Saw this in a few places. This is seriously cool! Given the trouble I had with a plaster jacket today, I have a whole new appreciation for putting one on a bone that size!
Let's be fair--practically NO skeleton is complete.
William Parcher said:
Yeah but back then the days were 81 hours long.
Other way 'round. Coral studies (used because corals excrete growth rings in very predictable cycles) show that days were shorter in the past. In the Devonian, if I recall correctly, the year was about 400 days long.
As far as food goes, it depends on how the animal heated itself. The elephant calculation up-thread assumes that sauropods were warm-blooded. If they were cold-blooded, they'd have eaten much, much less. Odds are, however, that they were something we don't have a name for, so it's really hard to tell. Also, most sauropods as I understand it were herd animals, often segregated by age--so they'd have a very vast territory (hadrosaurs crossed from Montana to Alaska and back, and sauropods could likely have had even bigger ranges), but they wouldn't necessraily come back to the same area again this lifetime. This would also impact what could prey upon them. As youths, they'd be relatively easy targets; however, in a herd they had a better chance fo survival (think fish--the odds of any one fish in a school being eaten are pretty low, even if the school attracts more predators). As they grew their numbers would deminish, but so would what could prey upon them. At full size, I doubt much would be eating a healthy sauropod; predation would likely be limited to the sick or the dead.
Olowkow said:
I seem to remember that some of these big ones had another brain to control the tail. I don't recall if that was disproved or not.
No evidence for this has been found as far as I know. Such neural arangements are not uncommon in the animal kingdom--for example, roundwomrs have neural ganglia in each segment. This doesn't happen in any Chordate I know of, however, and there's no fossil evidence for such a feature (such evidence would include large voids similar to those in the skull, only located in the hips; large holes in the bones to allow for large nerve clusters to move through; large holes that allow blood vessles to move through; scars in the bone; and a few other featurs).
Really? I thought that was an accepted hypothesis. Do you have more info? If not elevated oxygen levels, then what?
Oxygen levels are tricky to sort out in the fossil record (isotopic data has to be disentangled from other data recorded by teh same isotopic groups--imagine if a doctor got a single wiggly line titled "patient health" and had to figure out what their blood pressure was from it, and you get a sense of paleoclimetology). The other problem is that paleoclimatology for that time period is focused on the Ocean Anoxic Events--whenever something really big and exciting happens in the rock record, everyone wants to study that, which results in some rather deplorable data gaps. I have two different books attempting to correct exactly that phenomenon in regards to Southern California paleontology. That said, there seems to have been less oxygen in the atmospher in the Mesozoic, or at least for parts of it and in certain places.
Sherman tank: 30 tons. A neutron star is so dense that one teaspoon (5 millilitres) of its material would have a mass over 5×1012 kg or 5,500,000,000 tons. About 900 pyramids of Giza or 7.69 x1010 dreadnoughti.
