Andy Farke wrote:
This is a very interesting thread. . .I initially was going to dismiss it as*Rodney Dangerfield voice* I tell ya, I get no respect....pardon the outburst, but I wasn't trying to sell it as "hard" science; it was "fun" speculation through and through, and I think I presented it as such...anyway, I'm glad that we can find different ways to explore and learn about evolution and dinosaurs...
pseudoscientific babble, but it has the potential for some good dialogue on
terrestrial evolution.
Exactly! That's something that I'm constantly struggling to get my mind around when sketching these things out; I'm always finding that I want to make a "dinosaur version" of extant mammals or birds or such, thinking that somehow natural selection would direct dinosaurs to assume forms similar to modern mammals; and I have to keep correcting myself on that count. Certainly I would expect some level of convergence to occur, but I think that understanding the environmental challenges species face is key to making plausible guesses about possible adaptations down the road, much more so than looking at the same species' evolutionary history. So then I have to think about the possibility of some dinosaurs taking to the sea and competing with the already established marine reptiles, things like that.2) Evolution does not necessarily have a "destiny." You probably are not
going to have a one-to-one correspondance between modern mammalian analogues
and "modern dinosaurs."
I also think that I have a tendency to make evolutionary speculation out to be more predictable and "logical" in some ways than evolution really is; that is, I tend to think as a designer too much sometimes. "Well, if I were making the perfect predatory dinosaur, this is how I would make it..."