PrepTest 149, Section 3, Question 14
Several Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons found in North America(55 more words not shown)
The information above most strongly(6 more words not shown)
- AT. rex regularly(6 more words not shown)
- BAt the time(13 more words not shown)
- CT. rex sometimes(3 more words not shown)
- DT. rex sometimes(4 more words not shown)
- EAt the time(13 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Who's biting the T. rex?
The marks require a large carnivore, and T. rex was the only one around. So another T. rex made them. That still leaves two possibilities: fighting or eating. The last sentence helps us choose. If making these marks on a living animal would have been almost impossible, feeding on a dead animal is the much better explanation.
What we’re looking for
For the most strongly supported answer, I'd expect that T. rex sometimes ate members of its own species. We don't need this to be its usual meal. Several skeletons can give us evidence that something happened without showing it happened often.
Working the answers
- A
Smaller carnivores couldn't have made these marks, since the marks require a large one. We also have no information about how regularly T. rex fought smaller animals. A doesn't follow from the evidence we're given.
- B
How common was it? Several marked skeletons could represent a tiny fraction of the animals that lived. Even if those marks indicate feeding, they don't establish that carnivores commonly ate other carnivores. B adds a frequency claim the evidence cannot support.
- CCorrect
The animal being bitten was a T. rex, and the animal making the marks must also have been a T. rex. Feeding is strongly favored over combat because the marks would have been almost impossible to inflict while the bitten animal was alive. Eating members of one's own species is cannibalism, so C captures the supported conclusion without claiming it was common.
- D
'Intraspecies combat' means fighting within the same species. That initially looks possible: one T. rex bit another. But the final fact points away from combat and toward feeding on a dead animal. We aren't proving that T. rex never fought other T. rex; we're choosing what these particular marks most strongly support.
- E
We aren't told what lived on other continents. The evidence concerns North American skeletons and the large carnivore that could have marked them there. It doesn't establish the existence of large carnivores elsewhere.
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