Re: Dinosaur morphogenesis

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

 

     Query: has anyone yet conducted a statistical analysis of the relationship between increased dinosaur body sizes known from high latitudes (= decreased temperatures)?

Bergmann's rule? I don't know of an analysis; I suspect Bergmann's rule didn't have much of an effect in the Mesozoic because only in the polar regions it was actually cold.

At lower latitudes, dinosaurs are smaller, [...]

Are they? The biggest known ones are from pretty low latitudes -- all those Morrison and Tendaguru beasties, for example. And while mammoths were considerably bigger than the average living African steppe elephant, the largest known terrestrial mammal is Paraceratherium, which lived in rather low latitudes.

calling into question the concept that herbivory may have, in turn, precipitated pressure for increased pollination by social insects (with the additional idea that, perhaps, their pollination did not cause increased symmetricality in angiosperms flowers).

How does this all depend from the sizes of herbivores?