|
All,
Greetings and salutations, and
I must say, it's good to have time to be able to read all the posts on the list
again.
Well enough of the mushy stuff.....
I just got back from vacation
(after an extremely busy senior year, that was a welcome relief), and during
that (the vacation, that is, not the senior year....*shudders*... :)
) time I had the opportunity to read Xu et al 2001 about
Sinornithosaurus millenii. Here's my take on it.
The biggest thing
that stuck out of the whole paper (despite the xeroxness of it all) were that
the filamentous integument (i.e., the feather clumps). The filaments were all
parallel. Now, the paper describes the taphonomy (for those of you who don't
know what this means, taphonomy is the study of what happened to the carcass
after death, during, before, etc. burial, fossilization, and all the "juicy"
details of how the creature lost its juices....) of the animal as lying around
for a while before burial. Well, for spending as much time as it did out of
burial, those filaments are aweful straight. Not even the burial process curved
or bent them to a significant degree (except the example in figure 4). The fact
that the paper says that these feathers match the characteristics of downy
feathers makes this seem more remarkable. Downy feathers are soft and stuff....
These feathers don't even look frayed. The paper also states that they appear to
have been keratinaceous (sp.?), and keratin makes up harder parts like claw
sheaths, armor, fingernails, etc..
All this led me to believe that these
feathers, and possibly feathers from other non-avian
theropods as well, were made of
sterner stuff than are modern day feathers. That feathers serves as a
self-defense mechanism, not as a
give-away-and-leave-the-predator-with-a-mouthful-of-fluff type defense, but as a
prickly kind of defense (where's the right technical term when you need
it?????). These feathers could've been harder and acted like porcupine needles.
They wouldn't have to be too rigid, just prickly enough to hurt, like many cacti
do in the American Southwest (I know, I shouldn't compare cacti and dinos, but I
think differently than most people so just trust me here....). Spines like
these, for obvious reasons, would've been of great use to the animals on their
necks. On the limbs and tails they would've been of great use because it would
prevent predators from biting them there and dragging them to a better biting
position. Larger feathers would've meant that that trait might've passed to
offspring, and so larger quills (that's it!! Woohoo!) would've been more
attractive to potential mates, and so they got larger. Then they might've gotten
flashier to attract mates, and so on and so on.
Then they also could've doubled
for flying, swimming, brooding, selling used cars, what have
you....
Anywho, *_I_* think it's an
idea worthy of further research. Anyone else?? WHO'S WITH ME????
:)
Caleb Lewis
|