Re: [dinosaur] Submerged sauropods

[Mike Taylor <sauropoda@gmail.com>]

Interesting, Greg. My only knowledge of whale lung position comes from figure 11 of your 1998 paper "Terramegathermy and Cope's Rule in the land of titans", where the lung appears at about half height within the body. Even two meters below water level is a striking achievement in light of Kermack's (1951:831) observation quoted from Paton and Sand (1947) that the maximum pressure under which comfortable human breathing can continue is equivalent to only 25 cm of water depth.

-- Mike.

On Thu, 10 Oct 2019 at 23:46, Gregory Paul <gsp1954@aol.com> wrote:

In whales the lungs are set up up under the roof of the ribcage for reasons that are obvious, and are about 2 m below water level with the back at the surface.

From what I know whales exhale while the lungs are still fairly deep and water pressure does the work, and inhale when horizontal to minimize the muscle work. Â

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Taylor <sauropoda@gmail.com>
To: Dann Pigdon <dannj@alphalink.com.au>
Cc: dinosaur-l <dinosaur-l@usc.edu>
Sent: Thu, Oct 10, 2019 5:57 pm
Subject: Re: [dinosaur] Submerged sauropods

They would likely not have been able to inspire when their lungs were more than a meter below the surface of the water â at least, that's the conclusion from Kermack.

(I wonder how far below the surface the lungs of big whales are.)

-- Mike.

On Thu, 10 Oct 2019 at 22:49, Dann Pigdon <dannj@alphalink.com.au> wrote:

On Thu, Oct 10th, 2019 at 11:22 PM, Mike Taylor <sauropoda@gmail.com> wrote:

> Kermack's reasoning is rock-solid, and there is essentially no possibility
> of snorkelling sauropods. As Kermack himself noted in the closing words of
> his paper, "If the sauropods were, in fact, aquatic, they probably lived
> much the same sort of life as the present-day Hippopotamus, swimming and
> diving in the water, and walking along the bottom. To breathe, however,
> they would have needed to raise their body nearly, if not quite, to the
> surface."
>
> -- Mike.

It makes you wonder how elasmosaurids or tanystropheids managed to breathe. Would they have needed
to surface completely with their bodies held horizontal?

--
Dann Pigdon