Re: Spinosaurus: The dino-daddy of all meat eaters

[John Wilkins <j.wilkins1@uq.edu.au>]

I am surprised to see someone infer a phylogenetic inertia from a  
past trend. Why do you think that trend might have continued, rather  
than, say stabilised or even declined?

[Caveat - philosopher here, hence ignorant of the facts, so it's a  
real question.]

On 14/02/2006, at 1:01 PM, Guy Leahy wrote:

> It's interesting to speculate as to whether or not
> tyrannosaurs may have reached Spinosaurus size if
> their evolution had not been prematurely snuffed out
> by the K-T extinction event.  Tyrannosaurs were
> certainly heading in that direction, and had
> tyrannosaurs existed another 10-20 million years,
> perhaps they would have approached such sizes... :-0
>
> Guy Leahy
>
> --- Mike Harrison <mikevharrison@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >
> http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925384.600
> >         The dino-daddy of all meat eaters
> >    13 February 2006
> >    From New Scientist Print Edition
> >    Jeff Hecht
> >      Battle of the beasts
> >
> >   THE biggest, and possibly the baddest predatory
> > dinosaur of them all was not the fabled
> > Tyrannosaurus rex, or even its slightly larger rival
> > Gigantosaurus, but a long-jawed, sail-backed
> > creature called Spinosaurus.
> >   An examination of some newly obtained fossils
> > shows that Spinosaurus stretched an impressive 17
> > metres from nose to tail, dwarfing its meat-eating
> > relatives. As well as being longer than its rivals,
> > Spinosaurus also had stronger arms with which to
> > catch its prey, unlike the puny-armed T. rex and its
> > ilk.
> >   Until 10 years ago, T. rex held the mantle of the
> > biggest predatory dinosaur. Of the 30 specimens
> > collected so far, the largest and most complete is a
> > fossil called Sue, kept at the Field Museum of
> > Natural History in Chicago. She measures 12.8 metres
> > long and is thought to have weighed 6.4 tonnes when
> > alive 67 million years ago.
> >   Enter Gigantosaurus, a meat-eating dinosaur that
> > lived in what is now Argentina. Reconstruction of a
> > partial skeleton indicated that it stretched 13.7
> > metres. It lived about 100 million years ago at
> > around the same time as two other huge predatory
> > dinosaurs were stalking other continents.

--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
"Darwin's theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other
hypothesis in natural science." Tractatus 4.1122