Fast running crocs... I can picture them running on their flippy little hind legs.
I'm finding a lot about how the dino-to-bird thing is still controversial, not necessarily "almost certainly" as in the quote above, but it's all long and messy rather than succinct. I can get another "crocodilians are separate from dinos" quote if you'd prefer.
Go for it, Soz.
Thanks, Bob, for posting this. Always like to be up on the latest dinonews.
"bird hipped" and "lizard hipped". Sounds like an off runway discussion at a fashion show.
That was actually a "see I know some fancy terms" thing -- not really much more to it than that. Some dinos had hips like lizards, some had hips like birds.
Some of 'em were very birdy indeed, one was basically an ostrich with arms instead of wings and a big ol' tail.
Was it Farmerman?? Somebody anyway was explaining a week or so ago that dinos are not direct descendants of birds. Whoever it was had important proof which I can't remember, but I believed it at the time.
Standing on two legs is a heck of an anatomical trick. We had to go hang from tree branches to figure it out..
Mr.P is convinced that our most recent ancestors were floating apes. He mentions the lack of hair, amount of body fat <who? me??> and a couple of other things... uh... ability to control breathing, for one.
Interesting article, Bob!
Piffka - there is some good speculation that mammals went into the water and out and in and out...
Alot of the controversy can be dispelled when they test them with carbon dating to see if they're each as old. If so that's going to start people to writing new books.
What's the controversy here? Not all dinosaurs disappeared before mammals, and not all dinosaurs were gigantic. Some comedian used to quote the newspaper filller "Some dinosaurs were the size of chickens." Was that Wally Peebles? Anyway, it seems likely that this faster rat-bastard of a mammal crunched down on a poor helpless hatchling and then got his own ticket punched.
What the controversy again?
Joe(oh no, does he know about this stuff too?)Nation
Ive always wondered aboutCoates avatar. Maybe Im just the one with the dirty mind.
Yeh soz, the popular story about meteorites and dino death has been looked at quite carefully and there are a number of good (although un approachable for a kid) tech articles about how , through reconstructing the global tectonics of the time that dinos died, we see a whole passle of converging elements that affected their extinctions. Predation, selective predation on flocking dinos that lowered the population counts of first level predators, the rise of angiosperm plants and their deciduous nature, desertificTION and chilling. All this let a few paleo dudes to state that, for all purposes the dinosaur as a unique class of animals was dead before the end of the K period . The Yucatan meterorite was just a convenient calendar marker that originally formed a stratigraphic marker all over the western hemisphere and part of the east but was never tied to a meteor strike till about 1980.
Nowadays we look at the meteor as being as significant as a roosters call bringing on the dawn. It may have just been a planetwide coincidence.
The crashing meteor makes for better cartoons and NOVA shows but , its losing ground to the "stamp collector" mentality of the paleoecologists
bobsmythhawk-cant date dinos by C14, too old. C14 cuts out at about 45K years. Many people say 52 K to be accurate but by then, theres so little left that its not worth doing.
wed use K/Ar
Fission track
U238/Pb 210
long lived isotopes
Joe, the mamal didnt get "his ticket punched", we prefer to say that "he was capped"
Piffka-It was probly me. The latest issue on bird evolution is that theres a big gap from Archeopteryx to true birds. That has been filled in by some finds in Spain of a bird called Iberiaornis. It had all the features of birds and bird-like dinos (dromeaosaurs {raptors}) but the Ibeariaornis had much more highly developed flight feathers and the "thumb" that is modified into a "forward wing flap " to control landing and take off like a jet. They still had teeth .
The new hypothesis is that birds and dinos evolved from a common ancestor.
This **** drives the Creationists nuts. Fossil hunters keep finding new stuff and we keep filling in the gaps.
Quote:Mr.P is convinced that our most recent ancestors were floating apes. He mentions the lack of hair, amount of body fat <who? me??> and a couple of other things... uh... ability to control breathing, for one.
This notion is discussed in some length in "The First Chimpanzee," a very readable lay text on human origins by a couple of molecular biol types. They more or less discount it as a major determinant in our evolution, but they treat the idea with a great deal of respect. Certainly it has more explanatory power than the old "man the great hunter" idea...
Quote:through reconstructing the global tectonics of the time that dinos died, we see a whole passle of converging elements that affected their extinctions.
Is this when Antarctica moved over the south pole and mucked up the global ocean currents, or was that later?
What? The great dying didn't really happen? There still is a KT boundary though, right, with iridium in the more recent level and not the other?
I was thinking it was you, Farmerman, re. the birds/dinosaur question. Thank you for remembering.
