Dinosaur Evolution Comes Into Focus

nickynicky9doors writes: "National Geographic has an article celebrating the work of dinosaur hunter Paul Sereno and his colleagues. New Thinking On Dino Evolution provides an overview of the recent discoveries and the conclusions and questions that follow the discoveries. One of the lines of inquiry asks how the breakup of the SuperContenient Pangaea impacted the evolution of the dinosaurs."

Comments

Re:Questions:

[TheGreenLantern]

Keep in mind that, if you buy into evolution, in theory very small changes could have very drastic effects down the road.

This is all completely hypothetical, but let's say you have Pangea, starting to break apart. At this time they have pretty much the same animals wandering around. Now, when they finally do become seperated and start drifting apart, one of the new continents begins to see average temperatures a few degrees lower than on the others. These few degrees perhaps has a negative effect on the incubation periods of several key predators eggs, resulting in a mini-mass extinction of certain predators on the "colder" new land mass.

With a bunch of predators gone, there is suddenly a gap, which predators who were previously lower on the food chain can exploit. Or perhaps prey start dominating the landscape for a while, growing tremendously in size. The process just continues to domino effect from there on.

The point being that there are so many factors that could send evolution branching in so many different ways, it's very unlikely that dinosaurs would have continued to evolve in much the same way on seperated landmasses. Hence the idea that the breakup took a very long time, and the possibilities of "land bridges".