Re: feather tracts (and spiny tails?)

["Ken Kinman" <kinman@hotmail.com>]

Jaime,
    As I said before, better to be a theropod with a balancing problem than
a dead theropod.  The small forms which developed early protofeathers
wouldn't necessarily have been obligate bipeds in the first place, and even
if they were, the animal could often compensate enough to get by if the
section of tail lost wasn't too massive.  Since the vast majority of the
mass is in the proximal part of the tail, the loss of 20 or 30% of the
distal tail length would not be a huge loss in mass (5-10% or less, maybe a
lot less if the animal tail was long and skinny distally, but still "meaty"
proximally).
    And such a predator evasion strategy does not have to work all the time
(far from it) to be successful for a species as a whole.   And finally, why
would they have to necessarily be herbivores, as opposed to insectivores or
even meat-eaters.  There is no rule that a bigger meat-eater can't pursue
smaller meat-eaters.
                ------Ken
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