From: Andrew Simpson <deathspresso@yahoo.com>
Reply-To: deathspresso@yahoo.com
To: qilongia@yahoo.com
CC: dinosaur@usc.edu
Subject: Re: Most popular/common dinosaur misconceptions
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 08:58:47 -0700 (PDT)
Of course I can't really argue with any of your
statements as they are backed up with logic, fact and
wisdom but it doesn't change my opinions. Whether this
is a strength or weakness within me I do not know.
As for Pterosaurs I dont' know if it's childish to
want the word to be changed to Pterodactyl or not.
Might be the blank stairs when I tell people that's
what they're called or the way it never rolls of the
tongue. I know I have little hope of getting my way on
this but be honest if you could change it right now
wouldn't you want to call pterosaurs Pterodactyls?
As for them being dinosaurs, well they are and they
aren't. They are not scientificly, (in most arguments)
and they kinda are in the common english laymen
language. My question is, If they had been included as
dinosaurs in the first description would we still
consider them such 100 years later?
I know that Crit-tun wrote the screenplay and so he
has to be blamed as much as anyone. The book has so
many greater points to make all of which add a ton to
the over all plot and danger of the movie. Goldbloom
was the perfect choice for Malcome but his character,
or rather his interesting statements on everything
from chaos to scientific ethics was limited to a few
short bursts and that music...oy. The science of it,
or lack there off, doesn't bother me as much as the
bad storytelling and the abandonment of filmaking 101.
For me it felt remeadeal. of course I can't spell
re-mead-eal.
The limbs to capture prey argument has no merit for me
anymore than it does you.
As far as the birds/dinosaurs thang I know the
arguments and cannot argue against any of those
points. I suppose what I'm trying to figure out or
convay is somehow we're going to need to have some
seperation. Dinosaurs did not go completly extinct
cause birds decended. True. Birds are technicly
dinosaurs because of the rules of
clandestitronicitudes. But somehow the act of labeling
makes ness the seperation of the extinct dinosaurs and
the living brand. All of whom share common
characteristics that make them all aves.
crap now my head hurts. Tweedy not dinosaur!
Though it would be a funny cartoon to have tweedy walk
around cocky because he finds out he is a dinosaur.
andrew
--- "Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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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