The mutated two-meter-long deinonychus became famous in Spielberg's blockbuster Jurassic Park (1993), where they were insultingly called velociraptors. In the film, they are portrayed as highly intelligent apex predators, hunting large prey in groups and tearing it apart with their sickle claws. However, wolf raptors probably never existed.
Arguments in favor of wolf behavior are increasingly refuted, and the previously appropriated evidence of gregariousness of deinonychus in the form of dental marks on the bones of herbivorous tenontosaurs is now disputed in terms of the possible bite force of eudromaeosaurs [1]. Despite the initial general acceptance of the evidence for raptor hunting for dinosaurs in the past, the evidence for intelligent flocking offered by the late famed Yale paleontologist John Ostrom is relatively weak.
The problem with this idea is that modern living dinosaurs (birds) and their relatives (crocodiles) rarely hunt in groups. In addition, the brain size of the aforementioned lizards is no larger than that of modern monitor lizards, which, although they sometimes hunt in groups, do not have a strict hierarchical system within the “flock”. Hierarchy in the pack of dinonychs is observed only in the fantasies of the director of the film "Jurassic World" [3].
In addition, the fossilized evidence of herd hunting is in one way or another controversial, but evidence of fatal intraspecific aggression is not such [2; 3]. Therefore, we cannot say with certainty whether the animal really acted as a team in the process of hunting big game, or whether it hunted alone.
We can assume such a model of behavior of predators, but only if the school hunting will be more like hunting Komodo monitor lizards or crocodiles, in which animals can attack the same animal together in an unassembled group. Those. the group will not be coordinated. Within such a group there may be intraspecific killings, and the young in it will keep somewhere away from the adults.
So, in Komodo dragons, the cubs are at risk of being eaten by adult animals, so they take refuge in the trees. There they find an abundance of food not available to their larger earthly parents. Animals that hunt in “intelligent packs” usually do not exhibit this behavior and always eat relatively the same. Those. the diet, for example, of the same wolves will be approximately the same for both young animals and adults.
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1) The Predatory Ecology of Deinonychus and the Origin of Flapping in Birds (plos.org)
2) Roach B. T., Brinkman D. L. A reevaluation of cooperative pack hunting and gregariousness in Deinonychus antirrhopus and other nonavian theropod dinosaurs // Bulletin of the Peabody Museum of Natural History. — 2007. — Vol. 48, no. 1. — P. 103–138.
3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sBuuYOTEgA
4) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S003101822030225X?via%3Dihub
Note:
I am the author of the popular science article. The article was published in the popular science community Faneroza (https://vk.com/wall-170247428_12043 ).
The article was published in the scientific community ANTROPOGENEZ.RU: human evolution (https://vk.com/antropogenez ru? W = wall-110924669 285137 )