Dave Hone

Or what can you test with various bits of evidence?

So there was some Tyrannosaur inflicted bite marks on a duck bill from Mongolia that I worked on years ago.

The first one was from Mongolia, but it was held in Japan in a Japanese museum.

I was working with the Japanese on it.

And...

I'm not a taphonomist, so the study of decay and the history of specimens, and I am in no way, shape, or form a geologist.

I did zoology for my degree.

But the guys I was working with, they were really hot on erosion and damage.

And they were looking at some of the way the bones had been damaged, and they're like, okay, we're pretty confident that the bite marks are sitting on top of erosion.

What does that mean?

So it means that the animal had died and it was found in sand covered, but in what would have been a river channel.

So this animal has died, washed downstream, ended up on a sandbank.

The sand is whipping past because I've been in a sandstorm in China and it is not fun.

And that's starting to etch some of the bones and damage them.

And after that, there's a bite mark?

After that, you're getting bite marks coming in.

So that can only be scavenging.

That thing has been dead and sitting out for days, possibly weeks before something came along and chewed on it.

It pretty much can't have happened any other way.

And you have to take these really subtle signals to reconstruct the story.