Re: Sauroparental care

[zone65@bigpond.com]

On Tuesday, December 23, 2003, at 12:54  AM, Ken Carpenter wrote:

> The comment about the claw shows the type of thinking that I am trying 
> to change on DML.

Such unbridled hubris!

>  It is important to look at the whole picture and not just a single 
> feature (in this case). A dinosaur is more than a single bone (or set 
> of closely related bones). (BUT don't feel too bad, my professional 
> colleagues fall into this same trap with cladistic anaylses of a taxon 
> based on a single bone, make behavioral inferences from a single 
> structure, etc.)

I don't feel bad at all - sauropods were huge animals with presumably 
enough power to easily dig a hole if so desired. The bulldozers of the 
Jurassic, if you will (but you probably won't).

>  In the case of digging, we can look at all the known digging 
> vertebrates today and see certain characteristics that they all share. 
> The results are more meaningful if the animals are not closely related 
> because similar adaptations had to have arisen independently (i.e., 
> the characters were not inherited, but developed because of similar 
> life-style, etc.). In the case of diggers (e.g. armadillo and mole, 
> which are unrelated), we can see that the claws (not just one) are 
> enlarged and occupy the entire width of the hand in order to maximize 
> the amount of dirt the hands/paws can move.

Why is it always necessary to seek modern-day analogs to dinosaurs? 
What do armadillos and moles - or wombats and aardvarks for that matter 
- have the slightest in common with sauropds? Why must dinosaurs 
conform to what you know about extant mammals, or even reptiles? Yes, 
we can "look at" modern vertebrate morphology and behaviour, but 
they're not the yardstick you're making them out to be. Are you sure 
*you're* looking at the whole animal here?

Peter M