Sauropods.
Giants dinosaurs, with long necks & tails.
You’d think they were walking lightning rods.
Were they?
If so, how did they survive?
Have we found the fossilized remains of a Sauropod hat was killed by Lightning?
There was a recent thread on this. It is short, but it’s there.
Cardiac arrest don’t fossilize so good.
I know of absolutely no non-bird dinosaur finds of any clade that have been associated with lightning strikes.
It would most likely be vaporized on contact, leaving behind no trace.
By the same reasoning single trees in a field are standing lightning rods that should have died out long ago.
They are likely not the tallest things around. There must be trees taller than them, otherwise there would have been no evolutionary pressure to develop long necks in the first place.
Possibly there was some evolutionary advantage to individuals who kept their heads down during a thunderstorm.
Paging Ann Elk - maybe she has a theory…
Current scientific consensus is that sauropods did not survive.
And sauropods have a major advantage over trees: they can move, both in location and in stance. While I’m sure sauropods were killed by lightning strikes from time to time, their behavior could possibly have mitigated the risk. And sauropods reached maturity faster than trees, which make it even easier to out-reproduce any lightning deaths that did occur.
Do giraffes have this issue? Other that trees, they are probably the tallest thing on the savanna.
As I posted in the other thread, yes.
They do.