Re: Most popular/common dinosaur misconceptions

["Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>]

Andrew Simpson (deathspresso@yahoo.com) wrote:

<I think Pterosaurs should be considered dinosaurs. They're Arco-(or is in
sinclair?) saurs, we don't know their origions yet. No, they've never been
classified as Dinosauria but I think it's time. They are terrible, they are
reptiles. Well maybe they're not reptiles exactly but they are all very
terrible. I also am of the mind that we should do away with the ugly word
Pterosaur and replace it with Pterodactyl. The word more people know and sounds
sooo much better and cooler to the ear.>

  While they may both be archosaurs based on Gauthier's reasoning, this would
be true even if lizards, snakes, and all Crocodilomorpha were between those
pterosaurs and dinosaurs proper. Only Bob Bakker that I know of has suggested
pterosaurs being dinosaurs properly, that is stemming from the same dinosaurian
ancestor. Even when dinosaurs were considered to derive from the same stock as
pterosaurs, and both shared a more recent ancestor than either did with crocs,
they could still be kept apart. Dinosauromorpha and Pterosauromorpha, or some
such. Right now, however, there is some concern over the phylogenetic placement
of pterosaurs, with analyses like Peters (2001) and Senter (2004) (and some
unpublished thesis work showing more displacement) adding dissent to other
studies like Gauthier (1988) and Novas (1991) which argued for a sister-group
relationship between dinosaurs and pterosaurs.

  And both would be properly called reptiles, if they shared an ancestor with
turtles, lizards, crocs, and snakes, as virtually all analyses seem to suggest
(the others -- if they exist -- that dissent, I do not know of off the top of
my head).

  Furthermore, to simply call something a dinosaur for the sake of making it
familiar and lovely would seem rather childish. If a child sees a deer and
calls it a horse, is he right? But it sounds oh so sweet! Why not be a darling
and indulge. As we grow older, however, we step aside from the typology, and
examine things in more light. "Horse" means something, but what? If it means
that, does "deer" mean the same thing? If they do not, then they cannot have
the same name. But if there were a name that COULD include them both, it would
need an objective set of arguments to describe it to others. So far, that's
"ungulate" (they are, indeed, both hooved mammals), though one is a
perissodactyl, and the other an artiodactyl.

<Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus are completely seperate animals. Of  course
you'll have to read my as yet unpublished issue of Dinosaur Comics to know why
I think that so I'll move along.>

  Well, I'd agree that they are separate animals. Separate species, even. One
is based on a juvenile, and another on an adult. Yet peculiarly, while the
species may be regarded as distinct, though some may disagree, one cannot say
that *excelsus* lies closer to another "genus" than does *ajax*, and as such,
they are closer to one another than it would seem either are to another taxon
with another "generic" name than *Apatosaurus* (say, *Diplodocus*). This would
seem a lumper's mentality, but the less excessive the naming of things gets,
the more ease in communication, since one is not at a loss for description.

<Jurassic Park is the worst movie ever made. (tied with passion of the Christ)
The book is brilliant and should someday be made into a movie.>

  Oh, please don't put "Jurassic Park" in this category. Yes, it was so
well-done and beloved that children brought from it such an experience that it
became as their lives were, and thus as the original novelist wrote it, full of
his truthiness. This is an exceptional status for a film. That it portrayed
misconceptions was the fault, not of the filmmakers, but of the script, penned
by none other than the novelist, Michael Crichton, who chose to use one
person's personal conceptions to revise dinosaur culture. That the splicing of
genomes from different "classes" of organisms, survival of intact DNA from 65my
(from Horner's hypped discoveries) and the idea that an animal with it's nose 1
foot from a body couldn't smell it comes from the focusing of a source on one,
rather popular, man; even if he consulted others, they seem to have had less
impact than those things which Jack Horner argued for.

  If you want a bad movie, [don't] watch any movie made by Will Farrell. Sorry,
he was good on SNL, but his movies suck. B horror films, the "sci-fi" and
"horror" stuff the Sci-Fi channel must deem to throw at us.... I'd nominate Ed
Wood, but his stuff is so campy you gotta laugh, it's that bad, so it's
actually pretty good.

<In the book at least it was making a point to say we don't know what dangers
the dinosaurs have and will bring when they're actually alive. The bones don't
tell the whole tale. But yeah, the lay person don't care. They want Newman to
get it in the face when he steals the embreos.>

  There is a little science behind the venom, however. It has been theorized
that the jaws were too weak to restrain prey and the arms to small, that it
must either scavenge or inflict superficial wounds and use toxins to debilitate
prey. This is actually rather weak as theories go as it has little to back it
up (the jaws are actually rather robust compared to, say, *Coelophysis*).

  Ah, but the Seinfeld generation, full of cynicism. Ted Knight is a great
commedian, and I enjoyed his role as D. Nedry.

<I get this question more than anything and am always quick to disprove any
theories that T was exclusivly a scavenger. I doubt anyone on this list thinks
that either. When I hear Mr. Horner speak of it he never gives very convincing
arguments and he sounds pretty dumb. I know he's smart and read his stuff all
the time but in this one area he is either playing a game to get attention or
has a deep seeded fear of Giant Preditors and has to tell himself that to sleep
at night.>


  There is somewhere where the great case test for his argument is that there
is no predator that doesn't use it's limbs to capture prey. Horner describes
this (I think) in his 1993/4 book. Since tyrannosaurs cannot seize their prey
in their arms, they cannot hold it while ripping a chunk off. This doesn't seem
to stop 'gators and sharks, but it's not a subject most people are willing to
consider when listening to Horner, whose audiences are of the younger
generations. He uses olfactory data to argue this in front of others, and that
has never been backed up in print. I hear work is ongoing to determine relative
partitioning of the senses in endocasts, however, so we may see soon.

<My opinion of a misconception, that will get me lots of good disagreement on
this list, is that Birds are dinosaurs. NOT. Decended from yes, one could argue
based on nomenclature symantics that it is so but I think we have to draw the
line somewhere. A dinosaur is a creature I'll never see and bird, a pair of
them, live on my house and poop on my steps. I and some of my buds collect
dinosaur comic covers and we don't include tweedy.>

  True, dinosaurs are not birds, but the reverse cannot be argued (well, save
for one argument, but even that one argues modern birds derive from dinosaurs).
But now also think that just as an oppossum is a mammal, but a mammal is not an
oppossum, a bird and a dinosaur share the same relationship, and a small
broadening of the category away from the "extinct behemoth in the hot jungles"
concept and the fluttery avian concept into a simple group that left living
descendants called Dinosauria. Thus, and just if we argue that a group must
contain all its members if we use descent to arrange our groups, birds _MUST_
be dinosaurs. If, however, we like to use typological concepts, birds are just
the feathered fliers. Penguins, you see, are not birds. They swim, they may
seem to breath water, they crawl on their bellies, and don't even have
pennaceous fathers for primaries. They can't possibly be birds, though they are
descended from them.

  Cheers,

Jaime A. Headden
http://bitestuff.blogspot.com/

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)

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