Re: Brachiosaur flexibility and face-shape (Was: Terra Nova: thoughts)

[Andreas Johansson <andreasj@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com> wrote:
> On 28 September 2011 15:23, David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at> wrote:
>>>  I have sometimes wondered whether perhaps adult sauropods, in at
>>>  least some lineages, NEVER bent their limbs or moved them far from
>>>  vertical. If that's so, then they would have avoided the enormous
>>>  joint stresses involved in lying down and getting back up again. But
>>>  they would have had to do without deep sleep. Then again, since
>>>  no-one really has much idea about sauropod sleep anyway, I wouldn't
>>>  discount it.
>>
>> I once read the idea that sauropods slept standing up somewhere long ago. Of
>> course, it may have been proposed by someone who didn't know that all extant
>> birds and mammals, even ostriches and zebras, lie down _sometime_ in their
>> sleep.
>
> Just to be clear ...  I am not one of those people :-)  I have known
> Darren Naish for long enough that I couldn't possibly have avoided
> learning this if I'd wanted to.  So what I am suggesting is that
> sauropods were, in this respect, different from every everything else.
>  Which is not a huge stretch.

I'm told dolphins sleep one brain hemisphere at a time (and drown if
you sedate them to sleep bilaterally). Is that true? If so, might the
equivalent be imaginable for sauropods?



-- 
Andreas Johansson

Why can't you be a non-conformist just like everybody else?