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They Hunted the Night

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It seems likely now that at least some dinosaurs were able to hunt at night. Several paleontologists have developed a model based on a number of factors, including the scleral ring, a bone that reinforces the eye in a number of birds and reptiles. Taking into account evolutionary relationships, this model was tested on living animals species and was demonstrated to be accurate; given that knowledge it was then applied to extinct animals, whose habits are, rather understandably, harder to figure out.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/14/dinosaurs-around-the-clock-or-how-we-know-velociraptor-hunted-by-night/

It seems that, like modern animals, the predators largely hunted at night. This new information, exciting and fascinating new information, is a demonstration that, while we know so much more than we once did about the dinosaurs, there always remains work to be done. While many seem to think that the great age of learning about dinosaurs belonged to Marsh and Cope in the 19th Century and that we know all there is to know, we are currently in the middle of a renaissance on dinosaurs. New species are turning up with astonishing rapidity and new technologies allow us more insight into these wonderful creatures from our past. The picture we have of dinosaurs is not only different than the one that we had a hundred years ago, it is different than the one we had fifty years ago, twenty years ago. It is even slightly different than the one we had ten years ago! That is the wonder and majesty of science.

If anything, this is a beautiful picture of the great continuity of life, how species fill the same ecological roles that other, now extinct, species once did. It is truly amazing to contemplate this great tree of life and all its branches.
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