I’m gettin’ pissed. All of my favorite theories about “The New Dinosaurs” are getting trashed. First they said that Pachycephalosaurs and Stegoceras (the ones with the domed, heavily armored heads) didn’t use their reinforced skulls for head-butting contests a la Rams. Now they’re saying that the plates and spines on the backs of Stegosaurus and their relatives weren’t used for radiative cooling. I thought that theory had been cleverly demonstrated.: http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20050517/sc_space/stegosaurspikesjustforlooksdinoexpertssay
They suggest that these things might serve no other purpose than identification. They even go so far as to say that the horns on Ceratopsians like Triceratops might be for the same purpose. Say it ain’t so! What about all those cool duels between Triceratops and T. Rex, where the latter gets stabbed in the belly?
They’ve also been suggesting that T. Rex was principally a carrion-eater, too (although that’s old news). And that Sauropods like Brontosaurus didn’t browse treetops like giraffes (because their necks wouldn’t bend that way).
Whatr next? Ankylosaurs didn’t use their tails as clubs? Velociraptor toes were only for show? T. Rex teeth only used as a sexual display?
If it makes you feel any better, the paleontologists at my museum (the Field, here in Chicago) think that T. rex was a hunter. Rawr!
Some sauropods definitely didn’t have necks that bent up to eat leaves off of trees. At Dinosaur School (my nickname for docent training) on Saturday we looked at mamenchisaurus. They had the longest neck of any dinosaur, but could have only moved it side to side. I asked the paleontologist what the evolutionary advantage of this would be, and he didn’t know. But brachiosaurus, I am fairly certain, was eating leaves from the tops of trees.
P.S. pterodactyls aren’t dinosaurs. By definition, dinosaurs are land animals.
I never bought the stuff about Stegosaurus plates being used for cooling, anyway. It didn’t make sense that they would need them, while dozens of other, similarly shaped and sized species wouldn’t. Same for the alleged “sails” of Spinosaurus and Ouranosaurus. And the diveristy of head shields in ceratopsians certainly speaks to their being primarily used for show rather than defense (though they may well have doubled as the latter).
I don’t casre – I proudly stand by “brontosaurus”. The same rules of priority in taxonomy long ago took away the name “platypus” from the duck-billed Australian (a beetle had received the name first), but you don’t see pedants obsessively correcting others about the name. "Platypus just “fits” that anomaly right. And the damned big sauropods are now and forever “brotosaurus” to me.
(…as isn’t he always) the big dino should be Brontosaurus, not Apatosaurus. Gould argued that there’s nothing definite in the rules of taxonomy that prevents calling the big guy Brontosaurus, and since in popular usage that’s what he’s called, the boffins should have made that its scientific name.
