But growing to immense size after reproductive years would be detrimental to survival, unless there were a very great deal of parental care for young ones (i.e., probably more even than humans exhibit). You need to eat a lot of food to get to such size, and a lot more to maintain yourself at that size, and that’s all food that your offspring could be eating instead.
There are fossils of a good many large dinosaur species with fractured pelvises (that eventually healed), which some have taken as evidence that mating between these beasts was not without peril. I’m not sure if we have any direct evidence that mating was the cause for such injuries, however.
No one is sure just exactly how a sauropod with a vent fifteen or twenty feet off the ground managed to lay eggs. Squatting down would be a major challenge; some think maybe the female’s cloaca distended down to the ground when laying.
:eek: Thank you for giving me nightmares for the rest of the year.
Prehensile cloaca?
Ovipositor.
Note that while there may well be speculation for such in sauropods, there is, as yet, no fossil evidence confirming that they (or any other dinosaurs, for that matter) had them.
Ooo, pictures!: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/09/dinosaur-sex_n_1659391.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular#slide=more235982
Dinosaurs didn’t care.
Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a Good-Looking Fossil was their motto.
I note that with stoats, female are sexually mature for the purposes of insemination when only 2-3 weeks old.
And stoats don’t have any “gets too large to mate later” problem, so early mating/late birthing can clearly evolve, since it has.
Good, I wouldn’t want to see that anyway.
You’re just in time – tomorrow is Friday the 13th.
Your Honors, the Court of Appeal should vacate the judgement below, the Trial Judge is clearly…weird, he looked for pictures of Dinosaur sex for 4 years
:D:D
Seriously, that is super cool.
I also heard a report recently that more sophisticated methods of estimation are suggesting that big dinosaurs may not have been as heavy as we thought.
I can’t remember the term for the newer estimation method, but it involves digitally wrapping a model of the skeleton of the beast in a “skin” and then extrapolating how much more it would weigh than bones alone, based on data from living animals.
So they might have been lighter and more athletic than we tend to think.
Overruled!
Hey, I can’t help what AOL/HP pushes onto my computer…
Why is this even news?
Missionaries didn’t exist then.:dubious:
