Re: Inflatable throat pouch in Tyrannosaurids?

["Fam Jansma" <fam.jansma@worldonline.nl>]

Mickey wrote:

>Closest thing is the throat pouch of the ornithomimosaur Pelecanimimus
>polyodon from Spain.  The only reported tyrannosaurid skin impressions are
>from North America, and are much too small to tell us whether they had
>throat pouches or not.

Here's something on that pouch-thing: Tyrannosaurs did have them too! Here
is a quotation from Carpenters "Eggs, Nests, and Baby Dinosaurs", it's a
long one: "Tyrannosaurus and related large carnivores lack any display
structure of bone on the head or body. Tyrannosaurus did, however,
apparently have either a pelican-like pouch or dewlap baed on a impression
of the skin found below a skull in Mongolia (Mikhailov, personal
communication).  (...) If the impression is a dewlap, then Tyranosaurus
might have courted by displaying his dewlap. If the impression was a
pelican-like pouch, then possibly a brightly colored pouch was inflated and
displayed with the head tilted back somewhat like a frigate bird." Dinosaurs
are becoming very weird in recent years with feathers, pouches and displaced
nostrils: the dinosaur-metamorphose-years!
Hope this helps with the thread, it included a schematic drawing, but no
actual material.

Rutger Jansma