Well according to Eddie Izzard at 4 mins even, the bear got them caught in a lift door. :-)
And just a note if you still haven’t got it I miss play on words all the time but sound… it… out.
But the original question was about the paws… the geological pause before the advent of humans. There are a lot of scientists who talk about the great leaps in the geological record and seem to find this confusing. I don’t see it this way. The geological record of what we find is only the physical attributes present. It does not show the hormonal, regulatory, cultural, etc, etc changes that are fine-tuning themselves for the next great leap physically.
And specifically for mammals, I would suspect that the ability to transfer immunological information to the fetus was one of the huge driving forces for the development of mammals. There’s not really a good way to transfer information from the mother’s immune system to the fetus in an egg system. Any kind of shelled/laid egg starts only as a single cell outside and separate from the mother’s body.
The immune system of a mammalian fetus can “_talk_” to the mother’s immune system the entire time that it is developing up until birth.
http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/allergy-and-the-gastrointestinal-system/
the fetus has an immunological system orientated towards the T helper type 2 (Th2) responses, which protect it from ‘graft-versus-host’-type reactions, and that only following birth can the Th2 phenotype shift to a Th1 phenotype which provides protection from allergic reactions.
So flipping cool. What the paper is pointing out is that the fetus’s immune system has to protect itself, and the fetus from attack by the mother’s immune system (graft-versus-host disease) and that by doing so, it is not so good at defending against allergies which it will have to do after it’s born.
This mind-numbingly sophisticated system did not develop in 10,000 or 100,000 years. It literally must have taken millions, and could not develop easily in an egg system in my opinion. So dinosaur babies may have been much more susceptible to infectious and disease when they were young.
As many of you know I post too infrequently on the fascinating discoveries occurring in paleo-sciences. And some of you know the appreciation I have for Emily Willoughby.
So I’ve decided to post an open letter to Emily Willoughby and then I will work on trying to find an email where I can send her a link to this. She is done an absolutely fantastic job with the dinosaurs and of course some of it is going to be completely wrong. But that is great!! This is something I need to work on my self: to enjoy being wrong. Because that means that somebody else has found out something I did not know. Glory!
Found the link! And to all of my readers, I would highly, Highly recommended that you visit this site and look around emilywilloughby.com
So back to the feathers. I still think that it’s hugely possible that the dinosaurs developed incredibly complex and elaborate mating dances just like the bird of paradise, albatrosses, and others. Bonding dances.
But how do you get bonding between animals without elaborate emotions?? You have to develop the emotions! To evolve the emotions and the neurological pathways and chemistry. And then you have to build secondary layers on top of those emotions and fine-tune the original emotions all over again. There is not a chance that emotions would have left a fossil ☺.
Half of billion years ago the insects were perfecting their nervous system.
How about herd behavior? Migratory behaviour?
Tool use! You rock Emily
I have seen several things recently about how Triceratops’ tail is smaller than one might expect. Now even a non-weaponized tail is a pretty good defense especially when it’s large and muscular. So what would the advantage to downsizing it be?
I’m thinking maybe a reason for a smallish tail is that it needed to be crowded in with other tails on the inside of a circle. A circle with bunch of horns pointing out — just like musk oxen today. So now in addition to the painting I have wanted for a decade, I’m looking for a second painting with a ring of Triceratops with their display frill of feathers erect and showing their false eye spots gathered shoulder to shoulder in a defensive ring sleeping.
PuraVidaAquatic.com
