Dave Hone

So you'll get one set of footprints, and then a couple of hours later, a male will come past, and a couple of hours later, another male will come past.

And now you've got three sets of footprints all traveling in the same direction on the same bit of path, but they live on their own, let alone hunting together, which is a massive step above this.

And then the one I've talked about quite a bit in my book is Spotted Hyena, Krakuta Krakuta, which is the one, there's a whole bunch of hyenas, but this is the one everyone knows.

They're the big laughing hyena.

And can see plenty of Attenborough type documentaries of them, seven or eight of them, or even 10 or 12 of them going into a herd and ripping apart wildebeest or zebra or whatever it is.

But actually, if you read the scientific literature, this is really rare.

They mostly hunt on their own.

Now, they do live in these social clans with hierarchies and complex social interactions.

They are very social animals, but they mostly hunt on their own.

So even if you find loads of trackways of them moving together, or again, there's one, if not two, for tyrannosaurs.

We've got multiple tyrannosaurs together, and that's been argued for pack hunting.

At best, that argues they might have lived together, but it doesn't tell you whether or not they hunted together.

So how can we make a decision on one way or the other?

So, I mean, I tend to be ultra conservative in this context, and I think we should probably avoid saying things that we're not quite confident about.

I don't want to ever go down the, we must have really definitive 100% convincing evidence because this is paleo and we don't have that kind of data.

But...

just as I talked about with things like the predator prey size ratio stuff, there is data we can start to use on living species about what tends to trigger hunting in groups or living in groups and what data there might be from stuff like brain sizes or other track ways.

Or again, we do have bite marks indicating prey size.

If you start finding repeated attacks on big prey,

from relatively small predators, that would be quite convincing.