Re: Dinosaur tails

["John V Jackson" <jjackson@interalpha.co.uk>]

-----Original Message---From: Jonathon Woolf Date: 25 March 1998 07:53


snip

>Now, I thought the one thing that dinosaur tails were _not_ was highly
>flexible, like a snake.

snip

An Asian early Cretaceous Troodon was found curled up like a sleeping cat
with its head on its left shoulder, and its tail curled all the way round
the front of its body and heading off round towards the back again.  Amazing
for anyone who thinks as I do that just a few million years before it was
Archaeopteryx with its stiffened tail.  Troodons lacked the dromeosaur tail
stiffening rods of course, but even drom. tails could bend quite a lot.
Consider a woodpecker's tongue which bends over 200 degs round the top of
its head, and has a bone (two actually, side by side) almost all the way
through it.