Re: Blood pressure in Sauropoda

[Buckaroobwana@aol.com]

Greetings,
I hope everybody on-list had a Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah(I know I butchered the spelling of that, sorry...) Now on to the questions, Is there a consensus among the paleontology community about the horizontal posture of sauropod necks? As Bakker once asked, "Why evolove a 30 foot neck if all feeding is to be done on the ground?" It always seemed odd to me that such long necks would be used at a horizontal level. Is there any advantage to horizontal feeding with such a long neck? It seems to me that such a feature would have to evolve under selective pressures conductive to arboreal feeding. Also, what was the exact curvature of the diplodocid neck? I've seen it illustrated with the s-curve typical of theropods, and also coming straight out from the chest region and curving upward toward the head. What way do the neck vertebrae articulate?
                                                                         Thanks to whoever responds,
                                                                                              Brian Buck
"If I had known where it all would lead, I would've become a watchmaker."
Albert Einstein, shortly after the test detonation of the first Hydrogen bomb