June 8, 2007 — The agonizingly arched necks of dinosaur fossils may really be the signs of their death throes and not the result of drying, dead tendons, as paleontologists have long assumed.
A new re-examination of the possible causes for the strange death posture by a veterinarian and a paleontologist not only throws out the drying tendons theory, but points to some very specific causes of death. It even supports the idea that dinos were warm-blooded.
For decades dino hunters have assumed that the open-mouthed, backward-arched pose of many dinosaur skeletons was the result of the long tendons in the back of the neck drying after death and shrinking — thereby pulling the head up and back.
"I don't think anyone had really thought about it," said paleontologist Kevin Padian of the University of California, Berkeley. "No one had really tested the idea."
No one, until veterinarian Cynthia Marshall Faux of the Museum of the Rockies started looking into it. She studied what happened to the corpses of dead birds she encountered in her work at a raptor center. Birds are a useful model since they are built a lot like dinosaurs.
So do their necks curve back as their corpses dry out?
"We tested it and it didn't work," said Padian, who has published a paper with Marshall Faux in the latest issue of the journal Paleobiology.
In retrospect, it's not at all surprising, said Padian.
