this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Paleontology, also spelled palaeontology[a] or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes the study of fossils to classify organisms and study their interactions with each other and their environments (their /c/paleoecology. Read more...

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Could dinosaurs have had symbiotic relationships with other animals? (www.sciencefocus.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] Swictor 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It's pretty much guaranteed, though there are different kinds of symbiosis I suspect you specifically mean mutualism where both creatures benefit. Small birds removes parasites from larger creatures today and there's no reason to believe this didn't happen prior to the extinction. The Jurassic World giganotosaurus teeth cleaning(probably inspired by this piece) is also very likely.

There's also symbiosis like commensialism where one creature benefits and one is not affected like this beetle that lived in dinosaur nests and fed on detached dinosaur feathers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yes.

The interesting bit is the top article linked at the end of the article:

https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/if-the-dinosaurs-didnt-go-extinct-could-they-have-developed-a-civilised-society/

Not only were they involved in symbiotic relationships with others species, it seems they may have been on the brink of the first dinosaur city states!

[–] Swictor 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

That's not what the article says.

There's a bias we have that humans are the pinnacle to evolution and if evolution makes everything better over time then shouldn't everything end up being human-like eventually?

In reality evolution just makes us adapt to the environment as it is, and to have larger energy consuming brains is not always better for survival. If it were, everything would evolve bigger brains.

Dinosaurs could have taken that step incidentally at some point in another timeline, but they were nowhere close to the traits that are necessary for maintaining a large social society.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Fair enough, I found both articles a little silly and in the latter one it seemed very much like using humans as the yardstick of evolution, especially with the anthropomorphic dinos on the article and that all the traits the dinos could have achieved in the authors imagination are human traits.

They outnumber us at the very least 10 to 1 and have a wider global distribution than humans. Don't fall for the "Birds Aren't Real" stuff, they are real, they are dinosaurs, and they are likely prepped to rise again....literally on the hot currents of air we are providing them.

The way humanity is going at the moment it doesn't seem unreasonable that our dinosaur cousins could become dominant again for a few million years at some point.

[–] Swictor 2 points 2 years ago

Birdsarenotreal is a ploy by big bird to make us complacent and miss the real conspiracy of avian domination.

[–] jake_eric 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Sure, why not? It's likely that some of them did. That said, I can't think of any examples we know of off the bat for sure.

The example of birds cleaning larger animals is probably fairly close to something that could have happened, I've seen the concept floated that some small pterosaurs might have filled a similar role, picking pests off of the large herbivores.

But to actually have proof of a symbiotic relationship in prehistory would be pretty difficult I'd imagine, since that kind of behavior is hard to capture in a fossil.