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"Squishy Joints" May Have Helped Dinosaurs Grow To Giant Sizes
benonemusic writes "A new study in the journal PLOS ONE suggests that dinosaurs reached gigantic proportions relative to mammals because of differences in their cartilage, making their joints squishier and able to sustain greater amounts of force. Other factors contributed to dinosaurs' larger sizes, including their lighter, air-sac-filled skeletons, and some researchers point out that the sizes of some dinosaurs and mammals were approximately equal, so anatomical differences between cartilage in dinosaurs and mammals may not directly explain why some dinosaurs grew to larger sizes."
"anatomical differences between cartilage in dinosaurs and mammals may not directly explain why some dinosaurs grew to larger sizes."
Anatomical differences are never going to explain "why", they can only explain "how".
"Why" is easy to answer - survival of the biggest.
No sig today...
The huge joints that dinosaurs would have rolled would be quite squishy and sticky. They lit them at volcanoes of course. Which eventually led the the dinosaurs becoming too lazy and destructive(the joints would start forest fires) to serve their alien overlords so they were killed off.
... and the trees were purple and sky was bending through a tiny worm hole there we were all lead to utopia
Dinosaurs and mammals were about the same size? Didn't you just get done telling us that dinosaurs were much larger than mammals just 2 sentences ago?
Sheesh. What journal was this published in again? The Bible?
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
Evolutionary paths.
Insects on average are smaller than most mammals. Mammals too come in all sizes.
Analysis of air trapped in amber fossil shows that oxygen ratio in that period was higher, which may have permitted evolutionary path of such giant creatures.
http://minerals.cr.usgs.gov/gips/na/amber.html
Squishy joints? Considering how cause and effect get frequently confused, it seems more likely that the joints may have became "squishy" in order to support the larger size permitted by the oxygen-rich high-metabolism environment, not necessarily actually the cause.
Some of the best, brightest but ignored scientists in the world already know. The sun constantly bombards us with new energy which is converted into other materials. Over millions of years, this results in an increasing mass of the earth and and expanding earth. When Dinos were around, the earth was significantly smaller, and that's why not only Dinos but Trees were significantly larger back then. Gravity was lighter. Just look what happens to an Astronaut in zero gravity. They usually gain a couple of centimetres on their return. Imagine if the earth suddenly only gave us half the gravity. We'd all gradually get larger even in our own lifetime.
Come on now. There had to be one hell of a lot of easily obtained food in massive fields of easily reached, easily mouthed leaves and stalks for these huge vegetarians to exist (we'll ignore the tiny guys.) There also had to be a limited number of viable predators. Dinos also must have been able to grow fairly fast to reach those sizes within what could be considered a likely lifespan.
How come nobody talks about these other requirements? In other words there is a whole ecosystem and genetic system that conspired to let the huge dinosaurs exist.
taht is why:
Earth itself was younger and smaller by then - and the surface gravity was far lower, thus allowing for gigantic creatures.
http://www.dinox.org/expandingearth.html
It has always been a bit of a mystery as to how some of the largest land animals the world has ever essn managed to survive their size.
First off, there was a higher percentage of Oxygen to Nitrogen ratio prior to the KT Impact (As well as the Siberian Traps). This would allow for more energy to be available to the muscle tissues for more effecient movement. However; While the legbones of some of the largest brachiosaurs were truely impressive, the mass ratio and structural capibilities, even allowing for hollow bones, simply stretches credulity.
A thought had occured to methat seems on the face of it, absolutly bizaar, but it would explain the massive sizes of these creatures as well as allow for the tremendous amount of heat that they would normally generate.
Internal Methane Bladders. It occured that, as these creatures were herbivores, they would, by their very nature, generate huge amounts of Methane, should their digestive tracts divert some of the gas to storage bladders, around which a complex vascular system had grown, not only would would the lift from these bladders partially compensate for their tremendous size, but also help to regulate their body temperatures during the day and overnight. There is already an analog to this existing in most species of fish that control their bouyancy via internal airbladders.
Admittedly, this would not explain WHY these creatures grew to such great sizes, but it would explain HOW they survived at such great sizes.
Just a hypothsis...
Jason
Judging from published research the problem nowadays is that the top priority for most scientists is no longer finding out the truth. Their priority is getting more funding.
So if you have some idea, instead trying to find out the truth immediately and doing a proper rigorous study/research, you try to spread out the process. So you go "let's see if it could have been this" try to get $$$ to fund that research, then later "think of another possibility", or "we should also test this as well" and get $$$ for that, and so on.
Basically I suspect the Feynmans, Einsteins etc of today are using their brains to extract more $$$ rather than extract more truths and insights from the universe.
Either that or most scientists nowadays are really that stupid and incompetent... You can see so many papers that are obviously flawed- have plenty of holes or have poor reasoning.
Then there's stuff like the recent "dolphin" one on Slashdot - the guy mentions dolphins but doesn't even find out how dolphins actually do what they do. So why does he bring dolphins up? The real reason is probably because dolphins = more visibility/marketability = more likely to get $$$.
"I was thinking to myself that dolphins should not be able to see fish with their sonar in these bubble clouds unless they are doing something very clever that manmade sonar cannot," co-author Timothy Leighton of the University of Southampton's engineering faculty told Agence France-Presse. "I sat and thought: 'If I was a dolphin what kind of pulse would I send out in order to see these fish in bubble clouds?' and then I decided on a pulse that was a positive and negative pulse."
By experimenting with different forms of acoustic signals, he found that a large pulse followed by a small one could reflect sound waves in such a way as to allow fish and bubbles to be easily distinguished. "We built a sonar that did this and took it out to sea and it worked beautifully," Leighton says, though he adds that he isn't sure this is how dolphins detect their prey.
Dude! Wait, what?
All these years, the government has been telling us that smoking special joints will stunt our growth. Now we find out that special joints led to the dinosaurs growing to extraordinary sizes!
What about the small Dinosaurs? Did they have "Squishy Joints" also?
I thought the much larger concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere was supposed too have been a factor, and they'd never have been able to grow that big in our current atmosphere.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I always thought that the size attained by the dinosaurs was a combination of high levels of O2.
Some really clever little monkeys weren't around in the mesozoic to stab everything larger than a bug to death.
Mammals were well on their way to getting huge before we killed all the big ones off.
- Grow large, forcing an optimization of weight
- Wrong move! Environmental pressures prefer small
- Small and optimized for weight
- Oh shit, we can sort of fly!
- ???? = Ad views
- Profit
Entheogenic pharmocopia was present in and responsible for most of mans religions
Then what kind of drugs was L. Ron Hubbard on to come up with Sci-Fientology?
Like the ripples in a pond, light is made of waves. Red light is long waves. (Make a gesture.) And blue light is short waves. (Make a gesture with more tightly spaced wiggles.) You remember the rainbow, right? The farther down the rainbow, the longer the waves. Now the sky lets the long red and yellow waves go straight from the sun to the ground, but the shorter blue and violet waves bounce around in all different directions. So when you look at the sky, you see the blue light that bounced off that part of the sky. Sunsets are red because sunlight has to go through so much sky that most of the violet, blue, and even green are scattered out before it gets to your eyes.
You'll learn the rest in school.