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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
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.
No some, possibly even most dinosaurs are the same size as mammals. A small number of species of dinosaurs grew to be bigger than the largest land based mammals.
It's all bogus anyway as the largest known animal to ever exist is a mammal, namely the Blue Whale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_whale
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.
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!
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.
- 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
The blue whale also doesn't have to support it's weight on it's limbs.
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.