Adult Komodos have no problem snapping up babies (not their own) for dinner, so the juveniles get back at them by climbing trees and eating whatever is available up there instead of risking it on land.
This giant lizard with lethal saliva is also a cannibal.
What the researchers did instead was compare raptors to their closest living relatives, especially the Komodo dragon. Behavior like pack hunting can’t exactly be observed in fossilized evidence, either, unless we someday find an entire pack of dinosaur skeletons trapped in lava mid-hunt after that fateful asteroid stuck. You can’t exactly observe an animal in action when it’s been extinct for 66 million years. “Among the many differences between these two analogs is how social and asocial organisms rear their young, producing a diagnostic pattern based on the presence or absence of ontogenetic dietary changes." “ was more analogous to agonistic reptilian carnivores, like the Komodo dragon,” Frederickson said in a study recently published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. Frederickson’s team instead studied what these apex predators ate throughout their lives, and that gave away something quite surprising-and gruesome. What they unearthed was unexpected after raptors had reached cinematic stardom snapping their jaws and ripping apart prey in packs. Joseph Frederickson, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, and his team found that out after they put fossilized raptor teeth under the microscope. Rex and (just by coincidence) saved the lives of the humans trapped in the museum? Turns out that probably wouldn’t have happened even if we could bring dinosaurs back from extinction. Remember that epic scene in Jurassic Park where a pack of raptors attacked the T.