midwich cuckoo
13-03-2007, 11:00 PM
BBC News, Tuesday, 13 March 2007
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/sci_nat_enl_1173779571/img/1.jpg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/shared/img/o.gif
"The human is extraordinarily well designed. The whole arrangement is actually designed for a particular mode of life which as you can see looking around us is incredibly successful," says Conway Morris. But could dinosaurs have gone on to evolve into something like us?
The extinction of the dinosaurs was most probably caused by an asteroid hitting the Earth - but what would have happened if the giant space rock had missed?
For a long time it was thought that dinosaurs were a lumbering, cold-blooded extinction just waiting to happen. Even the word dinosaur has come to mean something that has outlived its time.
The scientific argument was that as cold-blooded creatures, dinosaurs would not have stood a chance of surviving an ice age.
"According to the first imaginings of palaeontologists and the general public about dinosaurs, we thought of them as reptiles," says Kristi Curry-Rogers, from the Science Museum of Minnesota.
"'Reptile' is a word which comes with a lot of other connotations, like cold-blooded, slow-moving, sprawling, scaly skins, kind of stupid."
But more recent discoveries, such as dinosaur fossils in both polar regions, reveal that these animals were far more adaptable than previously thought.
Dr Curry-Rogers has analysed fossilised bones from Late Cretaceous (65-99 million years ago) dinosaurs and found them to have more in common with mammals and birds than reptiles.
The evidence points to them being fast-growing and, crucially, that at least some of them were warm-blooded to some degree.
"They were perfectly well-adapted to deal with the problems of maintaining a body temperature," Dr Curry-Rogers told the BBC's Horizon programme.
In other words, some of the dinosaurs were more than equipped to survive almost anything that the evolving planet had to throw at them.
Ongoing domination
"They were the superlatives; they were the biggest, the heaviest, the meanest, the longest. You name it, dinosaurs were it," says fellow palaeontologist Phil Currie, from the University of Alberta in Canada, who has access to one of the richest areas of dinosaur research in the world.
"The badlands of Alberta clearly show that at the end of the Cretaceous, dinosaurs were extremely successful still," says Professor Currie, who points to dozens of different dinosaur species living in that one environment at the same time.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/sci_nat_enl_1173779571/img/laun.jpg (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/sci_nat_enl_1173779571/html/1.stm)
People-watching at the local supermarket
Had the asteroid missed, he believes, dinosaurs would have continued to dominate.
"We wouldn't have the modern animals that we're used to. Giraffes and elephants and so on; they just wouldn't have evolved because dinosaurs would still be here," says Professor Currie.
Instead of elephants, there would be large plant-devouring sauropods. In place of lions on the plains of Africa would be tyrannosaurs.
Adaptable dinosaurs had it all covered. Dinosaurs could have comfortably colonised many environments, from polar conditions to regions of rivers and forests, jungle and deserts.
A world with dinosaurs in it would be at the expense of most, if not all, of the mammals that we are familiar with today - and all that we rely on them for. No cows, no sheep, no cats equal no milk, no leather, no wool, no domestic companionship.
But milk aside, there could be perfectly suitable dino-substitutes of all kind.
A Protoceratops could be as farmable as a pig with the bonus of providing eggs. And an amenable Heterodontosaurus might make a perfect pet. Great with children.
They could even have adapted to current-day habitats, dining on suburban dustbins.
More -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6444811.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/sci_nat_enl_1173779571/img/1.jpg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/shared/img/o.gif
"The human is extraordinarily well designed. The whole arrangement is actually designed for a particular mode of life which as you can see looking around us is incredibly successful," says Conway Morris. But could dinosaurs have gone on to evolve into something like us?
The extinction of the dinosaurs was most probably caused by an asteroid hitting the Earth - but what would have happened if the giant space rock had missed?
For a long time it was thought that dinosaurs were a lumbering, cold-blooded extinction just waiting to happen. Even the word dinosaur has come to mean something that has outlived its time.
The scientific argument was that as cold-blooded creatures, dinosaurs would not have stood a chance of surviving an ice age.
"According to the first imaginings of palaeontologists and the general public about dinosaurs, we thought of them as reptiles," says Kristi Curry-Rogers, from the Science Museum of Minnesota.
"'Reptile' is a word which comes with a lot of other connotations, like cold-blooded, slow-moving, sprawling, scaly skins, kind of stupid."
But more recent discoveries, such as dinosaur fossils in both polar regions, reveal that these animals were far more adaptable than previously thought.
Dr Curry-Rogers has analysed fossilised bones from Late Cretaceous (65-99 million years ago) dinosaurs and found them to have more in common with mammals and birds than reptiles.
The evidence points to them being fast-growing and, crucially, that at least some of them were warm-blooded to some degree.
"They were perfectly well-adapted to deal with the problems of maintaining a body temperature," Dr Curry-Rogers told the BBC's Horizon programme.
In other words, some of the dinosaurs were more than equipped to survive almost anything that the evolving planet had to throw at them.
Ongoing domination
"They were the superlatives; they were the biggest, the heaviest, the meanest, the longest. You name it, dinosaurs were it," says fellow palaeontologist Phil Currie, from the University of Alberta in Canada, who has access to one of the richest areas of dinosaur research in the world.
"The badlands of Alberta clearly show that at the end of the Cretaceous, dinosaurs were extremely successful still," says Professor Currie, who points to dozens of different dinosaur species living in that one environment at the same time.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/sci_nat_enl_1173779571/img/laun.jpg (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/sci_nat_enl_1173779571/html/1.stm)
People-watching at the local supermarket
Had the asteroid missed, he believes, dinosaurs would have continued to dominate.
"We wouldn't have the modern animals that we're used to. Giraffes and elephants and so on; they just wouldn't have evolved because dinosaurs would still be here," says Professor Currie.
Instead of elephants, there would be large plant-devouring sauropods. In place of lions on the plains of Africa would be tyrannosaurs.
Adaptable dinosaurs had it all covered. Dinosaurs could have comfortably colonised many environments, from polar conditions to regions of rivers and forests, jungle and deserts.
A world with dinosaurs in it would be at the expense of most, if not all, of the mammals that we are familiar with today - and all that we rely on them for. No cows, no sheep, no cats equal no milk, no leather, no wool, no domestic companionship.
But milk aside, there could be perfectly suitable dino-substitutes of all kind.
A Protoceratops could be as farmable as a pig with the bonus of providing eggs. And an amenable Heterodontosaurus might make a perfect pet. Great with children.
They could even have adapted to current-day habitats, dining on suburban dustbins.
More -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6444811.stm