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RE: My thoughts on _When Dinosaurs Roamed America_



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu [mailto:owner-dinosaur@usc.edu]On Behalf Of NJPharris@aol.com
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2001 11:09 PM
 

>Did you all catch the cheesy reverse-animation of the _Dilophosaurus_ when it 
>started to feed on the _Anchisaurus_?
Yeah. That was kind of startling.  They also used "stock footage" (okay, they reused animation) of the _Dryosaurus_ feeding from the leavings of the _Camarasaurus_.

>Is there actual dromaeosaur material known from the Zuni site?  Wolfe and 
>Kirkland indicated that they originally thought "Fred" was a dromie.
 
Urg.  Good catch.  Yeah, "Fred" (it will never be "Little Tooth" to me: sorry) was the original inspiration for the inclusion of dromaeosaurs in that segment, then when they realized it was relatively basal.  Some isolated teeth *may* be dromaeosaur, but they might well be from "Fred's" species as well.  Still, dromaeosaurs are quite likely in that unit, given their near ubiquity in North American dinosaur bearing units from the Barremian to the Maastrichtian.
 
 
>Could hadrosaurids really rotate their jaws side-to-side like cattle?  I
>thought they were pleurokinetic, like _Iguanodon_.

You are correct.  This was the drawback of the creators not having someone paleontologically on hand full time.  Next time I hear about one of these projects I'll recommend a recently graduated grad student or someone else with a good scientific background to be on hand as a fulltime consultant.
 

>Isn't _Purgatorius_ a plesiadapiform?  I thought these were closer to flying 
>lemurs than to primates.

Some debate about that.  However, it was certainly NOT a didelphid marsupial!!  If only they had asked to borrow a _Tupia_ or other tree shrew from a zoo (the National Zoo has loads and loads of these): they are at least a lot closer in form to what one might expect _Purgatorius_ would have looked like.

                Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                Vertebrate Paleontologist
Department of Geology           Director, Earth, Life & Time Program
University of Maryland          College Park Scholars
                College Park, MD  20742      
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/tholtz.htm
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/eltsite
Phone:  301-405-4084    Email:  tholtz@geol.umd.edu
Fax (Geol):  301-314-9661       Fax (CPS-ELT): 301-405-0796