wtf?
active around 69 million years ago
But the world is only 6000 years old.
Everybody knows that the dinosaurs were cold-blooded, right? Lizards, cold blood, there you go. But maybe not. A new species of dino, lately discovered among fossils found in chilly Alaska, has confirmed that the mighty lizardoids of the remote past could actually survive in much colder regions than had been thought - and this …
To get a diagnosis of sense of humour failure, you have to challenge the patient with an actual joke. That whole 'only six thousand years old' thing is so old, it doesn't qualify any longer, so several downvotes were probably from readers, or petunias, thinking "Oh, no, not again".
I'd love to wrap my gums around that bargain bucket and no, I'm not David Cameron.
Seriously, though, one would imagine that layers of downey feathers would've helped considerably but to have survived in sub-zero conditions as a cold-blooded animal does sound most unlikely.
" the dinosaur was so far north that it would have lived in darkness for months at a time"
From the points of darkness, and frigid cold... even beyond the likelihood that they were actually warm-blooded, and the fact that the planet was a lot warmer overall back then, perhaps they simply had seasonal migrations.
We have photographic proof that duck-billed dinosaurs can indeed thrive in snowy conditions.
A couple of years ago I had a long chat with a professor who knew considerably more about dinosaurs than I ever will (not especially hard) and he stated that he believed that there was no evidence for dinosaurs being cold blooded and the belief that they were cold blooded was more likely a cultural "they must have been primitive as they were such a long time ago" attitude than anything based on fact. He specifically pointed to birds and asked the question "when did they become warm blooded"? He also doubted that a such broad genus(?) could have been been so successful if it was made up of large land based cold blooded animals as in the current world the only incidences of successful "large" cold blooded land animals are in niche environments.
Back in the 70's there was a book called "Warm blooded dinosaurs" which had a pretty complete history of this, it's been a recurring debate throughout the short history of paleontology, many Victorian era researchers noted the similarity of many dinosaurs skeletal design to birds, but the visual imagery of huge lumbering primitive lizards was just to compelling an image (Stephen Spielberg seems to agree, despite the mounting evidence not a feather in sight in the new Jurassic World movie.)
Victorian era archaeologists did a lot to shape our views of the past according to their own prejudices, we are now starting to discover many dinosaurs probably weren't cold blooded, and that the Dark Age's were not particularly dark.
To be fair to Speilberg and co, it is explained in the latest film that the animals aren't really dinosaurs. They're genetically engineered animals designed to meet the public's perception of dinosaurs. It explains why the raptors are so big and none of the animals have feathers.
"To be fair to Spielberg and co, it is explained in the latest film that the animals aren't really dinosaurs. They're genetically engineered animals designed to meet the public's perception of dinosaurs. It explains why the raptors are so big and none of the animals have feathers."
Yep nice try by Spielberg, but we all know if they had tried to show feathered raptors or heaven forbid a T Rex they wouldn't look so fearsome (even if they actually were probably extremely dangerous even with feathers ...and turkey sized raptors, Chris Pratt would look a bit silly with them escorting his bike lol)
if they had tried to show feathered raptors or heaven forbid a T Rex they wouldn't look so fearsome (even if they actually were probably extremely dangerous even with feathers
They tried a feathered version of the T-Rex in with test groups, but like you said, didn't work for the film. They did end up using it in another picture though:
We have known for donkeys years that dinosaurs, (Jurassic onwards), were warm blooded. We now think that some species of shark and tuna are warm blooded which explains there endurance.
Also pretty sure that during the late Cretaceous the arctic regions were sub-tropical.
Crap arcticle, geddit
@ToddR
We are still living in the aftermath of an ice age that ended only some 20,000 year ago. For most of the time since the Cambrian era the world has been much warmer than it is now. That was especially so before Antarctica became isolated some 30 million years ago by an unbroken southern ocean.
The question is whether the world will revert to a fifth ice age (four in the last two million years) or will improve to a more historical level of warmth. It's no use asking the greenies, they don't know, nor does anybody.
<i>"...My question is: How far North was this "far North" 65 million years ago?..."</i>
My thoughts exactly. Don't these continents have a habit of wandering about the globe, over the aeons. Isn't that why we also find fossils of tropical trees in the far north?
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My Son told me about this when he was in Botany class at NAU many years ago... it is common knowlege by most Biologists / Bio Chemists, but kept a quiet subject as it upsets grant funders.
Seems 49 MY ago CO2 levels went from 3500 ppm to 650 ppm, over an 800k year span... Azolla weed sequesters CO2 very efficiently and later becomes crude oil... YUM, my car loves that stuff.... RDS.
Are you sure it was African and not European swallows? If these swallows were laden it would have affected their airspeed would it not?
This must have been an effort on par with the building of the pyramids.
Did the swallows build the pyramids and we (as in the Egyptians) were just their slaves?
Long live our swallow overlords watching from on high.
Must stop rambling...
The swallows are dinosaurs, so it would not matter if they migrated or not. They could just drag them there. Not to mention I would imagine a prehistoric swallow to be much larger than your lay African or European swallow.
Imagine the fryer needed to get those T-Rex thighs in! Buffalo T-Rex arms. Maybe that is why they were so small and useless - they were bred to fit in the fryer more efficiently.
Indeed, as I recall, around that time, Alaska was in a latitude akin to where New England lies today.
Meanwhile, modern science has decided that quite a few, if not all dinosaurs were warm blooded.
So, there'd be *some* snow, on occasion. But, food was always available, as warm bloodedness rather requires a constant source of food or hibernation, which is a bit absent in the animal kingdom for reptiles.
"leaving more bacon for the 'normals' to lovingly encase"
In dark chocolate. The darker the better. I like 100%, the wife prefers 95% cacao. And yes, I'm totally serious! Two major food groups in one taste treat!
Now, you Brits are going to hate me here[0], but I'm OK with that[1] ... Try my methodology before you poo-poo the concept. Take streaky bacon, fry/bake/broil/grill until crispy, drain, cool, and dunk in melted dark chocolate. Allow the chocolate to solidify. Eat. Simples.
[0] This does NOT work with proper bacon, nor with watery bacon. Go with the salt-cured & smoked streaky bacon. Trust me. It's an eye-opener the first time you try it.
[1] After all, what else is new ;-)
"In dark chocolate. The darker the better. I like 100%, the wife prefers 95% cacao. And yes, I'm totally serious! Two major food groups in one taste treat!"
The local pub has just installed a special Vodka machine which dispenses mixed drinks, one of which is BACON flavoured. No, I've not tried it!!!!
Vegetarianism is a lifestyle choice/ethical position. Herbivorous is the word you're looking for.
"herbivorous" is only the word you're looking for if they ate leaves or grasses. If they ate fruit, it's "fructivorous". It's odd that there doesn't seem to be a word for anything-except-meat-eaters.
Herbivorsaurus even ...
Hippos are herbivores, so they eat mostly plant food to fuel their large frames. Grasses and fallen fruit make up the diets of wild hippos, On rare occasions, hippos in the wild will eat meat or insects. Usually this is due to scarcity of the grasses, vegetation and fruit that makes up their regular diet, such as during a drought. Hippos may chew on water plants, but these flora do not make up a significant portion of their diet.
Must have smelled the bacon and reached for the ketchup/brown sauce...
Dinosaurs have been known from the Polar regions for many years; so much so that the BBC had an entire episode of "Walking with Dinosaurs" devoted to them! And to avoid confusion, the dinosaurs concerned lived in an area that was close to the South Pole. Some of my former colleagues studied these dinosaurs; the BBC didn't invent them!
Concerning the temperature regulation of dinosaurs, a) Birds are dinosaurs (related to Velociraptor!), and are warm-blooded and b) the latest publications suggest that some dinosaurs occupied a sort of middle ground on thermal regulation; it only cut in if their temperature dropped below some limit.
Feathers or feather-like structures have been found in every dinosaur group except sauropods, and there have been next to no fossils of juvenile sauropods found (juveniles are much more likely to need feathers than huge adults). Insulation is only any use to an animal that internally generates heat; a cold-blooded animal is actually hampered by insulation.
The current hypothesis is that homeothermy (warm-bloodedness) is ancestral to dinosaurs; an internally-maintained warm blooded condition evolved before dinosaurs did. Homeothermy in a small animal and in a big one is different; the surface to volume ratio alters so much that very big animals have more trouble losing heat than they do retaining it (whales lose heat through their tongues, for example).
Big herbivores would have had another advantage; they were essentially fermenting huge volumes of plant material in their guts, which generates quite a lot of heat. Cows do this very thing today, and benefit quite a bit from having what amounts to an internal heating system. Bison, when over-wintering, can store enough fat to get through the winter without feeding much, but nevertheless still dig into snow to feed just to keep the bacterial colony in their guts ticking over and generating heat.
Umm. no.
If wales did not have a HUGE blubber layer, they would die. They need the insulation to keep warm. Water is very good at sucking heat out of a body - even at the equator the water temperature is RARELY high enough to keep a warm blooded creature from dying of hypothermia.
Large LAND animals have trouble losing heat - hence less insulation than small ones. Air is a pretty good insulator. The advantage feathers have for insulation is that feathers trap air rather efficiently.
If all dinosaurs were warm blooded (likely), it would seem reasonable that feathers would be most useful at hatching/shortly afterwards (pin feathers? down?). As they grew larger they would gradually shed the feathers (internal heat may damage the cells producing the feathers... and feathers just fall out, or are plucked out, going bald).
Insulation doesn't help the cold blooded because it makes it harder to warm up.
Why don't dino-hunters consult geoloists before spouting rubbish? 65 mil years ago there wasn't even the Himalayas (they're about 35 mil years old which is why they, as the newest hills, are the tallest=no weather errosion). South and North American weren't joined (Donald Trump probably recalls those halcyon days) and Alaska was further south.
No Himalyas meant the winds could traverse the globe unimpeeded, no Panana meant the ocean currents could go around the earth unimpeeded. Everything was warmer until plate tectonics shoved what is now India into the bottom of Russia/China and North and South Americas joined up. This shifted weather and current patterns to the extent you see today. Cold bits top and bottom, hot in the middle.
"Everybody knows that the dinosaurs were cold-blooded, right?"
No, it's been known for quite a while that they weren't. Or at least, that not all of them were; early dinosaurs way well have been, but their modern descendants certainly aren't.
"Lizards, cold blood, there you go."
Dinosaurs aren't lizards.
Amber, not SSR! Damn, you are correct. Mea culpa. They say the mind is the first thing to go ... I'll have to re-read both collections. It's been a while. I think I'll back 'em up with Spider's Callahan's series, my granddaughter ain't getting any younger, and I'd like to start her out right ;-)
Beers all around, and may Mr Robinson live long enough to entertain us into our dotage.