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Dinosaurs Doing The Backfloat
Meshach writes "The Globe and Mail has an interesting article about how the scientific community is becoming convinced that dinosaurs were able to float. This helps to explain how creatures of such huge mass were able to spread around the world."
doo dah doo dah
Matt Biondi surrenders.
... but the dinosaur's remains spread across the world due to the fact that their living bodies were all together on the super-continent pangea, which then separated, leaving the remains spread across the continents we live on today.
Moreover, the article doesn't echo the article submitter when he said, "This helps to explain how creatures of such huge mass were able to spread around the world."
In fact, the article merely speculates that this is how sauropods and the like moved without collapsing under their own weight.
I'm not trying to knock the poster, but young people read this site, and I'd hate like hell for anyone to be misinformed.
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
What a sac of hot air!
SCO (noun.)- A Slimy Corporate Ogre. Often seeks free money.
Have they found bodyprints of when the dinosaur got in water too deep for it, tipped over and drowned?
-Grump.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
And it matters. Really.
You've got it all backwards.
When Noah floated around in his Ark, the Dinosaurs had to go somewhere, so obviously they had to float. I mean, it just wouldn't do to have huge carnivores on the boat with Noah, would it? Clearly, a floating dinosaur is rendered harmless (very small rocks are harmless, and they float too!), and therefore, everything works scientifically according to God's design. Unfortunately, when the waters began to recede, the Dinosaurs floated all over the place, and most of them died from lack of proper places to pray, thus creating the fossils as we know them.
Sheesh. You evolution people make me sick.
Laugh. It's a joke.
I for one wish to be the first to welcome our floating joke overlords
Scientific American had an article about Dino constuction (in 1993 - I am not sure), that showed that the legs of teh dinos were strong enough to allow them to walk and even run, some of them reasonably fast.
In Murphy We Turst
Sauropods probably travelled in herds, and were wandering vegetarians. Being able to float might have helped to find food, or to survive the occasional flooding caused by monsoon rains, says Dr. Henderson.
;)
life is easy when you're a vegetarian, you can just float along with your mouth open, and eventually you get a full meal
aside from the geek value of all this research, it should provide a good basis to help solve some robotics problems in the future. lots of problems robots have with walking could probably be rationalized similarly to the problems huge, clumsy, unbalanced dinosaurs had. problems of large-object boyancy and maneuverability as well, although i don't imagine that these things were very maneuverable in water either.
of course, i grew up playing with plastic dinosaurs and erektor sets, so i might be biased.
Welcome to your first Dinasour swimming lesson! We are going to teach you how to float so we can baffle the scientics 2000000 years from now. MWAHAHAHAHA. Wont that be fun!!!
DUKEY!
In claiming that sauropods could float but not swim, I wonder if the researchers considered their tails? I can see that a diplodocus might have trouble doing the doggy-paddle, but with a tail as long as a couple of city buses, you'd think they could get some speed up swimming tadpole-style. Also their tails and necks would probably be quite effective counterbalances if they did start to wobble.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
How do you make a dinosaur float?
Take a glass of root beer, add two scoops of ice cream, and one dinosaur.
(sock it to me)
Elephants float. Horses float. Dogs float. Rats float. Humans float.
There are too many advantages to being able to survive in water to think that dinosaurs would actually sink.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
No one is arguing that there is no advantage to NOT floating. What these scientists did was find evidence that dinosaurs may have floated (anomolous footprints, spinal air sacs, etc.), then ran models/simulations to show that the evidence allows for brachiopods being able to float. This does not constitute *proof*, btw, just an credible assimilation of the gathered evidence to form a likely explanation.
FYI, certain primates (chimps and orangutans, I think) will not float. So your logical argument of "it's advantageous, therefor it's obviously true" is false. Just as false as some future palentologist making the argument that "Eagles flew. Bats flew. Butterflies flew. Therefore humans must have flown - there are too many advantages for survival in flying that humans won't fly." wouldn't fly. Thankfully, scientists are a bit more rigourous in their thinking (hopefully).
Also, FYI, the ability to float does not have anything to do with the size or mass of the object, only its displacement. Anything will float as long as it weighs less than the matter it displaces.
Positive buoyancy = floaty
Negative buoyancy = sinky
Neutral buoyancy = balanced between being floaty and sinky
That is why battleships float. Oil tankers float. Aircraft carriers float. Submarines float (even when they are underwater they're floating, just not on the surface).
---anactofgod---
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
So your logical argument of "it's advantageous, therefor it's obviously true" is false.
You are injecting words into my post. I never said it is "obviously true". I said that we shouldn't be suprised, because it is so common that so many modern animals do, in fact, float.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
At 6'3", 170lbs, my body fat is low enough that even with fully inflated lungs, I slowly sink to the bottom of a swimming pool. Made swimming lessons extra tough, 'cause I could never pass the "front float" and "back float" parts of the tests :(
Wow, an animal made mostly of water with a big airsack in the middle of it can float... no freakin' way.
This is just like the article I just read that talked about how scientists recently discovered that fish can feel pain, and how this discovery has caused some to question the humaneness of angling.
Hello, of course they freakin' feel pain, how else do they know they've been injured. A machine feels no pain, if a joint breaks, or a rivet comes loose it keeps working... often to it's own destruction. Animals however can't afford to bash themselves to death when injured, they have to know they are injured to adapt their behaviour to improve their chances of survival.
I swear all of these scientists talking about anthropomorphism have got it all wrong. We shouldn't be trying to prove how other organisms are like us, but how we are any different from the rest of the natural world. They assume that the human race is somehow different, seperated from the rest of nature. They say, prove that animals think and have feelings... prove that fish feel pain. What a waste of time. Prove to me that you feel pain. I dare you to come up with a convincing proof that you feel pain. Hell, prove that you even think.
I'd like to coin a new term anthro-isolationism. It means the attitude that humankind is somehow detatched from nature, somehow above it. That's the predominant menatality in the scientific community.
I can't believe that someone bothered to prove that fish feel pain.
Am I the only one who thinks that the ideas that dinosaurs floated and that fish feel pain don't need proving until every other freakin' fact and idea has been worked to death?
How else did they get off of The Island before Speilbergs flare sized ego took over? duh.