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RE: Regarding Spinosaurus
Sorry , I'm rather an outsider concerning dinosaurs, but I wish to leave
my small triassic diapsids for a little while and humbly put my two cents
(of an Euro:-) ):
At 19.47 07/01/02 -0600, you wrote:
(And the entire head would be naked, not just the snout. Strictly speaking,
all birds have "naked" snouts, since their not covered with feathers.)
>However, even if it were to be found, a naked spinosaurid is not a
>foolproof way to "prove" Graydon's hypothesis.
What do you mean with naked heads in spinosaurids? without feathers? or
without scales? I am not aware of feathered spinosaurs, were they?
Monitor lizards pluck into the belly of dead mammals with scaly heads.
>I still think that
>the best method by which to test this is to compare the spinosaurid
>skulls and dentition to modern forms that perform similar methods of
>feeding.
Then we come back to crocs and piscivory.
But if we add the claws the scenario changes a little. It seems to me
that, they may have been useful also for tearing while grasping and
keeping with the teeth, perhaps something big.
If spinosaurids were "high metabolic", however, it is difficult to
envisage a strictly scavenging habit. As Greg Paul wrote, today we have
no terrestrial "pure" scavengers, because looking for carcasses is
energetically too expensive if you cannot fly high and look over very wide
areas in a time (unless there was plenty of corpses in the Cretaceous).
Now I come back to my small diapsids from the Triassic.
Silvio
_
"The Wise Man is like a bamboo tree;
simple, upright, and useful, but hollow inside"
Lao Tzu
Silvio Renesto
Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra
Università degli Studi di Milano
Via Mangiagalli 34
I 20133 Milano
Italy
phone +39-02-58355511
fax +39-02-58355494
e-mail: renesto@mailserver.unimi.it
Silvio.Renesto@unimi.it
have a look at our Triassic website at
http://users.unimi.it/vertpal/index.htm