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What caused the dinosaurs to die?
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Sun Apr 23, 2006 3:16 pm
Indy11 said:
But doesn't that present a rather serious problem with our current understanding of evolution? IF saurians were well on the way or had already developed warm-blooded characteristics (which I don't doubt for a moment, I hasten to add) and that they'd already long separated from cold-blooded reptiles (akin to those that exist today) the one would have thought that the warmer-blooded animals would have the advantage to survive a global catastrophe, yet the evidence of the fossil record and the existence of only cold-blooded reptiles in our current times shows that the opposite happened.
I'm not trying to undermine evolutionary theory here or to promote certain intellectually indefensible alternatives that have a particular constituency, but it's something which has struck me for some time now as very odd indeed.
Edited by - The Great Moon Moth on 4/24/2006 12:59:09 AM
Also, given that more and more evidence is being collected that indicates that the dinosaur to bird link includes warm bloodedness already being present in the dinosaur, it is beginning to be implied that the fork between cold blooded reptiles as we know them today and their ancient predecessors and dinosaurs as we are beginning to understand them is a very very old one and more or less makes modern reptiles only distant relations to dinos ... possibly far more distant than birds.
But doesn't that present a rather serious problem with our current understanding of evolution? IF saurians were well on the way or had already developed warm-blooded characteristics (which I don't doubt for a moment, I hasten to add) and that they'd already long separated from cold-blooded reptiles (akin to those that exist today) the one would have thought that the warmer-blooded animals would have the advantage to survive a global catastrophe, yet the evidence of the fossil record and the existence of only cold-blooded reptiles in our current times shows that the opposite happened.
I'm not trying to undermine evolutionary theory here or to promote certain intellectually indefensible alternatives that have a particular constituency, but it's something which has struck me for some time now as very odd indeed.
Edited by - The Great Moon Moth on 4/24/2006 12:59:09 AM
Mon Apr 24, 2006 5:43 am
For one thing, birds and mammals have survived the last major cataclysm. So warm bloodedness wasn't completely inconsistent with survivability.
I am not sure where to take the rest of your observation because it is all speculative, including your idea of the contradiction, I dare say. For example, cold bloodedness as presented by modern day reptiles means much slower metabolisms which in turn makes feeding less of a day to day priority whereas warm bloodedness would imply the need to feed a metabolism far more frequently and regularly, especially if massive in size.
But we also shouldn't confuse warm bloodedness in a dinosaur as being the same thing as we see in birds or mammals today. Although perhaps not exactly the same thing, it has been suggested today that some large fish also are "warm blooded" in that their internal termperature is higher than the surrounding water by a some number of degrees (although far from what we would consider "warm" it was "warmer"
. This was noted in blue fin tuna, for example. Some suggest that it is the result of that fish's sheer mass and the chemical processes involved in digesting its food, its heart to beat and using its muscles to swim.
Edited by - Indy11 on 4/24/2006 6:44:04 AM
I am not sure where to take the rest of your observation because it is all speculative, including your idea of the contradiction, I dare say. For example, cold bloodedness as presented by modern day reptiles means much slower metabolisms which in turn makes feeding less of a day to day priority whereas warm bloodedness would imply the need to feed a metabolism far more frequently and regularly, especially if massive in size.
But we also shouldn't confuse warm bloodedness in a dinosaur as being the same thing as we see in birds or mammals today. Although perhaps not exactly the same thing, it has been suggested today that some large fish also are "warm blooded" in that their internal termperature is higher than the surrounding water by a some number of degrees (although far from what we would consider "warm" it was "warmer"
. This was noted in blue fin tuna, for example. Some suggest that it is the result of that fish's sheer mass and the chemical processes involved in digesting its food, its heart to beat and using its muscles to swim.
Edited by - Indy11 on 4/24/2006 6:44:04 AM
