Re: Albino Dino

[don ohmes <d_ohmes@yahoo.com>]

--- On Wed, 5/14/08, Dann Pigdon <dannj@alphalink.com.au> wrote:

> From: Dann Pigdon <dannj@alphalink.com.au>
> Subject: Re: Albino Dino
> To: dinosaur@usc.edu
> Date: Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 5:08 PM
> David Krentz wrote:
> > 
> > If a meat eating dinosaur was born albino, what kind
> of limitations
> > would that put on its lifestyle?
> 
> Dying very young tends to put a dampener on most
> creatures' lifestyles. :)
> 
> Albinos in the wild tend to be predator magnets in most
> instances, not only
> because they're easier to see (unless they happen to
> live in the snow or on salt
> flats), but because their own eyesight is generally poor
> (which, it would seem,
> would counter-act anything beneficial about living in
> high-glare environments
> like snow or salt flats).
> 
> Even non-albino animals born with unusual white colouration
> (like lions or
> tigers for instance) tend to have a hard time of things,
> even if their eyesight
> is normal. They still stick out like sore thumbs to
> predators, and still have a
> much higher rate of skin cancers than their normally
> coloured relatives. Unusual
> colouration can also lead to individuals being shunned by
> others of their own
> species, which can limit their reproductive success
> (assuming they live long
> enough to reach adulthood of course). 
> 
> Hence why white lions and tigers are extremely rare in the
> wild - and why, in my
> oppinion, zoos should sterilise their white animals at
> birth 

Amen to that. Pursuit of the unusual is inappropriate w/ such animals. 

BTW, when I get my time machine going, we can go looking for white dinos; I'll 
take the vid while you do the sterilizations. 

Heh. Can you imagine a trank gun for dino's? Sheesh.

> rather than
> encourage such maladaptive traits (assuming there are plans
> to re-introduce
> captive bred animals into the wild at some point in the
> future). Non-albino
> white animals in captivity also tend to have higher rates
> of medical problems,
> which suggests that the white colouration is just the
> immediately visible
> consequence of more serious genetic problems. I suspect the
> health problems of
> true albinos are even worse.
> 
> So the outlook for an albino dinosaur would seem to have
> been bleak. Perhaps a
> nocturnal polar tro-odon might have fared (very) slightly
> better.
> 
> -- 
> ___________________________________________________________________
> 
> Dann Pigdon
> GIS / Archaeologist             
> Http://geo_cities.com/dannsdinosaurs
> Melbourne, Australia            
> http://heretichides.soffiles.com
> ___________________________________________________________________