英語聽力：恐龍之戰(zhàn)之極限生存—11
Sauroposeidon does almost everything by instinct, including rearing or more accurately not rearing its children.
It may seem cruel to just dig a hole and leave your eggs and wander on, but it’s a very effective means of reproduction if you can afford to make lots of babies. We know that the sauropods were not taking care of the newly hatched babies. And we don’t find the newly hatched babies with the adults.
Scientists believe sauroposeidon’s gargantuan size makes incubating eggs a physical impossibility.
When you’re running, say, 60, 80 feet in length, and your eggs are only about the size of a cantaloupe, the size difference makes it so hard to be gentle. I think sauropods like Sauroposeidon are just too big to be able to control where their body mass is going to be. You know, they aren’t, they don’t have the brain capacity to understand where their butt is at the same time as where their head is.
With its mammoth size and limited intellect, sauroposeidon relies on a totally different method than Tyrannosaurs Rex to raise its young.
In its life span, a mated pair of sauroposeidons might produce thousands and thousands of eggs, and only maybe a couple or 3 are going to survive to adulthood. So what that tells us is that almost all of the offspring are being killed and eaten by predators.
Basically you’re flooding all the carnivores with so much food that they can’t eat it all, and so there’s bound to be some survivors.
Sauroposeidon’s approach to its young sounds brutish and cruel. But it isn’t.
Sauroposeidon like sea turtles, for example, seems to have tried to overwhelm the predators with just sheer numbers of offspring. They’re not just all laying their eggs within a few weeks of each other. They’re all trying to lay the eggs on the same night or two. And one of the reasons is so that they can overwhelm the predators. If you have a food resource that’s available in vast numbers, but only for a very limited time, it’s hard for predators to eat all of them.
