The Case of S T Nikos

Defenceless Hadrosaurs

The intelligent dinosaur is likely to have been a meat eater just as the intelligent mammal is. The upright dinosaurs and the best developed ones all seemed to be predators and, on basics, predators would be expected to be more intelligent than herbivores. Like mankind the Anthroposaurs must therefore have herded suitable animals for butchery. What were they? I put this question to Nikos and received the following reply.

"The hadrosaurs! Hadrosaurs showed explosive diversification shortly after descending from the iguanodonts towards the end of the Cretaceous. Extreme diversification depends on genetic variation. The greater the extremes, the more variation is implied and vice versa. Dinosaur extremes indicated great genetic variation which accounted for their ability to adapt and to radiate into vacated niches.

The reason they could not cope with the events of 65 million years ago whereas they had successively coped splendidly with previous mass extinctions of 145 million years ago, of 117 million years ago and of 95 million years ago, was that in the few million years before the final act they had lost variation and had become inflexibly standardized.

The last few million years of the Cretaceous showed a marked reduction in diversity of dinosaur species: the earlier vigorous adaptive radiation of the hadrosaurs and the ceratopsians similarly gave way to a yielding of variety. For the last two million years of the Period, a single genus of each�saurolophus and triceratops respectively�dominated the landscape, although they did so in vast numbers.

No gradual environmental change is going to eliminate genetic variation in genus after genus of dinosaurs. That very variation will guarantee adaptation to the changes by natural selection before genetic variation has been significantly pruned. The motive power of evolution is expansion of diversity with environmental change. The dinosaurs’ loss of variety is much more characteristic of the loss of variety in species we are seeing today�by unnatural selection�at the hand of man.

Though the average Brazilian consumes less meat each year than a domestic cat in the United States, he has to slash and burn forests to satisfy our demand for steaks and hamburgers. A habitat which harbours perhaps 50 per cent of all species is destroyed to make pastures for one species, cattle, and food for one other, man. The fall in variation of the hadrosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous might indicate they were herded. Could the Anthroposaurs have burnt their own forests to provide more nutritious browsing for their �cattle�?

Human proliferation has created a huge imbalance in faunal variety illustrated by the huge human biomass of 250 million tons�probably greater than that of any other animal species. And, besides the six billion human animals, there are domesticated animals�three billion domestic herbivores. What we see is a reduction of species variety together with an increase in actual numbers of some animals. That is just what happened at the end of the Cretaceous.

Caches of bones of a single species are regarded by paleoanthropologists as suggesting husbandry. In the development of man, various cultures seemed to concentrate on ibex, horses, reindeer and so on. Could it be that ceratopsians and hadrosaurs were actually domestic animals like cows and sheep kept for food? Is it possible that hadrosaurs were the cattle of the Cretaceous period, herded on the great plains before being shipped to a Cretaceous Chicago for making into meat pies and hamburgers? Is it impossible?

Michaela Magi Griffiths, Bloomsbury, September, 1993
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