Rosa Rubicondior: Unintelligent Design - The Prolific Waste Of Baby Dinosaurs as Food

Life in Late Jurassic Colorado.

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Baby dinosaurs a common prey for Late Jurassic predators | UCL News - UCL – University College London.

The prolific-waste reproductive strategy of Late Jurassic dinosaurs has been highlighted in a paper published in a New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin by a team of palaeontologists led by Dr Cassius Morrison of University College London’s Department of Earth Sciences.

The team constructed a detailed food web using fossil data laid down around 150 million years ago in the Morrison Formation of the United States. The Morrison Formation is a prominent sequence of Upper Jurassic sedimentary rocks (approximately 156–147 million years old) spanning around 1.5 million square kilometres across the western United States. It is North America’s most prolific source of dinosaur fossils, preserving vast deposits of mudstone, sandstone, and limestone formed in ancient river systems and floodplains.

Their analysis revealed that a major food source for carnivorous dinosaurs consisted of the young of the largest herbivores. These animals followed a reproductive strategy in which large numbers of offspring were produced and then effectively abandoned after hatching. Such juveniles would have been abundant, vulnerable, and easy prey for predators. This strategy is a familiar one in biology and only makes sense as the outcome of evolutionary processes. As an intelligently designed reproductive strategy, however, it is difficult to make sense of at all.

This is yet another example of the prolific waste that characterises living systems and betrays the absence of intelligent foresight in their design. Prolific waste and unnecessary complexity are hallmarks of evolution, whereas minimal waste and minimal complexity are the defining features of genuinely intelligent design — a distinction I explore in detail in my book The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.

Prolific Waste as a Reproductive Strategy. Across the living world, many organisms maximise reproductive success not by careful optimisation, but by overwhelming excess. Vast numbers of offspring, spores, pollen grains, or gametes are produced, with the expectation that only a tiny fraction will survive. This is not a flaw in evolutionary terms; it is a predictable outcome of natural selection acting in uncertain and hostile environments.

Fungi
Giant puffballs and other fungi release trillions of spores into the air. The overwhelming majority land in unsuitable environments and perish. A handful succeed, which is all that is required for the lineage to persist.

Plants
Oak trees release trillions of pollen grains over their lifetimes and produce tens of thousands of acorns, most of which are eaten, fail to germinate, or die as seedlings. Wind-pollinated plants in particular rely on extreme redundancy because pollen delivery is largely random.

Marine Invertebrates
Many corals, sea urchins, and molluscs release millions of eggs and sperm directly into the water column. Fertilisation rates are low, larval mortality is extremely high, and yet the strategy is successful because numbers compensate for losses.

Fish and Amphibians
Cod, sunfish, frogs, and toads produce thousands to millions of eggs, most of which are eaten or fail to develop. Parental investment is minimal; survival depends entirely on probability.

Insects
Many insects lay hundreds or thousands of eggs, knowing that predation, parasitism, and environmental hazards will eliminate most of them. Natural selection favours quantity over care.

Large Vertebrates (including Dinosaurs)
Even large-bodied animals have often followed this strategy. Fossil evidence increasingly suggests that many dinosaurs produced large clutches and provided little or no parental care, resulting in extremely high juvenile mortality.

Why This Matters
Prolific waste is precisely what we expect from evolution acting without foresight. Natural selection cannot plan, optimise globally, or eliminate inefficiency; it can only favour what works well enough in the immediate environment. In contrast, intentional design with foresight would be expected to minimise waste, failure, and unnecessary complexity.

The ubiquity of reproductive excess across biology is therefore powerful evidence against intelligent design and entirely consistent with evolution by natural selection.

The team’s research, and the reasoning that led them to these conclusions, is explained in an article published by UCL News.

Baby dinosaurs a common prey for Late Jurassic predators
Babies and very young sauropods – the long-necked, long-tailed plant-eaters that in adulthood were the largest animals to have ever walked on land – were a key food sustaining predators in the Late Jurassic, according to a new study led by a UCL researcher.
The study, published in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin, used data from fossils laid down 150 million years ago in the Morrison Formation*, in the United States, to map out a “food web” of the time – a gigantic network of who ate what and who ate whom.

The research team found that very young sauropods, relatively defenceless and left to fend for themselves by their enormous parents, were a major food source for multiple meat eaters.

Adult sauropods such as the Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus were longer than a blue whale. When they walked the earth would shake. Their eggs, though, were just a foot wide and once hatched their offspring would take many years to grow. Size alone would make it difficult for sauropods to look after their eggs without destroying them, and evidence suggests that, much like baby turtles today, young sauropods were not looked after by their parents. Life was cheap in this ecosystem and the lives of predators such as the Allosaurus were likely fuelled by the consumption of these baby sauropods.

Dr Cassius Morrison, Lead author
University College London
and Natural History Museum, London.

The research team used fossil records from a single quarry, the Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry in the state of Colorado, where a remarkably rich collection of dinosaur fossils was deposited across a time span of up to 10,000 or so years, including at least six species of sauropod (among them a Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus, and Apatosaurus).

To determine who ate what, the researchers used existing data such as dinosaur size, wear and tear on their teeth, the abundance of certain isotopes in the remains, and in some cases the fossilised contents of their stomach revealing their last meal.

They then mapped out the food web of the time – i.e. all the possible links between dinosaurs, other animals and plants – at a higher resolution than has previously been carried out for dinosaurs, with the help of software typically used for modern ecosystems.

The team concluded that sauropods had a key role in this ecosystem, with substantially more links to plants and animals than the other main group of vegetarian dinosaurs, the ornithischians (plant-eaters such as the armoured Stegosaurus who were more dangerous prey).

Sauropods had a dramatic impact on their ecosystem. Our study allows us to measure and quantify the role they had for the first time. Reconstructing food webs means we can more easily compare dinosaur ecosystems across different periods. It helps us to understand evolutionary pressures and why dinosaurs might have evolved in the way they did.

Dr Cassius Morrison.

The researchers noted that 70 million years later, during the time of Tyrannosaurus Rex, fewer sauropods providing easy prey may have helped trigger the evolutionary adaptations (stronger bite force, larger size, better vision) allowing the T. Rex to hunt larger, more dangerous animals, such as a Triceratops, which were armed with three large horns.

The apex predators of the Late Jurassic, such as the Allosaurus or the Torvosaurus, may have had an easier time acquiring food compared to the T. Rex millions of years later. Some Allosaurus fossils show signs of quite horrific injuries – for instance caused by the spiked tail of a Stegosaurus – that had healed and some which hadn’t. But an abundance of easy prey in the form of young sauropods may have allowed injured allosaurs to survive.

William Hart, co-author.
Hofstra University, USA.

The study involved researchers at institutions in the UK, the United States, Canada and the Netherlands. Publication:
Morrison, Cassius; Hart, William; O'Callaghan, Ezekiel. et al.
"HERE, SIZE IS NO ACCIDENT”: A NOVEL FOOD WEB ANALYSIS OF THE DRY MESA DINOSAUR QUARRY AND ECOLOGICAL IMPACT OF MORRISON FORMATION SAUROPOD FAUNA
New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 102 387-426.

Abstract
The Morrison Formation is a well-preserved Upper Jurassic rock unit with a characteristic terrestrial fauna. Despite over a century of study, the complex ecological interactions remain poorly understood due to preservational bias. Understanding the complex food webs of the Morrison Formation, despite this bias, is important. The preserved biota remains one of the most unique and diverse from the terrestrial fossil record, and reconstructing ecological interactions across deep time remains understudied. Here we present the reconstructed trophic links and food web of Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry, a relatively well-preserved Morrison Formation ecosystem, using the R package cheddar. We recovered a complex food web with over 12,000 unique food chains. Sauropods had substantially more trophic interactions than their ornithischian counterparts, indicating a substantial and important role in the ecosystem. The ubiquity and diversity of sauropods throughout the ecosystem across deposition, combined with the large body size they attained, underscores their importance as ecosystem engineers. Reconstructing the food web of an extinct ecosystem is an important tool for understanding phylogeny and broader biological concepts, as it provides insight into how ancient organisms interacted, evolved, and influenced each other’s adaptations. By understanding trophic links and interactions, the ecological roles and evolutionary pressures that shaped species traits and lineages over time could potentially be determined. This novel food web is the first study of its kind to use trophic analysis to examine Morrison Formation ecological interactions, paving the way for other deep-time food web analyses.

Silhouettes of DMDQ fauna arranged in generalized dietary categories. Silhouettes are not to scale. The different background colors relate to the diet of each animal, with green for herbivores, brown for omnivores, and red for carnivores. Phylopic credits (top to bottom via left to right): Jagged Fang Designs, Scott Hartman, Dean Schnabel, Mette Aumala, FunkMonk (Michael B. H.), Jacob Schick, Scott Hartman (modified by T. Michael Keesey), T. Michael Keesey (after Heinrich Harder), R. H. Traquair, Ghedo and T. Michael Keesey, Nobu Tamura, Matt Martyniuk, Nix Illustration, Mathew Wedel, Will Toosey, Andrew A. Farke, Benchill, Gareth Monger, and Robert Gay. Phylopic information for silhouettes, including licenses and license links, can be found in Appendix Table 1.

Cenogram of the Dry Mesa dinosaurs by log-transformed body mass. Taxa were categorized as herbivores (green) or carnivores (red). Body size in kilograms was log-transformed, with the smallest taxa in the highest values and the largest taxa in the lowest values.

Far from being an anomaly, the picture that emerges from the Morrison Formation fits seamlessly into what evolutionary biology predicts. In ecosystems shaped by natural selection rather than foresight, success is measured not by efficiency or elegance, but by what works often enough, for long enough. Producing vast numbers of offspring, most of which will die young, is not a design flaw in evolutionary terms; it is a brutally effective solution to the problem of persistence in a dangerous and unpredictable world.

What this study exposes particularly clearly is the gulf between evolutionary explanations and the claims of intelligent design. A reproductive strategy in which countless juveniles are effectively manufactured as disposable prey is precisely what we expect from blind processes acting over deep time. It is, however, profoundly at odds with the notion of an intelligent, benevolent designer carefully optimising living systems. No engineer with foresight would design a system whose success depends on catastrophic inefficiency and mass failure.

Once again, the fossil record does not merely accommodate evolutionary theory — it actively reinforces it. The Morrison dinosaurs lived, reproduced, and died in ecosystems governed by the same rules that shape life today: variation, excess, competition, and attrition. These are the unmistakable fingerprints of evolution by natural selection, and they leave little room for comforting myths about intelligent design.

And of course, this all happened in that very long period of Earth's history that happened long before creationism's 'Creation Week'.

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