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Re: Waimanu


----- Original Message ----- From: "john bois" <jbois@verizon.net>
To: "dinosaur" <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Saturday, May 20, 2006 9:47 PM
Subject: Waimanu



I would guess that soaring bird niches are so specialized, demanding, a kind of biological mission impossible...and, after all, Tom Cruise was not around to make it happen. 

Why are they particularly specialized or demanding?

Still, it is worth wondering what Falconiformes (for example) might have meant for K soarers

Not much. K soarers were mostly marine. Falconiformes are mostly inland (a planform related difference). Consequently, on the whole, the falconiformes would have trouble accessing the soarers.

--and how later birds might have had immunity not available to pterosaurs due to cold blood (for example).

I was of the opinion that warm-bloodedness in pterosaurs was pretty well demonstrated. Am I missing something? I do note that pterosaur flight style does not require warm-bloodedness, but that doesn't mean that they weren't..

For (another) example, what if pterosaurs were limited to equable/more predator-dense climates?

The larger pterosaurs require fairly sparce vegetation to launch (sparce enough to acommodate extended wings). That implies limited cover for predators. Since the largest pterosaurs would be moving at more than steady-state stall speed when their feet leave the ground, they would also be moving faster by that point than any predator of the time would likely be able to run. For the biggest pterosaurs, time to launch would be on the order of a half second, too short a time for a surprise predator to move very far. I'd say that in their normal habitat, the big pterosaurs would be pretty much uncatchable unless ill, injured, or captured at sea by a marine predator.