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avatar_Lynx

Most misunderstood dinosaurs

Started by Lynx, October 11, 2021, 02:44:36 PM

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Bowhead Whale

Quote from: Halichoeres on June 15, 2022, 06:25:46 AMavatar_Bowhead Whale @Bowhead Whale Are you talking about the notch in the neural spines near the shoulder? That seems to be an artifact from a healed injury:
Technical paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joa.13363

Brief summary: https://dinotoyblog.com/forum/index.php?topic=9167.msg275482#msg275482


So, if I understand the article well, we only have one parasaurolophus skeletton with its vertebral spine complete, which means we don't have enough data to understand for sure what this saddle-depression is a wound or if it is natural to the species. Right?


Halichoeres

I think this is the best-preserved Parasaurolophus spinal column, but it isn't the only one. There are also dozens, perhaps hundreds of other hadrosaur spinal columns showing no such notch in the vertebrae. And the holotype specimen, as described in the paper, shows signs of breaking and healing in the vertebrae with the depression. So I think it would be special pleading to advance the idea that it was somehow a hereditary feature of the animal.
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Bowhead Whale

What about Brachiosaurus's nose? It is always represented with the nose of a whale, but the flat platform-like snout somehow shows, to me, that it had what must have looked like the beginning of a trunk. Not a long trunk like this of an elephant, of course, but something that might have looked like the snout of a saiga antelope. You know, fleshy nostrils that could have been used to make its calls louder, like the nose of a dutchman monkey. What do you think?

Newt

The idea of some sauropods having tapir-like trunks was much debated in the 80s and 90s; there is no real evidence for it, and it doesn't make much sense either - why do you need a trunk when you have a long neck? The only support for it was the fact that many sauropods have nostrils set well back from the tip of the snout, as do trunked mammals - but sauropods don't have the exaggerated muscle attachment points and the enlarged passages for blood vessels and nerves that trunked mammals have.

A narial resonating chamber, on the other hand, is perfectly reasonable and could explain the "rim" on the top of brachiosaurid snouts. This idea goes back at least as far as Bakker's Dinosaur Heresies - which I highly recommend if you are interested in speculating about dinosaur biology. Not because all of the ideas in it are true - it's an old book, much of the data has been superseded, and some of Bakker's ideas never held water - but because he walks you through the process of reasoning out an extinct animal's biology through the lenses of comparative anatomy, ecology, physics, taphonomy and so on. It's not an encyclopedia on "what we know about paleontology" but rather a primer on "how to think about paleontology".

Gothmog the Baryonyx

I thought for a long time that Brachiosaurids may have had a 'melon' like what beluga have over their snout so the head shape doenst match their skull shape.
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Bowhead Whale

So, a resonating chamber is a reasonnable idea. Because, you know, having our nose on the top of our heads when we are not aquatic animals look too weird to me to accept it like that...

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