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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."
... 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.
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.
One camp, vocally led by Bob Bakker and Greg Paul, claims that most dinosaurs (including Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops) were capable of fast motion, of the order of 40mph (72khm), and it is of course this group that's influenced the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movies.
Another, probably larger, group argues instead that the locomotory performance of most dinosaurs was more like that of elephants than rhinos, with T. rex for example capable of a fast walk but not a true run.
The evidence is equivocal. rex knees seem to be built in such a way that they were permanently flexed in life, which is a running adaptation, but John Hutchison's study last year appeared to show that the animal would need 70% of its entire body-weight in leg muscles in order to run.
It's a fascinating area, and everyone ought to study it! I particularly recommend starting with R. McNeill Alexander's very approachable book, Dynamics of Dinosaurs and other exinct giants Buy at amazon.com Buy at amazon.co.uk
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