I don't buy how large that ribcage is, based on the skeletons I've seen. Its like they're trying to make it stockier than need be.
That might be due to this?
The gastralia were particularly difficult to reconstruct. As gastralia are infrequently used in mounts, it was difficult to understand them in a three-dimensional form. With help from Scott Hartman, RJ was directed to this photo of gastralia preserved in matrix.
There are a bunch of dermal bones that are often not shown with the rest o the skeleton.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Reposted from D&D
If this is real and not some absolutely elaborate and very mean April Fool's prank, it is an absolutely spectacular discovery. There's a paper being published Monday (which, yeah, is April 1st) detailing a discovery of a massive fossil site in the Hell Creek formation that the authors believe was laid down on the day the dinosaur killer asteroid hit the Earth. It's a jumble of fossils, dinosaurs of all types and ages, feathers, charcoal, amber (70% of the world's forests are estimated to have burned as burning debris rained back down), both marine and freshwater fish, ant mounds, and even some mammal remains. Plus, lots of lots of tektites - little glassy balls formed when molten ejecta falls back to the surface, getting rounded from air resistance and cooling as it goes. There are fossils of fish with tektites in their gills (X-ray of that seen below),
lodged in as they struggled to breath as they were forced along, and tektites in amber, and even preserved impressions from where those tektites hit the ground.
The main hypothesis was that when the asteroid struck, massive seismic waves ripped out, causing magnitude 10 or more earthquakes. These set off seiches, which is kind of like an indirect tsunami. The impact tsunami still would've taken hours to go around the world, but this was set off in what's now North Dakota about six and a half minutes after the strike. The earthquakes caused a massive surge in the inland sea which rushed inland, causing a powerful flood that carried along everything in its path, leaving ammonites by ancient paddlefish on dinosaur remains, as the forests around burned and debris rained from the sky. Then the entire mess was just deposited down, with left nothing to scavenge it, and it was all left magnificently preserved.
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Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
valhalla13013 Dark Shield Perceives the GodsRegistered Userregular
I read that long article last night in the New Yorker. I really hope it's true.
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turtleantGunpla Dadis the best.Registered Userregular
Bajablastsaurus
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
The article has been posted on PNAS's website. A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota. I skimmed through it and the supplement but it's almost entirely "here is our paper detailing this site, which was laid down within hours of the asteroid strike" and not as much "here's all the cool shit we found in this site." I assume there will be more papers following this one.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Oh hey dinosaur thread, long time no see. This article was published in May, but I don't see that anyone posted it. Some new flying dinosaurs were discovered in China.
You might be all ho-hum about this. So what? I can look out my window and see some flying dinosaurs today.
These though were absolutely a different line from the ones that lead to birds though, and we know because they were bat-winged.
These dinosaurs predated Archaeopteryx and had skin membranes and extra-long wrist bone extensions to support those membranes. They might've evolved these in a similar fashion to how bats did, starting with climbing trees, gliding between them and working from there (one of the scientists in the article says they would've looked like a "creepy-looking dinosaur squirrel").
It's hard to say why this pattern didn't work out and feathered wings did in the end. Could be the feathered wings had some greater advantage, or could be sheer bad luck. This being said, the bat-winged dinos almost certainly did have some feathers, as some kind of primitive feathers probably evolved before this. Which did lead to another artist's conception of these bat-winged dinosaurs.
bats do appear sometime in the late Jurassic to early Cretaceous just there is no early mammal that shows it was creating flaps into wings they just appear
I would personally say that it's probably:
1. Because feathered wings are a lot more resistant to injury. A bats skin membrane isn't super fragile, but if it's injured it takes a long time to heal and the bat might not be able to fly at all while its healing. Feathers on the other hand are disposable. Sure, if lots of feathers are damaged a bird might not be able to fly, but even tufts of feathers can go flying and the bird is fine.
2. Feathers provide insulation on top of flight ability. You find flying birds everywhere, even in the artic, high altitudes and in deserts. Bats on the other hand tend to need warmer and more hospitable environments.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I would personally say that it's probably:
1. Because feathered wings are a lot more resistant to injury. A bats skin membrane isn't super fragile, but if it's injured it takes a long time to heal and the bat might not be able to fly at all while its healing. Feathers on the other hand are disposable. Sure, if lots of feathers are damaged a bird might not be able to fly, but even tufts of feathers can go flying and the bird is fine.
2. Feathers provide insulation on top of flight ability. You find flying birds everywhere, even in the artic, high altitudes and in deserts. Bats on the other hand tend to need warmer and more hospitable environments.
Mites evolved to snack on feathers
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
I would personally say that it's probably:
1. Because feathered wings are a lot more resistant to injury. A bats skin membrane isn't super fragile, but if it's injured it takes a long time to heal and the bat might not be able to fly at all while its healing. Feathers on the other hand are disposable. Sure, if lots of feathers are damaged a bird might not be able to fly, but even tufts of feathers can go flying and the bird is fine.
2. Feathers provide insulation on top of flight ability. You find flying birds everywhere, even in the artic, high altitudes and in deserts. Bats on the other hand tend to need warmer and more hospitable environments.
True, but we do have both bats and birds now so it's not like bat-winged creatures can't find a successful niche in competition with feathered-winged creatures. It's possible the bat-winged dinosaurs persisted but just weren't as prevalent and didn't preserve well, or they might've gotten squeezed out since the bat-winged dinos were already competing with pterosaurs when avian dinosaurs evolved.
The competition to find niches though would probably have been tougher between bat-dinosaurs and bird-dinosaurs than it was for bat-mammals. Bats have this entirely different evolutionary package to build on. Afaik only mammals have developed active echolocation (and in multiple different evolutionary branches).
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Oilbirds and swiftlets, two not-closely-related groups of birds that live across the Pacific from each other, independently developed echolocation. It's not as good as bat echolocation but it works well enough for their needs. Of course, that means the bird-dinosaur line is the one that developed it, but I don't think we could tell if a creature could use echolocation based just on skeletal remains.
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Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
Bats probably evolved from a crepuscular or nocturnal creature to begin with, given the early evolutionary history of mammals, so their main initial competitive advantage could have been just that; living on the opposite side of the clock to the birdosaurs. These batsaurs (not to be confused with bat-saws, for escaping wooden traps) might well have been competing directly for the same food sources.
We have to be cautious since we don't understand Mesozoic ecological niches very well and we know for example that birds and pterosaurs co-existed comfortably in the same ecosystems (the decline of pterosaurs previously postulated doesn't seem to be true and even if pterosaurs declined during the late Cretaceous, that still leaves a massive timespan in which they shared the world with birds)
Bats probably evolved from a crepuscular or nocturnal creature to begin with, given the early evolutionary history of mammals, so their main initial competitive advantage could have been just that; living on the opposite side of the clock to the birdosaurs. These batsaurs (not to be confused with bat-saws, for escaping wooden traps) might well have been competing directly for the same food sources.
As pointed out in a pbs eons many insects fly so mammals filled a niche
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That might be due to this?
There are a bunch of dermal bones that are often not shown with the rest o the skeleton.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
If this is real and not some absolutely elaborate and very mean April Fool's prank, it is an absolutely spectacular discovery. There's a paper being published Monday (which, yeah, is April 1st) detailing a discovery of a massive fossil site in the Hell Creek formation that the authors believe was laid down on the day the dinosaur killer asteroid hit the Earth. It's a jumble of fossils, dinosaurs of all types and ages, feathers, charcoal, amber (70% of the world's forests are estimated to have burned as burning debris rained back down), both marine and freshwater fish, ant mounds, and even some mammal remains. Plus, lots of lots of tektites - little glassy balls formed when molten ejecta falls back to the surface, getting rounded from air resistance and cooling as it goes. There are fossils of fish with tektites in their gills (X-ray of that seen below),
lodged in as they struggled to breath as they were forced along, and tektites in amber, and even preserved impressions from where those tektites hit the ground.
The main hypothesis was that when the asteroid struck, massive seismic waves ripped out, causing magnitude 10 or more earthquakes. These set off seiches, which is kind of like an indirect tsunami. The impact tsunami still would've taken hours to go around the world, but this was set off in what's now North Dakota about six and a half minutes after the strike. The earthquakes caused a massive surge in the inland sea which rushed inland, causing a powerful flood that carried along everything in its path, leaving ammonites by ancient paddlefish on dinosaur remains, as the forests around burned and debris rained from the sky. Then the entire mess was just deposited down, with left nothing to scavenge it, and it was all left magnificently preserved.
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You might be all ho-hum about this. So what? I can look out my window and see some flying dinosaurs today.
These though were absolutely a different line from the ones that lead to birds though, and we know because they were bat-winged.
These dinosaurs predated Archaeopteryx and had skin membranes and extra-long wrist bone extensions to support those membranes. They might've evolved these in a similar fashion to how bats did, starting with climbing trees, gliding between them and working from there (one of the scientists in the article says they would've looked like a "creepy-looking dinosaur squirrel").
It's hard to say why this pattern didn't work out and feathered wings did in the end. Could be the feathered wings had some greater advantage, or could be sheer bad luck. This being said, the bat-winged dinos almost certainly did have some feathers, as some kind of primitive feathers probably evolved before this. Which did lead to another artist's conception of these bat-winged dinosaurs.
1. Because feathered wings are a lot more resistant to injury. A bats skin membrane isn't super fragile, but if it's injured it takes a long time to heal and the bat might not be able to fly at all while its healing. Feathers on the other hand are disposable. Sure, if lots of feathers are damaged a bird might not be able to fly, but even tufts of feathers can go flying and the bird is fine.
2. Feathers provide insulation on top of flight ability. You find flying birds everywhere, even in the artic, high altitudes and in deserts. Bats on the other hand tend to need warmer and more hospitable environments.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Mites evolved to snack on feathers
True, but we do have both bats and birds now so it's not like bat-winged creatures can't find a successful niche in competition with feathered-winged creatures. It's possible the bat-winged dinosaurs persisted but just weren't as prevalent and didn't preserve well, or they might've gotten squeezed out since the bat-winged dinos were already competing with pterosaurs when avian dinosaurs evolved.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
As pointed out in a pbs eons many insects fly so mammals filled a niche