Dave Hone

The hyenas, spotted hyena, are, yeah, these super social animals, but the brown hyena, the striped hyena, and the odd wolf are solitary.

So you just can't do...

group versus solitary of close relatives or anything like that.

I am very sure a ton of dinosaurs were aggregates, lived in groups to some degree, and I'm very sure some of them were social with complex lives and hierarchies and even pack hunting.

Which ones...

I have very little idea because I think the data is so sparse that we can't really say it with any confidence for anything.

In my opinion, I think that can be got at.

I think we need to start getting at it with the sort of stuff I'm talking about, like get a better understanding of what drives sociality in lions versus tigers versus leopards, you know, relatively close relatives who overlap.

Don't forget in India, leopards and tigers overlap with lines.

The Asiatic line is still there.

Um,

So you can talk about ecosystem structure and prey size and prey type and all this stuff.

Maybe we can start piecing that together a bit better and then apply that to stuff like the trackways and the isotopes and all the rest of it, bite marks and these mass mortality sites.

So I think it can be done.

But personally, what were pack hunters?

No idea.

I don't think any of them were in the sense that I don't think we've got good evidence for any of them.

Yeah, probably for some of them.

I mean, I think it's well within their scope.

One of the papers writing about this, ironically arguing against pack hunting in Deinonychus,