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Dinosaurs Never Held Heads High
richard_za writes "The common notion that long necked dinosaurs held there necks high to graze from treetops has been proven impossible. Roger Seymour, from Adelaide University's Environmental Biology Department and Harvey Lillywhite from the University of Florida. According to a research paper published at the Proceedings of the Royal Society in London, he explained that due to heart size and metablic rates the only way they could have functioned on land was with a horizontal neck. This flies in the face of images popularised in Hollywood movies such as Jurassic Park. However it is doubted that this new evidence will have any effect on the Mozilla Project."
actually, mozilla will be affected most of all. they do have the slowest metabolism rate out of any open source project i've ever seen.
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This story is unbelievably old. Has anyone been to a display of dinosaurs bones in a museum lately? They are all displayed with the neck horizontal now. Or is your primary source of information cartoons? :)
...who thinks that a story about dinosaurs is somehow appropriate for election day?
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
I would think it would be harder to hold their neck straight out rather than up. How do they know that they didn't have bigger hearts that could handle pumping the blood up there? Or maybe some additional smaller hearts to help it along. Maybe I missed the point
I dunno, it just doesn't seem right. You try holding your neck horizontal for a while. After a few minutes your heart will get strained from the effort and you will go back to vertical. It just doesn't seem right.
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence -- and then success is sure. Mark Twain
Do you guys even proofread? I learned the difference between those two words in the FIRST GRADE.
I'm a far cry from a dinosaur expert, but I remember seeing a Discovery program about this about a year ago...
Buck up, little T. Rex, it's all right..
Whew, bad joke. I can practically smell my karma burning.. :)
Sid
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
I went to a seminar in Manchester a couple of years ago where it was argued that long-necked dinosaurs must have four chambered hearts.
Apparently if they had two chambered hearts then when they bent down to drink the hydraulic pressure would have made their heads explode.
Lets step back for a second before we bash Crichton. In Jurassic Park, he was one of the first authors of popular dinosaur fiction to display VERY controversial, and very relevant theories.
Like what?
Like the familial instincts, like the pack hunt, like the individualism of some species, etc.
Sure, the movie dumbed some of it down, but book was really very groundbraking, and the sequel was even better.
We have to understand that authors have to capture both the truth AND the common perception of things, and try their best to balance them.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
As somone with a biology background, if you studied the skeletal remains of a giraffe you might think the same thing. Due to the fact that I don't think there has ever been enough soft tissue find that could irrefutably say that these animals did not have valves for blood flow in their necks. I mean for goodness sakes they still are divided on if they were poikilothermic or homeothermic, if they were endotherms or exotherms...so given we know very little about their metabolism anything based on metabolism is a best guess at best :) Ok ok I did take 2 semesters of classes on dinosaurs.... Anyway just kinda found this one ridiculous.
Nobody ever "proves" anything in any science. Particularly not when making speculative calculations about millenia old animals about whom we only have fossil information.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
* daring code hacker by night *
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I seem to recall that scientists have conclusively proven that bumble bees cannot fly (wings too small, body too heavy...). Apparently the laws of physics don't apply to bumble bees. Or something.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Walking with dinosaurs, a program on the bbc, had this story as well; they based it on a computer model showing the unnatural bending required for some dinosaur necks to achieve the classic cartoon stance.
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
it's all about the size of the heart. If the heart is not big enough to pump gallons of blood 30' into the air (and that's a really hard feat) then a dinosaur would pass out when it lifted its head.
Think about it -> how often do you grey out a little bit when you stand up too fast? Or, when you cut your finger, didn't your mom tell you to hold your hand above your head? That was to prevent as much blood from getting there, because the heart can't pump it up there as easily
By the way, if you're really careful, you can sometimes see the impressions of soft tissue as well as the bones in fossils. Also, it's fairly safe to assume that, being closely related to today's reptiles, dinosaurs would have only one heart. The only thing I know of that has more is an earthworm (5 hearts), and those aren't really hearts, just parallel tubes that contract to pump blood.
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I wonder if the assertion mentioned in this post applies to some of the heftier dinosaurs, like the Brachiosaurus. If I remember correctly, the Brachiosaurus possessed an extremely long neck and was fond of submerging itself up to its head in water. According to this theory, the increased buoancy allowed the Brachiosaurus greater freedom of movement.
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Insects and Grafitti Photos
This article addresses a few more interesting things as well.
~ fact is not dependant upon your belief therein. ~ ~ Have I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth?
- A.P.
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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
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If you had the brain the size of a walnut, and needed an extra brain in your ass just to get by, you wouldn't be all that proud either, would you??
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You want the Oct. 7th 2000 issue.
Of course you can't read it without a very expensive subscription.
Here's an idea for story submissions... how about not posting stories where the details aren't available to the mass public. There are plenty good story submissions which are ignored and everyone can read the details.
The main thing that pissed me off about the movie is the fact that they took DNA from a frog to patch the missing pieces. Birds are the closest living relative to the dinosaurs. I also think that the story about Stephen Jay Gould asking Crichton why he put a dinosaur not from the Jurassic era on a book titled Jurassic Park.
Harlan Ellison says never write down to your audience, make them look shit up. It is unfortunate that hollywood can not embrace this simple philosophy.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
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You are a fucking moron.
http://www.bearfabrique.org/s aur opods/sauropods.html
http://www.talkorigi ns. org/faqs/sauropods/sauropods-misc.html (The section "Blood pressure would have been too high", especially)
Anybody got a link to something more recent?
Michael Crichton (author of Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World) realized this error - in the book The Lost World he corrected this as sort of an aside - not only would dinosaurs be forced to hold their heads horizontally due to blood flow, but also due to balance. The example given in the book was of a suspension bridge - in order for these dinosaurs to simply stand, they would have to have their long necks horizontal to balance out against their long and heavy tails.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
The sauropods in Jurassic Park were brachiosaurs, and they're pretty much designed to have upright necks - their forelegs are longer than the rear legs, so its head has to be higher than its heart unless there was a huge kink in its spine - ISTR the theory being that it had a big muscle in its neck that acted like a blood pressure collar which forced the blood upwards...
-- Bah weep grah nah weep nini bong
Sure the dinosaurs held their necks horizontal, but did they look up and fall over backwards when a teradactyl squacked overhead?
Teradactyls could have been a contributing factor in the death of dinosaurs.
Evolutionary theory tells us that environmental pressures lead to some trait shift in a population. I'm guessing that since they could not use their long necks to reach high foilage, then the logical answer to why the long necks is to give the carnovaurs a bigger target. Or maybe it was to counter balance their enourmous tails?
Without a living animal to ask, how do these scientists 'prove' anything with a straight face?
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Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
While it may be that dinosaurs had a horizontal configuration, I don't think that you (or in fairness, the article's author) can really say it has been "proven".
The unfortunate fact is that with all respect to the science goes into paleontology (and archeology for that matter) there is always so much that is not known that what is missing is often filled in with conjecture and story telling. Given the limited information, you can build a scientific model to "prove" almost any theory you wish to start with.
To further blur the issues, those models are not always accurate. Once upon a time it was "proven" than a man could never run a four minute mile. They looked at blood flow and O2 capacities, and determined that it was flat out impossible. Now it's a somewhat common occurence...
Sometimes I think I'm the only person on the Internet who knows the difference between "there", "their", and "they're". It's good to see someone else who is educated in basic grammer.
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Technoli
I'm going back a long way, here. Trying to remember my grade 10 biology class when we dissected a locust. I mostly remember the smell. Yuk. Anyway, back on topic: IIRC, insects don't really have a well developed cardiovascular system at all. Their internal organs just float around in a sea of "blood" which is circulated by several valves that just squirt it everywhere. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
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The reason why I think this story isn't true is relevance. In nature everything is there for a purpose. Offcourse we humans did things the other way and made our own tools, but animals have all the natural 'tools' they need to survive. Giraffe's have a long neck in order to reach their food, lions & tigers have sharp claws and teeth to kill and rip open their food, etc, etc. Everything is there for a reason.
Having a long neck for, say, 5 meters and holding it horizontal not only takes extremely more effort to maintain; it also doesn't make any sense what so ever. Why would they have a long neck when their head is close to the ground anyway? To look cool and being able to eat grass which is 7 meters away? I don't think so Tim.
AFAIK The IE team started with an already stable product (Spyglass Mosaic, itself based on NCSA Mosaic). Mozilla is a from-the-ground-up project.
But you're right that IE is a better browser: they made the (IMHO correct) decision to make a browser and a browser only: they left the mail client (for example) to the Outlook team, etc. Mozilla could learn from that.
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Way back I was reading up on theories of a more dense water atmosphere. I can't remember the exact name, but the theory was that during the dinasour era the humidity was extremely high compared to todays limits. This extremely dense water vapor environment would be the only type of environment that a Paradactal (sp?) could fly in due to the airodynamics of its wings.
Would such an environmental difference, if it were to exist, affect the hydrolic nature of the heart such that dinosaurs could walk with there heads high?
Icebox
Giraffes also have an organ at the base of their brain which helps choke off the blood pressure, because just the pressure of the column of blood in the however-many feet of neck above their heads would do them in otherwise (think the rush of blood to your head when you hang upside down, only lots worse).
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
You mean Jurassic Park isn't scientifically accurate? SCANDAL!
You, sir, are in violation of Article 2 of Slashdot patent #535, Techniques for Enhancing Score of a Credibility Metric of Electronic Forums. You must cease this violation or pay the appropriate licensing fees.
I suppose you would also lick Bill's boots if they tasted like ice cream?
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"its" and "it's", and "then" and "than", and "and" and "end". Ok, strike the last one.
Relative to a human, take a 10 pound book, and hold your arms out straight for 10 minutes.
Now hold your arms up and out, not straight up.
Which can you hold longer? It's all about leverage. A dinosaur would find it NEARLY impossible to hold it's long neck out straight for hours on end.
Can a SNAKE stand straight out for hours? No. For short periods of time, yes, but mostly, it'll shoot it's head up in the air.
This study is bunk.
Reminder: Since we don't have a sauropod heart to examine, we have NO idea how good it's circulatory system was. We're extrapolating from elephants and giraffes.
Of course, the heart size and metabolic rate of dinasaurs is not known. Scientists can guess (hypothesize) about these things, but in the end we really do not know.
One paper may have "proven" this, but I'd wait a few years before I started believing it. Let's see what the others in their field say about the research, or whether other counter-theories are advanced, etc.
It's easy for one research paper to be wrong.
Of course, irresponsible persons in the mass media will immediately run the story as if it had come down from Mt. Sinai on stone tablets, but you have to remember that they're peddling journalism, not facts.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
And I suppose that you believe that "hokey-pokey" patent to be legitimate as well.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
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Even better, imagine Linux Torvalds head explode due to thinking too hard.
Gary
"Making linux GPL was the best thing I ever did" - Torvalds. I'd hate to see the worst thing...
This is going to invalidate most of the household appliances and technology on the Flintstones, except for the clamshell shaver.
Arm yourself with knowledge.
This is simply ridiculous. Why would a dinosaur have a long neck if it was not going to use it for any purpose? Evolution rarely encourages traits that have no function, particularly one that would create such a huge negative surivivability trait -- slows them down, more mass = more food required, more awkward to escape predators, etc.
This guy must be a Libertarian -- all focusing on the theoretical details, no focus on the objective, practical reality :). [Hey, gotta use some election day metaphors!]
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Speaking of basic grammar --
EVERYONE PAY ATTENTION NOW!!!!
THE WORD "IT'S" IS A CONTRACTION THAT ALWAYS MEANS "IT IS"! IT IS NOT THE POSSESSIVE FORM OF THE PRONOUN! THE POSSESSIVE FORM OF THE PRONOUN IS "ITS"!
WHEN YOU WANT TO SAY THAT SOMETHING THAT IS NEITHER MALE NOR FEMALE OWNS SOMETHING, YOU SAY "ITS"
CORRECT: "It's making me sick how many times I have seen people screw this up." read this as "It is making me sick".
CORRECT: "The dinosaur cannot lift its head up."
INCORRECT: "The dinosaur cannot remember it's root password." try reading it as "The dinosaur cannot remember it is root password."
(I am so sick of people making this mistake)
Don't post on slashdot. Get back to work.
... in the sequel to JP, The Lost World (the book, not the horrible movie "based" on it), Chrichton talks about the same topic. If I recall, he (through his characters) claims that the whole point of a long neck was to counterbalance the long whiplike tail, which was a very effective weapon against attackers.
OK, first of all this is an old argument. No conclusive "proof" available at this time for either faction.
There are several possible anatomical features that would invalidate the math used: for example, the long-necked dinosaurs could have valvular tubing (either traditional valves like a giraffe, or structures similar to Tesla's valvular fuel piping) in their necks. There could also be muscular arrangements for peristaltic pumping and flow control - the peristaltic pumps in mammals are weak, but that doesn't prove anything about dinosaurs. I am not aware of any complete soft-tissue fossils of dinosaur necks that would prove or disprove the existence of such structures - post 'em if you got 'em.
Other arguments have been made as well - for example, if a brachiosaur can't lift his head for any length of time, he can't drop it for any great length of time - the blood would pool in his brain (rapidly, since the efficiency of his heart as a suction engine is likely much poorer than as a pressure generator). So, given that such a huge creature would require tremendous amounts of fluid intake, how did they drink without passing out? The fossils don't cluster around waterfalls as far as I know (again, post 'em if you got 'em).
Now, as computer geeks, we're all supposed to have some familiarity with LOGIC. So we should all know that it is nearly impossible to PROVE a negative - and astronomically more difficult to do so when the bulk of the evidence is obscured. Most paleontologists agree that the fossil record is necessarily incomplete due to the unusual circumstances required for fossilization and the tremendous variance of species diverisity over geological time periods.
--Charlie
> But you're right that IE is a better browser: they made the (IMHO correct) decision to make a browser and a browser only: they left the mail client (for example) to the Outlook team, etc. Mozilla could learn from that.
Well, the mail client did not really add delay to Mozilla (because it was a separate issue). Galeon is, for instance, a mozilla-based browser that have no mail or news. OTOH, Netscape is a mozilla-based browser that will have this all-in-one approach.
Wihle I agree with you that it was a bad idea, it worth noting that the mail/news/browser/all-in-one is pretty much a requirement for AOL and for embedded markets.
Lastly, the XUL thingy will turn mozilla in an incrediblely powerfull platform (or a shitty mess, depending on how you look at it).
Anyway, I now use Mozilla more often than IE. Shift-Wheel to increase/decrease font size is quite nice...
Cheers,
--fred
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This paper relies on cold blooded dinosaurs. The theory that dinosaurs were cold blooded has not been proven. The theory that they were warm blooded hasn't been proven either. Theories need not be accurate. They are just extrapolations from a reasonable amount of evidence. The FACT being they don't have enough evidence to prove anything!
This paper is basically political posturing by scientists for funding. It has no reasonable foundation other than to get media attention. Besides it's a research paper, NOT a published theory!
"People need reset buttons"
The folks that never grasped grammar fundamentals (or their common mistakes) won't remember anyway, no matter how many times it's pointed out to them. However, I still feel that you shouldn't let it blur the content. If you're a bit less anal and judgmental of others (very minor) mistakes, perhaps you'd get more work done. Even geniuses such as yourselves have misspelled words whilst in the midst of a writing frenzy, but how would you feel if nobody took your thoughts seriously because of your faults? For example, people suffering from serious dyslexia are misunderstood often, yet they shouldn't be branded morons (until further investigation :).
Have a nice day.
And next time they'll disprove the existence of giraffes. Go figure.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
as in some news article posted on slasdot before..
what if the gravity was low back then..
would they still be able to keep their heads high
or would they fail miserably
crushing their necks since they are long and
it would take very strong muscles to keep them horizontly
as everybody knows that keeping hands horizontly
extended requires more muscle toughness
than keeping their hands extended vertically
as in giraffes
just my imagination..
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The U.S Patent Office has no jurisdiction here. Any patent granted by the SPO is valid in this jurisdiction.
You punishment has been commuted due to negative moderation. However, should your post become positive again, you will also be in violation of Article 5 of my aforementioned patent.
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Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
This guy has some interesting articles, including one that focuses on physics involved in the dinosaures skeletons. There are lots of links, cruise over and have a look.
Warning he is seriously focused on creationism. True or false, I'll not say but an interesting arguement either way.
But nowadays reptiles don't have that "helper brain" near their bums, and some of those old ones did.
So just because they don't have them now doesn't mean they didn't have them before.
Also, the dinos don't have to hold their heads up for so long.
Most people can't hold their hands up for that long either, but that doesn't mean they can't do it for a while.
How well can scientists gauge the metabolic rate of dinosaurs anyway?
As for multiple hearts, the stegosaurus apparently had a second brain near the base of its tail. Why not some specialized blood pumping organs???
I wouldn't give two much credit to one paper or a small sample of fossils. For years, paleantologists (sp?) thought the duck-billed dinosaurs had a horn. It was actually a thumb-type appendage that was found in a jumbled fossil and placed in the wrong spot by its finder. Someone finally figured it out when they kept finding more horns than dinosaurs.
science is a religion
Heh!
:/
The sad thing is, there are people out there who actually *believe* that!
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
I'd love to travel about 50 Myears into the future to see what future archeologists (whatever they may look like) would make of of a platypus fossil. I'll bet they claim it's a fraud.
Full text isn't available (to us lowly nonsubscribers) but the abstract is here
Could someone explain to me how they can define heart size and metabolic rate from a bunch of fossilized bones? We're talking about tissue here, tissue that hasn't been around for millions of years.
Also, keep in mind that this "decision" has been made from the same group that can't figure out whether they were warm-blooded or not, or why they became extinct!
I've been called a "Fucking Dick" by better people than you.
The reason this article is significant is not that it's the first to suggest that sauropods held their necks horizontally - that is, as you say, old news. However, it supports that theory, making specific reference to calculations of blood pressure and required heart size, et al.
As one example, this fluff piece on the Diplodocus at the Carnegie museum gives the reasoning for displaying the new dinosaur statue with a horizontal neck as being based on the ability of the shoulder and neck to withstand vertical stress. (though it turns out that they had to raise the head a bit to keep kids from climbing on it)
I have a little to add to that theory in challenge.
While I agree that the dinosaur couldn't hold it's neck up in today's conditions, I doubt the earth was much like it is today back then. Now this is based on no real research, just late night conjecture, so if Im way off base, feel free to smack me once or twice. Lets begin with where I agree.
For a dinosaur, like the Brontosaurus, to be able to hold it's head high like a giraffe, It's heart would have to be almost the size of a Buick and it's blood pressure would require veins of iron. It's pretty much agreed that in this world, the dinosaurs wouldn't survive simply because gravity would kill them.
Now, where I deviate. I don't think gravity was then what it is now. Try holding your arms out straight for as long as you can. You will fatigue, fast. Now lets say that a dinosaur, at best, has the musculature of a body builder (it is commonly believed to be comparable). Even a body builder can only hold their arms out for a few minutes, at best at hour. A dinosaur in today's gravity just couldn't survive period. Neck high or low.
I believe that gravity in the era of the dinosaurs was much weaker then it is now. That would explain the colossal size of most dinosaurs, and would also give a convenient explanation for the extinction. If gravity increased for whatever reason, the earth cooling and becoming more dense or whatever, the largest dinosaurs would not be able to survive. They would just mysteriously die out. Sounds familiar.
So what do you think? Again, this isn't based on research, just a late night think before bed.
Jason
www.cyborgworkshop.com
...and the geek shall inherit the earth...
www.linux-skunkworks.com
If I had to work on 150 million year old software.
managers...why god invented purgatory
Not to worry, they can still eat lawyers with their heads down. I'd put forward Ally McBeal with those spindley legs splayed out of the toilet when she forgets to put the seat down but I doubt there's enough meat there for a small mammel let alone a big honkin' dino!
:wq
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IF we buy this guy's assumptions about metabolic rates, then we can accept his conclusions. The seemingly nonsensical assertion that dinos would have had long necks that they held WAAAY out in front of them should make us question that metabolic rate even more closely. In case someone didn't notice, the whole hot- vs. cold-blooded (i.e. metabolic rate) thing is a little bit of a hot issue among dino sorts. (Heart size is based on all sorts of morphological details having to do with chest cavity size, and gets disputed less.)
Either we question the metabolism thing, or we start imagining what possible other encouragement they would have had for a face on a long stick in the middle of primeval forests that stretched to the sky. (Maybe it was a sexual display. Heeeeey, baby!)
the brontosaurus is thin at one end,
much much thicker in the middle,
and thin again at the far end.
That is my theory and what it is too."
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Someone had simply assembled a fake dinosaur with fake aging and all that crap, just to see how stupid these researchers could really prove to be ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I mean, really. Imagine the accidents that would happen if they had had their heads just snaking through the grass. It'd be worse than being a python on a highway...
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Many important biological issues are brought up by the gigantism of dinosaurs. Many people have theories that they were not erect, or smart, or fast, or land-based, or that they were warm or cold-blooded. But they are just theories. Nothing will be proven until we actually see one in action. Other than birds, we simply do not have any huge lizards around to find out about.
Also, millions of years ago, we believe the air was much warmer (which might have led to more land being underwater, or not). But, the air pressure may have been vastly different, the tree height different, the foliage different, the predators different. We don't know, except that probably a lot WAS IN FACT different from how the Earth now is.
So until we know the basics, like ambient air pressure, we cannot know what the dinosaurs were like. (If the air pressure was higher, and therefore the atmostphere thicker and more bouyant, then gigantism would be easier to achieve.)
Maybe not. We don't know.
-Ben
Even if it is impossible for long-necks to walk around on land with a head up hand, how about water dwellers?
After I have received the wisdom of good teaching, I will untiringly teach all people. - The Teachings of Buddha
No it isn't. The browser should have the ability to call these programs when it's required, so that when you click on a mailto: or news: link on a webbrowser, it calls the relevent program. This gives the user the chance to replace the mail/news program with their choice, and divorces the development of these tools from the browser.
I like the one about less gravity back then being proof about the bicameral mind.
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence -- and then success is sure. Mark Twain
Or a denser atmosphere... a denser atmosphere would have a higher cnocentration of required gasses, including oxygen, and would also supply more requirements for a smaller heart and organs...
not necessarily less gravity, just denser atmosphere, which would be easier on muscles, plus higher concentration of oxygen and longer life spans...
possibility?
The only thing I know of that has more is an earthworm (5 hearts),
I remember when I was like 5 or 6, a blacksmith told me something about horses having "hearts" in their feet to help with circulation. Was that just drunken blacksmith babble, or is there some truth to it?
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if your weight was measured in tons. Makes picking out a bathing suit a pretty nerve-wracking experience.
Steven
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If we found and studied one then the theory could be proven. Or disproved. Yes, it would probably require a jurassic-park like experiment to figure this out, but that may be doable. (or not)
-Ben
I'm not sure about horses, but in humans i think i know what he is refering to. (Don't take the word heart literaly, think pump.) When you walk, the veins and arteries in your feet act like a pump to assist the heart in getting the blood back up the legs. at least thats what i've heard and no.. i'm not a doctor.. just a monkey full of useless information. :o)
BillyZ
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I take no responsibility for any spelling mistakes in the above post.
We really know so little about the physics of biology, and even less about dinosaurs. While this is an interesting theory, I don't think it's any kind of proof.
How do they explain giraffes?
I always thought long-necked dinosaurs had the long neck to counter-balance their long tail, which was used for self defence. Of course, all I know about dinosaurs I learned in kindergarten.
Apart from any speculation regarding soft tissue that we don't have, there is the principle of skeletal remodeling.
The skeletons of animals CHANGE in response to load stress and range of motion. If a dinosaur never lifted it's head due to brain blood supply, the spinal column would remodel to reflect this. Adult specimens would have obvious calcifications of the intervertebral joints which would PREVENT vertical movement above a certain point.
The absence of these structures does not PROVE the long necked dinosaurs commonly held their heads up, but it does indicate that they could.
Given the skeletal evidence for vertical movement of the neck, plus the existence of a long neck in the first place, there are a number of mechanisms that could help blood flow. Muscular pumping is one obvious one. It is a little know fact that the calf muscles of humans do most of the work returning blood from the legs to the heart. This is why hospital patients resting in bed get blood clots in their legs. Giraffes have similar muscular pump structures in their necks to help flow.
If the dinosaurs in question spent a great deal of time in the water as has been suggested, the demands on the heart would be decreased as well due to external water pressure supporting the vascular system. On the other hand breathing would require more effort for the same reason, so what you gain on the swings you lose on the roundabouts.
The important thing to remember is that blood supply depends on a lot more than the heart and arteries. The bones are what we have in hand, and the bones allow vertical movement of the head.
The Phantom
Brought to you by the Invincible Chordate Pikaia Commemorative Society.
We now know what finished off the dinosaurs and plesiosaurs.
we have strong evidence that the dinosaurs where thriving up until the impact.
as others have posted, the blood pressure argument only holds if the the circulatory system consisted of a heart and inelastic tubing - a fairly strong assumption. Various plausible mechanisms have been proposed to get around this problem.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
Just my 2 cents
"Rock over London, Rock on Chicago.
Wheaties, Breakfast of Champions"
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
Also, using this advice, WHEN YOU WANT TO SAY THAT SOMETHING THAT IS NEITHER MALE NOR FEMALE OWNS SOMETHING, YOU SAY "ITS", what do I say when my dog spot can't find [it's] toy? I'm pretty sure its a male.
There has to be more to the rule then that. And take it easy on the use of all capitol letters.
Anyway, this is what you get when MS apps correct half the world's spelling and grammar.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
to anyone who has been following the study of dinosaurs, this is pretty much old news. is it really republishable?
First, ears do more than hear. They also help maintain balance. Shouldn't that be the job of the legs? Hmm. Maybe the systems of the human body are interconnected.
Second, the araul cavity is connected to the sinus cavity. An interesting anecdote: I had a friend that worked in a steel plant for a while. He had a drop of molten lead fly into his hear once. A few minutes later he sneezed and the hardened drop came out his nose. This had the unfortunate side effect of toasting his hearing in one ear, but if the cavities weren't connected, he would still have lead in his inner ear.
Think, how can one pop one's ears by holding one's nose while attempting to exhale if the cavities aren't connected.
have a day,
-l
That's the general rule. The person or group that discovers a new taxonomic group- living or extinct- and first demonstrates it to be taxonomically distinct gets to name it. So if it's a new species, you get to give it a new species name, but not the genus name. If you discover a species in a whole new philum, you'd get to give it philum, class, order, family, genus, and species. In practice, though, I suspect that intermediate taxonomic groupings (between genus/species and the highest classification that holds) would be considered provisional until some related groups were found. The neat part is that there are so many species out there that all of the obvious names have been taken and almost everything new gets the kind of (often funny) phony-latin names that they used to make jokes with on Road Runner.
On a more serious note, there's a wealth of on-line taxonomy data at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. They have a lot of information about taxonomy in general, as well as a heirarchical database of every species (including some extinct ones, though no dinosaurs) for which any DNA or Protein sequence has been published. Even if you're not interested in the data there for professional reasons, the NCBI web page is a fantastic example of how to make Gigabytes of data accessable on-line.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
hello, i remember that article too. it made me wonder two things. 1) do ants look at us and say we're impossible.. :)
2) what if the earth used to rotate faster, there would be much less gravity making such huge animals possible. if a comet hit the earth with enough force to slow the rotation of the earth. all the dinosaurs would have died because they couldnt hold themselves up! does this theory make any sense?
This smacks of the proofs that bumblebees can't fly. What nonsense. There's a huge assumption up front -- that dino necks and their anatomy were effectively identical to modern creatures. We already know that this isn't true c. f. the secondary `brains' that the brontos had in their hindquarters. It's quite possible that the necks had secondary pumping mechanisms. I'm not saying they did, I'm saying it's possible - and probably can't be determined without soft tissue analysis. On a separate front, this proposal leaves us with the question of just what those necks were for. Yeah, I can see it now, herds of brontos scurrying across the plains with their heads 60 feet ahead of the bodies and 6 feet off the ground...yeah, right.
Imagine holding out your arm horizontally with a small weight in your hand all day. Not possible. Therefore, I propose that dinosaurs slithered on the ground like snakes ^_^;;
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For starters there would be a clear survival advantage to being able to reach the tree tops. And what else are you going to do with a silly long nick? These bonehead profs are so damn arrogent. How do they know the animal didn't have a special organ in the nick to help pumping or that allowed them to raised their nicks only for brief periods? Maybe they had highly specialized nick veins? Nature has no lack of creativity when survival is on the line! And I have seen people with PhDs be wrong too often to beleive them on what is obvious to the most casual observer. PhD must grow on trees because every pencil-nicked geek has one.
Of course you can't read it without a very expensive subscription.
I wonder who funded the research on which this report is based and paid the salaries of the people who wrote it?
Most of it came from taxpayers in various countries, I'll bet.
Hell. I actually wnet to a Lutheran HS that TAUGHT that. I am just glad that I broke free intelectually my freshman year
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
Blood vecells in the body have "one way" features in them. As far as I know, they can'tbe preserved like bones can.
<P>
Ducks have funky blood vecel systems as well.
JLC - can't speel.
woops I forgot to link to the silly me. You can read the about it at
The link to the article can found here.
How is it that they can "know" dinosaurs had a horizontal neck? Theoretically, giraffes have a horizontal neck as well, due to their blood pressure, metabolism rate, etc. etc. etc., but have you ever really seen a giraffe walking around with its head on the ground? When they explain that, they'll have my attention.
Hva heter en hai uten halefinne? Itterasshai.
This story doesn't contain enough information for us to be able to tell whether it's news or not. Does no-one have a link to even an abstract of the original paper?
It's been paeleontologically orthodox for some time now that the majority of sauropods (including Diplodocus and ``Brontosaurus'') held their necks more or less horizontally - which is why that's what you see in Walking with Dinosaurs, and indeed The Lost World if I remember its fleeting sauropod scenes correctly. So if all the paper's saying is that Diplodocoids help their necks horizontally then, hey, time for me to publish my paper suggesting that dogs have teeth.
On the other hand, Brachiosaurus and its kin were built very differently: most suggestively, their front legs were substantially longer than their back legs (hence the name, which means ``arm lizard''). This means that their spinal columns sloped upwards from hip to shoulders. Given the general construction of these animals, it makes all kinds of sense that their necks would be held, if not vertically, then at least inclined upwards at maybe a 45 degree angle.
So if the Seymour/Lillywhite paper is claiming that Brachiosaurs held their necks horizontally, then that's a much more surprising assertion, and one that will need a lot of justification: the whole body design of Brachiosaurs makes no sense unless it's that way to get the head up high.
In other words, I think that the sauropod scenes in Jurassic Park (which featured Brachiosaurs) were probably also correct! (Er, except for the bit when they're sitting in the tree and a Brachiosaur head rears up - it's ludicrously too big.)
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What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
Did anyone else see "Walking with Dinosaurs" in the UK when it was on TV? They mentioned all this - their brontosaurs and other long-necked beasts generally walked in a flat stretched-out posture, and they discussed some of the reasons why this was believed correct. They also made reference to the tree-grazers in Jurassic Park.
The whole series is currently available in the UK on DVD, don't know about anywhere else though. I highly recommend it.
> IE can do the same thing, except it's Ctrl-Wheel.
I didn't know that. I guess Mozilla copied, so this may be a Microsoft innovation...
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Well, I said embedded markets. In those markets, the user have _no_ way to replace the mail/news program with something else. So, there, it make sense to have an integrated offer. Mail and news must use HTML (hey, AOL want people to be trackable. That what web-bugs are for...), so, in any case they are dependant on the underlying layout engine. I maintain that it make sense to have 3 programs (Browser/Mail/News) based on the same rendering technology (Gecko). Having them linked together or a 3 separates apps using a common shared library is a (big) implementation detail.
:-)
I consider a very bad move the idea to integrate everything. But the idea of having a extensible platform (XUL) have its advantages. We'll see how it sorts out...
Btw, every program grows until it can read mail...
Cheers,
--fred
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Let me get this straight. These dinosaurs are walking around. They get killed because of this flood. Then this guy, Noah, writes all about it. Cave man Noah. Cave man, dinosaur hunting, Noah. Noah, who failed to put all these dinosaurs on the boat. There's this little thing called the age of mammals separating Humans from the last dinosaurs. It lasted 65 million years.
To answer your comment about the pineal gland, read this, or go to the website linked below.
:)
The pineal gland is most astonishing in its nature. As its name implies, it is a cone-shaped body (Conarium pinealis, pine cone). It is reddish in color, about a half inch in length, and not much larger than a grain of wheat. It is attached to the roof of the third ventricle of the brain. It weighs about two grains. It is hidden away at the base of the brain (to which it is attached by the hollow pineal stalk) in a tiny cave behind and above the pituitary body. it is composed, in part, of nerve cells containing a pigment similar to that present in the cells of the retina which is an expression of the optic nerve-- this strengthening the argument for its ancient function as an eye. The lower part of the gland points backward.
The secretion of the pineal gland, called pinealin, acts as a restrictor for all the glands of internal secretion. By its checking activity on the other endocrine glands, it gives the baby time to grow in bulk, which is its chief business during the first two years of its existence. during these two years the baby should quadruple its birth weight. The pineal acts as a sort of general supervisor over all of the other glands.
The accepted belief of the nineteenth century anatomists was that the pineal gland was a useless, wasteful, space-consuming vestige of a once important structure. For a long time, in fact, up to a few decades ago, the pineal was believed to have no present function at all, or at least no ascertainable one. That it might be a gland of internal secretion was a popularly despised theory. Late observations, however, have related the pineal to muscle function. There is a singular muscle shrinking and deforming disease, known as "progressive dystrophy," the cause of which has been an unsolved mystery to the medical profession. By means of the X-rays, late studies of the pineal in relation to this disease have shown it calcified, that is, buried in lime salts, which signifies that where it is weak, or no longer functioning, the muscles do not receive the proper amount of nourishment.
It has further been discovered that the pineal regulates the coloring of the skin by varying the degree of light ray reaction. That is, it controls the action of light on the pigment of the skin. It is the light within that reflects the light without.
The pineal also produces the normal physical and mental development of the brain cells and the normal development of the cells of the organs of reproduction. The rich blood supply of the pineal is suggestive of its active functioning rather than that it is only the persistence of a vestigial organ which during the course of evolution has outgrown its original use.
To summarize: The pineal gland secretion (1) prevents a too early sex development in the child, and thereby promotes normal puberty; (2) it favors activity of the creative force, which tends to develop both the brain and the organs of reproduction normally; (3) it gives the vigor which tones up the muscles; (4) it influences the body by varying the degree of light ray reaction; that is, it controls the susceptibility of the body to light; (5) it influences the skin pigment by causing a marked transparency of it due to a contraction of the pigment cells.
Taken from: The Mystery of the Ductless Glands by Max Heindel, Chapter 7
Essay Ch.'s 5-8 Helps when you do some research
Anyway, you fail to explain the age of mammals and why it lasted 65 mil. years.
Proof is the essence of truth, or it's only a theory based on faith.
Sorry, here's another thing about dinosaurs & man...
Evolutionists insist that dinosaurs died out millions of years before man appeared. However, there are many reasons to disbelieve this. There are the stories of animals much like dinosaurs in the legends of many lands. These creatures were called dragons.
Many times in the recent past, explorers have recorded sightings of flying reptiles much like the pterodactyl. Human footprints were found along with those of a dinosaur in limestone near the Paluxy River in Texas.
Also not to be tossed aside is the possibility of dinosaurs living today. Consider the stories such as the Loch Ness monster (of which many convincing photographs have been taken). Some have claimed to see dinosaur-like creatures in isolated areas of the world.
Recently, a Japanese fishing boat pulled up a carcass of a huge animal that intensely resembled a dinosaur. A group of scientists on an expedition into a jungle looking for dinosaur evidence claims that they witnessed one, but their camera was damaged.
However, they tape recorded the roar of the beast. This recording was checked. The voice patterns on it did not resemble those of any other roaring. You decide. At any rate, the evidence that man and dinosaur did live together at one time poses another problem for the evolutionists.
"But if the dinosaurs lived at the same time as man, they would have had to have been on the Ark, and that's impossible!" Is it? The ark was about one and one-half football fields long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet tall. It had a cubic footage of 1,518,750.
There would have been plenty of room on the Ark for the dinosaurs (especially considering that only a few were of the enormous size of Tyrannosaurus or "Brontosaurus.") Also, the Bible states that Noah was to take two of every kind onto the Ark. Many dinosaurs and reptiles were of the same kind, but much smaller. Dinosaurs pose no problem for creation science
From 17 Evidences Against Evolution by Kevin Martin, #12
Article Again, research helps. I'm a middleman, I'm not saying either way, I'm just looking for complete arguments/theories from both sides. Personally I'm believing less and less on the large-scale universal history theories.
I strongly suggest you read "How We Believe : The Search for God in an Age of Science" by Michael Shermer. Look it up on Amazon.com, has complete arguments on the existence of God and theories of why "we" believe in one.
I find your "research" conjures up arguments based on pseudo-science...they are not even close to being scientific I'm afraid (I don't mean to insult you, it's just that many people are not informed as to what science really is, and are easily mislead by many creatism arguments disguised as "science").
http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/notorious.htme bPages/5.TechnicalCommunication/tc_2_Usa ge.html
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/csk/its.html
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs5014/fall.95/courseNotes/W
http://www.ossweb.com/article-6.html
Is that enough?
Don't post on slashdot. Get back to work.
Thanks, no I realize that's not a fully scientific reasoning for the existence of dinosaurs during man's. It's a very minimal explanation. The Creation/Evolution debate is one of my favourite topics and I'm always open to new scientific evidence. I, for one, am very factual, and the way I can see anyone being convinced without a doubt is through true scientific method and evidence, otherwise it's a matter of faith either way <gasp> :)