Dann--Your singling out of babelfish's hiccup puts me in mind of trouble IBM allegedly had in the 1960s in its attempts to build a translating computer. Supposedly the English saying "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" was fed into the computer to be translated into Russian. What emerged was, "The whiskey is agreeable but the meat has gone bad."
I don't find it completely impossible that cold climates caused dinosaurs to develop sleeping bags.
Scott Perry----- Original Message ----- From: "Dann Pigdon" <dannj@alphalink.com.au>
To: <dinosaur@usc.edu> Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2011 11:28 PMSubject: Re: Cold winters for Jehol dinosaurs during Early Cretaceous explain feathers?
On Wed, Mar 9th, 2011 at 2:37 PM, "bh480@scn.org" <bh480@scn.org> wrote:This news story is out in French and Spanish news sources, but I haven't found an English language version yet. I'll post a link and the full abstract as soon as the article is available on the PNAS site. Romain Amiot, Xu Wang, Zhonghe Zhou, Xiaolin Wang, Eric Buffetaut, Christophe Lécuyer, Zhongli Ding, Frédéric Fluteau, Tsuyoshi Hibino, Nao Kusuhashi, Jinyou Mo, Varavudh Suteethorn, Yuanqing Wang, Xing Xu, and Fusong Zhang (2011). Oxygen isotopes of East Asian dinosaurs reveal exceptionally cold Early Cretaceous climates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (advance publication) http://www2.cnrs.fr/presse/communique/2125.htm A team of French, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai scientists says that oxygenistopes from teeth and bones of dinosaurs, mammals, and reptiles that livedin the Jehol region during the Early Cretaceous indicate that the localclimate was temperate, not tropical, and more similar to the modern Beijingregion. During the cold winters, turtles and lizards hiberated. The feathers on dinosaurs would have helped keep them warm during the colder months.Babelfish does a reasonable job of translating the French into English, although there were a fewhiccups. While discussing feather types:"(these structures could take various aspects, energy of the filament to the "true feathers", whilepassing by the sleeping bag and the "protoplumes")." http://babelfish.yahoo.com/ -- _____________________________________________________________ Dann Pigdon Spatial Data Analyst Australian Dinosaurs Melbourne, Australia http://home.alphalink.com.au/~dannj _____________________________________________________________