Re: Sauropod Rearing

[Mark Hallett <marksabercat@yahoo.com>]

Dear Scott, Those are good additional points. Let's
hope that future dino documentaries won't have the
footsteps of sauropods and giant avetheropods
accompanied by the obligatory "earthquake tremors"
that have become standard in these films, although
it's apparently too late for "Dinosaur Planet"!
--Mark Hallett 
--- DinoBoyGraphics@aol.com wrote:
> I just wanted to add a few things to Mark's post:
> 
> 1) Humans are not even remotely adapted to the
> behavior known as 'ballet.'  Forgetting for a moment
> the large mechanical differences between mammals and
> archosaurs, it is still ridiculous to compare what
> has been interpretted as a major adaptive strategy
> (rearing in sauropods) to non-adaptive human
> behavior.  Whether in sports or dance, we routinely
> engage in ctivities with much smaller margins of
> mechanical safety than do organisms in their natural
> habitat.  So using human injuries in this manner
> cannot be constued as a valid baseline to make
> comparisons.
> 
> 2) As Mark noted, dipldocids have a number of
> anatomical modifications which shift their center of
> mass much closer to the hips.  Combined with their
> axial musculature, it isn't obvious that the speed
> of descent for a rearing sauropod would have been
> great at all (contrary to those "Walking with
> Dinosaurs" Diplodocus').  It's even been
> hypothesized that apatosaurines could have moved
> bipedally if they so chose, in which case there may
> have been almost no deceleration at all when they
> resumed quadrepedal locomotion.
> 
> Obviously neither of these objections proves that
> sauropods reared habitually, only that Rothchild has
> failed to cast any significant doubt on the subject.
> 
> Scott


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