And ignorant mods give +Insightful to cluelessness like this. Here in good ol' Yurp (and pretty much in the rest of the world, too) we have this thing called GSM, which is quite a nice little standard: it makes our phones work in England as well as in Turkey! And Jakarta! And Johannesburg! And Novosibirsk! And Manaus! In the standardless US on the other hand we can sometimes get to places where our phones would need CDMA or whatchamacallit to work... Standardized indeed!
The Permo-Triassic mass extinction killed most of the so-called mammal-like reptiles (to be cladistically correct, they were actually reptile-like mammals), which were the dominant land herbivores and carnivores.
"'Internets' is a slang term for the Internet that has been going around lately. I have no idea who started it or why."
The slang term "internets" was brought to you by president George W. Bush. For further information, see the 2004 presidental election debates. And don't forget Poland.
I know my strength always increases after a couple of healthy doses of alcohol. However, the day after my body thinks the opposite, I've got all these bruises and strained muscles. What am I doing wrong?
You know, this finally makes it possible for people who, after getting the error message "Cannot find the printer", turn their monitor screen to 'look' at the printer beside the monitor...
True enough, but remember that growing those sunflowers consumes more energy than you'll ever be able to lose off your waist and thighs when riding that bicycle!
"...the energy saved by the increase in MPG wouldn't be enough to compensate for the energy used to create these heavy industrial products."
Well duh. Hybrids still swallow less energy in use than normal cars (or SUVs, for that matter). The creation of both hybrids and normal gas guzzlers probably takes as much energy, so there is a difference. We aren't going to get cars built with zero energy any time soon, anyway.
From an extreme environmentalist's point of view the only solution would be to dump cars and other vehicles altogether, but that's probably not what you're looking for.
They couldn't. They only got to the genus level. Picking nits is fun.;P
Actually, it might not be as amazing as it sounds. Dunno about Plateosaurus specifically, but many animals have very distinctive bones even in their knuckles, so identifying this critter might not be that hard. Plateosaurus is a very well-known dinosaur, so a dinosaur expert might recognise one right away even from a crushed knuckle bone.
Don't forget that hyenas are actually more prominent hunters than lions.;) They just happen to have a knack for bone-crunching - maybe T. rex had, too. But yeah, you're right to point out those T. rex traits, which might as well be evidence for it having been a scavenger.
"Yikes - where's this fossilized bison that's 10x as big as a T. Rex?"
In Sauropoda. It's interesting to see that in early to middle Creataceous South America there are plenty of huge sauropods, while elsewhere in the world they were on a decline at those times. And along with the huge sauropods there were loads of huge predators, more than elsewhere. The late Cretaceous North-American Tyrannosaurus looks like quite an anomaly, a huge predator where it seems it didn't need to be, but there's nothing out of place with these new critters, Giganotosaurus and other large Cretaceous South-American theropods. They had some "megabison" to hunt.
Was the T. rex a vicious predator or a lumbering scavenger? You seem quite confident with your position, but at the same time you forget about the facts that point to the other direction.
Arms? I don't need no steenking arms to be a predator! If small arms == scavenger, most of the big theropod dinosaurs would have been scavengers. Not likely. Sight? The brain of T. rex seems to indicate it had an excellent sense of sight. Smell and sense of balance, too. Feet? Yeah, T. rex probably wasn't a sprinter. But it was very heavily built, which could mean a position as a top predator that took on the biggest, slowest and heaviest herbivores. As you already mentioned yourself, it may not have needed to be quick. It's neck is as strong as anything found in dinosaurs, but apparently at the same time it was able to make very fast and coordinated movements. Predators can also get big to be able to hunt big prey, and dinosaur prey-predator ecology was very likely to be different from its mammalian equivalent. Yes, T. rex was around right up until the KT extinction, but it wasn't there since the dawn of dinosaurs. It was actually one of the last dinosaur species known to have evolved, along with the likes of Triceratops and other late Cretaceous dinosaurs.
So, make of these facts what you will. The only true fact, though, is that T. rex could have been an active predator or a scavenger. We simply don't and cannot know for sure. My take is it was probably both. A carnivore that big should have eaten tonnes of dead meat regularly to stay alive, and I find it unlikely that dead dinosaurs big enough to satisfy a T. rex's hunger were lying around in that large numbers. Just like lions today, it would be happy with a carcass in case such was easily available. As for pack hunting, that's mostly pure speculation.
Oh, and the carnivorous fossil elephants of tomorrow. As it was already pointed out in another reply, the future paleontologists would look at the molars of the elephants and make the right conclusion that the animal was a herbivore. Size doesn't make animals carnivores, neither elephants nor dinosaurs.
I think people often mean something else when they talk about 'realism' in movies like LOTR or Star Wars. You may wonder: "Realism? In fantasy movies?" when you hear or read about such demands. My guess is they don't mean 'realistic' as in our world, but 'realistic' as in those worlds the movies are portraying. This means the things that happen in those movies should be consistent with the 'realities' the world of the movie has. Some examples: why doesn't Gandalf always use that shining staff thing to chase away evil creatures like when he chases away the Nazguls in Return of the King? Or why are the Jedi sometimes able to Force throw their opponents (or able to resist a Force throw) and sometimes they're not?
The realism within a movie depends on how consistent they are with their own 'laws', how believably they reconstruct their worlds.
I apologise for being blunt, but your post is creationist BS. You mention the only two fakes known and all of a sudden all hominid fossils are labeled "faked" by you. The moderators are doing the right thing when they mod you down, disinformation should not be encouraged.
Nebraska Man? It never even made it into wider public knowledge. Only some stubborn creationists keep mentioning the creature (which quickly turned out to be a pig tooth - being omnivorous creatures, pigs have molars that look a lot like ours).
Piltdown Man? A much, much worse case, since unlike the Nebraska Man this critter got lots of publicity and was even scientifically described and accepted, but guess what? Science, being a self-correcting process, worked the whole thing out and although it took a long time, the "fossil" was proved to be a hoax. Great, if you ask me.
Of course, now you'd have to explain away fossil hominids like Australopithecus, Kenyanthropus, Sahelanthropus, several species of Homo and so on. But you can't. Nobody can, because all those fossils are real remains of real human-like creatures. Tough luck, creationists.
Really. Every fossil found is touted by the media as a "missing link" between this and that. The "missing link" hysteria in the media is ridiculous. How many times have we already found the "missing link"? Every fossil that is found is a link between creatures that lived before and after it. Every new fossil can give us a clearer picture of how evolution has worked (and very often they mess up our nice concepts), but they can never give us a complete lineage, and thus the media can always gloat over a new "missing link".
No I haven't. But Cantona probably thought the H would be pronounced in the word because in English it almost always is, so he was just being logical. Well, grammatical exceptions aren't that unfamiliar to English anyways... Or maybe they have an exception with "honneur" in French and the H is actually pronounced? Who knows. But thanks for informing me about the ad.
Your French sucks, mon ami. The letter H is silent in spoken French, it practically doesn't exist. The French, if anybody, would pronounce honor without the H.
Oh, BTW: the word itself comes to English from French.;P
"To stay a bit on topic: I recently spent quite a bit of time researching the Swedes, and I'm very surprised at the amounts of freedoms they had in a country that has typically been considered socialist."
Gee whiz, big surprise huh? Sweden is "typically" considered socialist by American right-wingers who think a country that a) Isn't the U.S. of A., b) has a political party called Social Democrats as one of the biggest parties and c) has higher taxation than the U.S. of A. can't be anything else than socialist. Or that it probably has a German-speaking Saddam Hussein as the head-of-state.
Fact 1: There are countries which are as free, in some aspects even freer than the U.S. of A. And on the other hand they might not be as free as the U.S. of A. in some other aspects.
Fact 2: Socialism and freedom are not necessarily mutually exclusive. (And in Sweden's case, calling it a "socialist" country is pretty damn extreme anyway.)
Fact 3: Sweden is a Western democracy (note to the not-so-well-informed: a monarchy's opposite is a republic, not a democracy). Western democracies are usually very free (as in freedom, not beer) regardless of the side of the Atlantic they lie.
Dunno about the 'least', but yes, it is more important to know how a creature's bones looked like instead of knowing whether it was grey on purple when it lived. (Colors do often play a role in the behavior of animals, though.)
I happen to be a paleontologist myself, so you are indeed very correct. I was just being sarcastic about "us evolutionists" since, strictly speaking, "evolutionists" in the ideological way creationists mean it only exist in the minds of creationists. (Unless you want to define 'evolutionist' as somebody working in the field of evolutionary biology.) And I'd honestly like to see a serious paleontologist who doesn't accept evolution as a fact.
In case of creatures of which we have no recent examples (dinosaurs, for instance), the reconstruction does include lots of speculating. Up to the musculature and such everything is fine and dandy (muscles can be reconstructed on the basis of comparative anatomy and bones), but the actual look of the critters is mostly based on educated guesses.
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And ignorant mods give +Insightful to cluelessness like this. Here in good ol' Yurp (and pretty much in the rest of the world, too) we have this thing called GSM, which is quite a nice little standard: it makes our phones work in England as well as in Turkey! And Jakarta! And Johannesburg! And Novosibirsk! And Manaus! In the standardless US on the other hand we can sometimes get to places where our phones would need CDMA or whatchamacallit to work... Standardized indeed!
The Permo-Triassic mass extinction killed most of the so-called mammal-like reptiles (to be cladistically correct, they were actually reptile-like mammals), which were the dominant land herbivores and carnivores.
"'Internets' is a slang term for the Internet that has been going around lately. I have no idea who started it or why."
The slang term "internets" was brought to you by president George W. Bush. For further information, see the 2004 presidental election debates. And don't forget Poland.
I know my strength always increases after a couple of healthy doses of alcohol. However, the day after my body thinks the opposite, I've got all these bruises and strained muscles. What am I doing wrong?
That's funny. There's another Fazer in Europe, namely a Finnish chocolate brand.
You know, this finally makes it possible for people who, after getting the error message "Cannot find the printer", turn their monitor screen to 'look' at the printer beside the monitor...
I'd mod you informative if I could. Thanks for digging into this!
True enough, but remember that growing those sunflowers consumes more energy than you'll ever be able to lose off your waist and thighs when riding that bicycle!
"...the energy saved by the increase in MPG wouldn't be enough to compensate for the energy used to create these heavy industrial products."
Well duh. Hybrids still swallow less energy in use than normal cars (or SUVs, for that matter). The creation of both hybrids and normal gas guzzlers probably takes as much energy, so there is a difference. We aren't going to get cars built with zero energy any time soon, anyway.
From an extreme environmentalist's point of view the only solution would be to dump cars and other vehicles altogether, but that's probably not what you're looking for.
They couldn't. They only got to the genus level. Picking nits is fun. ;P
Actually, it might not be as amazing as it sounds. Dunno about Plateosaurus specifically, but many animals have very distinctive bones even in their knuckles, so identifying this critter might not be that hard. Plateosaurus is a very well-known dinosaur, so a dinosaur expert might recognise one right away even from a crushed knuckle bone.
But, imagine a Beowulf Cluster of Ultra Monkeys...
Don't forget that hyenas are actually more prominent hunters than lions. ;) They just happen to have a knack for bone-crunching - maybe T. rex had, too. But yeah, you're right to point out those T. rex traits, which might as well be evidence for it having been a scavenger.
"Yikes - where's this fossilized bison that's 10x as big as a T. Rex?"
In Sauropoda. It's interesting to see that in early to middle Creataceous South America there are plenty of huge sauropods, while elsewhere in the world they were on a decline at those times. And along with the huge sauropods there were loads of huge predators, more than elsewhere. The late Cretaceous North-American Tyrannosaurus looks like quite an anomaly, a huge predator where it seems it didn't need to be, but there's nothing out of place with these new critters, Giganotosaurus and other large Cretaceous South-American theropods. They had some "megabison" to hunt.
Was the T. rex a vicious predator or a lumbering scavenger? You seem quite confident with your position, but at the same time you forget about the facts that point to the other direction.
Arms? I don't need no steenking arms to be a predator! If small arms == scavenger, most of the big theropod dinosaurs would have been scavengers. Not likely. Sight? The brain of T. rex seems to indicate it had an excellent sense of sight. Smell and sense of balance, too. Feet? Yeah, T. rex probably wasn't a sprinter. But it was very heavily built, which could mean a position as a top predator that took on the biggest, slowest and heaviest herbivores. As you already mentioned yourself, it may not have needed to be quick. It's neck is as strong as anything found in dinosaurs, but apparently at the same time it was able to make very fast and coordinated movements. Predators can also get big to be able to hunt big prey, and dinosaur prey-predator ecology was very likely to be different from its mammalian equivalent. Yes, T. rex was around right up until the KT extinction, but it wasn't there since the dawn of dinosaurs. It was actually one of the last dinosaur species known to have evolved, along with the likes of Triceratops and other late Cretaceous dinosaurs.
So, make of these facts what you will. The only true fact, though, is that T. rex could have been an active predator or a scavenger. We simply don't and cannot know for sure. My take is it was probably both. A carnivore that big should have eaten tonnes of dead meat regularly to stay alive, and I find it unlikely that dead dinosaurs big enough to satisfy a T. rex's hunger were lying around in that large numbers. Just like lions today, it would be happy with a carcass in case such was easily available. As for pack hunting, that's mostly pure speculation.
Oh, and the carnivorous fossil elephants of tomorrow. As it was already pointed out in another reply, the future paleontologists would look at the molars of the elephants and make the right conclusion that the animal was a herbivore. Size doesn't make animals carnivores, neither elephants nor dinosaurs.
I think people often mean something else when they talk about 'realism' in movies like LOTR or Star Wars. You may wonder: "Realism? In fantasy movies?" when you hear or read about such demands. My guess is they don't mean 'realistic' as in our world, but 'realistic' as in those worlds the movies are portraying. This means the things that happen in those movies should be consistent with the 'realities' the world of the movie has. Some examples: why doesn't Gandalf always use that shining staff thing to chase away evil creatures like when he chases away the Nazguls in Return of the King? Or why are the Jedi sometimes able to Force throw their opponents (or able to resist a Force throw) and sometimes they're not?
The realism within a movie depends on how consistent they are with their own 'laws', how believably they reconstruct their worlds.
I apologise for being blunt, but your post is creationist BS. You mention the only two fakes known and all of a sudden all hominid fossils are labeled "faked" by you. The moderators are doing the right thing when they mod you down, disinformation should not be encouraged.
Nebraska Man? It never even made it into wider public knowledge. Only some stubborn creationists keep mentioning the creature (which quickly turned out to be a pig tooth - being omnivorous creatures, pigs have molars that look a lot like ours).
Piltdown Man? A much, much worse case, since unlike the Nebraska Man this critter got lots of publicity and was even scientifically described and accepted, but guess what? Science, being a self-correcting process, worked the whole thing out and although it took a long time, the "fossil" was proved to be a hoax. Great, if you ask me.
Of course, now you'd have to explain away fossil hominids like Australopithecus, Kenyanthropus, Sahelanthropus, several species of Homo and so on. But you can't. Nobody can, because all those fossils are real remains of real human-like creatures. Tough luck, creationists.
Really. Every fossil found is touted by the media as a "missing link" between this and that. The "missing link" hysteria in the media is ridiculous. How many times have we already found the "missing link"? Every fossil that is found is a link between creatures that lived before and after it. Every new fossil can give us a clearer picture of how evolution has worked (and very often they mess up our nice concepts), but they can never give us a complete lineage, and thus the media can always gloat over a new "missing link".
Steve Ballmer's pugilistic sport of choice would be wrestling. You can use chairs there.
The Slashdot Effect(tm) - Bringin the Ugly out of Your Website since 1997.
No I haven't. But Cantona probably thought the H would be pronounced in the word because in English it almost always is, so he was just being logical. Well, grammatical exceptions aren't that unfamiliar to English anyways... Or maybe they have an exception with "honneur" in French and the H is actually pronounced? Who knows. But thanks for informing me about the ad.
"...heart, Honor..."
;P
Your French sucks, mon ami. The letter H is silent in spoken French, it practically doesn't exist. The French, if anybody, would pronounce honor without the H.
Oh, BTW: the word itself comes to English from French.
PS3 will be released with Duke Nukem Forever bundled! (Plus a rootkit, but they won't tell you.)
"To stay a bit on topic: I recently spent quite a bit of time researching the Swedes, and I'm very surprised at the amounts of freedoms they had in a country that has typically been considered socialist."
Gee whiz, big surprise huh? Sweden is "typically" considered socialist by American right-wingers who think a country that a) Isn't the U.S. of A., b) has a political party called Social Democrats as one of the biggest parties and c) has higher taxation than the U.S. of A. can't be anything else than socialist. Or that it probably has a German-speaking Saddam Hussein as the head-of-state.
Fact 1: There are countries which are as free, in some aspects even freer than the U.S. of A. And on the other hand they might not be as free as the U.S. of A. in some other aspects.
Fact 2: Socialism and freedom are not necessarily mutually exclusive. (And in Sweden's case, calling it a "socialist" country is pretty damn extreme anyway.)
Fact 3: Sweden is a Western democracy (note to the not-so-well-informed: a monarchy's opposite is a republic, not a democracy). Western democracies are usually very free (as in freedom, not beer) regardless of the side of the Atlantic they lie.
Dunno about the 'least', but yes, it is more important to know how a creature's bones looked like instead of knowing whether it was grey on purple when it lived. (Colors do often play a role in the behavior of animals, though.)
I happen to be a paleontologist myself, so you are indeed very correct. I was just being sarcastic about "us evolutionists" since, strictly speaking, "evolutionists" in the ideological way creationists mean it only exist in the minds of creationists. (Unless you want to define 'evolutionist' as somebody working in the field of evolutionary biology.) And I'd honestly like to see a serious paleontologist who doesn't accept evolution as a fact.
In case of creatures of which we have no recent examples (dinosaurs, for instance), the reconstruction does include lots of speculating. Up to the musculature and such everything is fine and dandy (muscles can be reconstructed on the basis of comparative anatomy and bones), but the actual look of the critters is mostly based on educated guesses.