"Squishy Joints" May Have Helped Dinosaurs Grow To Giant Sizes 56
benonemusic writes "A new study in the journal PLOS ONE suggests that dinosaurs reached gigantic proportions relative to mammals because of differences in their cartilage, making their joints squishier and able to sustain greater amounts of force. Other factors contributed to dinosaurs' larger sizes, including their lighter, air-sac-filled skeletons, and some researchers point out that the sizes of some dinosaurs and mammals were approximately equal, so anatomical differences between cartilage in dinosaurs and mammals may not directly explain why some dinosaurs grew to larger sizes."
Wrong question (Score:5, Insightful)
"anatomical differences between cartilage in dinosaurs and mammals may not directly explain why some dinosaurs grew to larger sizes."
Anatomical differences are never going to explain "why", they can only explain "how".
"Why" is easy to answer - survival of the biggest.
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"Why" is seldom a helpful modifier with which to begin an interrogatory . It only deals with motives. It invites only speculation or lies , dependent on circumstance.
It would be easier to simplify that there was merely a "need", be it for competition, be it from different gravity, be it for, fill in the blank.
Unless one is privy to the cirumstances in realtime as a witness, "why" is only a guess and has no real place in science.
Far more profitable are; who, where, when, how and what, producing a trove of da
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Why should he get off /. for being high? It is, after all, a thread about joints.
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Some of our greatest minds in history, altered their states of consciousness.
Entheogenic pharmocopia was present in and responsible for most of mans religions, carving the face of society since the stone age.
Marijuana has been shown to deal with many ills, from cancer to Parkinsons disease to pain relief , it is not unimaginable that it helps Joint conditions too.
It is not unimaginable that dinosaurs feasted on cannabis and benefited to various degrees.
No doubt, what's that chumps problem? Give him some fib
L. Ron Hubbard (Score:2)
Entheogenic pharmocopia was present in and responsible for most of mans religions
Then what kind of drugs was L. Ron Hubbard on to come up with Sci-Fientology?
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Being from Wichita, Ks, L.ROn could never find any decent drugs, but thanks to questionable ancestry and a little help from his family, he roasted right along on his own hormones and brain chemistry.
Family ever drive you crazy? Make a profit! Be a prophet! http://rsidd.online.fr/profit/ [online.fr]
I give you " The Profit" by Kehlog Albran
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Hmmm no challenge to my premise , but a preoccupation with altered states. ( high x2 , get off )
Wants to know if I am high, indicates detection through a sense he could not possibly possess, then quasi mumbles something about "getting off slashdot now" as if he expects I am to anesthetize the readership. This isn't possible. Many software companies would eat rats , if only to figure out how to deliver that feature.
You are a silly anon cow wanting to graze on grass,
If you shaved your head, you'd loo
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"anatomical differences between cartilage in dinosaurs and mammals may not directly explain why some dinosaurs grew to larger sizes."
Anatomical differences are never going to explain "why", they can only explain "how".
Agreed - this is sloppy reporting (mainly in the /. summary but also in the original). I think what they are trying to say is that this particular joint design, which evolved in smaller reptiles, later proved to be helpful in the evolution of giant dinosaurs - i.e., it was a sort of exaptation (formerly known as pre-adaption) in the sense that while this design's posited suitability for carrying large loads wasn't necessary when it evolved (the mammalian design was equally capable for animals of that size),
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Using "why" (implicitly "why can") rather than "how" is a very standard usage, both when asking these kinds of questions and answering them. I doubt anyone would actually read it in the anthropomorphising sense unless they were trying to win some sort of pedantry contest.
Re:Wrong question (Score:4, Funny)
I agree. No one says to a 6 year old when they ask "Why is the sky blue" ...
"Do you mean why as in motives or did you actually mean how it is that the sky is blue? Please clarify."
because if you ask that, then they will say, "Why"
and then you are screwed.
Explaining sky color to a kindergarten student (Score:2)
Like the ripples in a pond, light is made of waves. Red light is long waves. (Make a gesture.) And blue light is short waves. (Make a gesture with more tightly spaced wiggles.) You remember the rainbow, right? The farther down the rainbow, the longer the waves. Now the sky lets the long red and yellow waves go straight from the sun to the ground, but the shorter blue and violet waves bounce around in all different directions. So when you look at the sky, you see the blue light that bounced off that part of
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So what you're saying is that the sky is blue because air is coloured a very pale shade of blue.
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Re:Wrong question (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that "survival of the fittest" is an unguided process, isn't that also "how" rather than "why"?
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Squishy joints in the morning
Squishy joints at night
Squishy joints, before squishy joints
And then squishy more...
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Well why where they so large? Where they endothermic, and the large body mass helped them conserve heat?
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Ah yes, the Lehman-Brothersaurus, too big to become extinct.
They smoked squishy joints too. (Score:5, Funny)
The huge joints that dinosaurs would have rolled would be quite squishy and sticky. They lit them at volcanoes of course. Which eventually led the the dinosaurs becoming too lazy and destructive(the joints would start forest fires) to serve their alien overlords so they were killed off.
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The huge joints that dinosaurs would have rolled would be quite squishy and sticky. They lit them at volcanoes of course. Which eventually led the the dinosaurs becoming too lazy and destructive(the joints would start forest fires) to serve their alien overlords so they were killed off.
This is a cartoon I would pay to watch.
Re:They smoked squishy joints too. (Score:5, Funny)
And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is why they called it the Stoned Age.
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It also explains why Fred and Barney were always cooking up colossally dumb ideas.
-
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Um... (Score:1)
Sheesh. What journal was this published in again? The Bible?
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No some, possibly even most dinosaurs are the same size as mammals. A small number of species of dinosaurs grew to be bigger than the largest land based mammals.
It's all bogus anyway as the largest known animal to ever exist is a mammal, namely the Blue Whale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_whale [wikipedia.org]
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The blue whale also doesn't have to support it's weight on it's limbs.
Critical thinking missing (Score:4, Interesting)
Evolutionary paths.
Insects on average are smaller than most mammals. Mammals too come in all sizes.
Analysis of air trapped in amber fossil shows that oxygen ratio in that period was higher, which may have permitted evolutionary path of such giant creatures.
http://minerals.cr.usgs.gov/gips/na/amber.html [usgs.gov]
Squishy joints? Considering how cause and effect get frequently confused, it seems more likely that the joints may have became "squishy" in order to support the larger size permitted by the oxygen-rich high-metabolism environment, not necessarily actually the cause.
Re:Critical thinking missing (Score:4, Informative)
Insects don't have lungs or a circulatory system. Their size is limited by how fast oxygen can diffuse through their internal goo.
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Keep in mind that hundreds of millions of years of extinctions and adaptive radiations have taken place between then and now. It's not only a question of whether insects can exist at the larger sizes they once grew to, but also whether they'd be competitive enough to take back their former ecological niches from the current incumbents. To use a tech analogy, it's like asking whether a flip phone can dominate the premium phone market in 2014, because they once dominated it in 2005.
Judging from the range and
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But, is that correlation or causality? Do oxygen rates really need to be that much higher to grow that large. Sherpas get by with the same biology, just way more hemoglobin (?) in their blood to exploit lower oxygen levels at altitude. And, your body would quickly adjust as well.
Or were the oxygen levels just an artifact of the arms race of trees trying to outgrow the herbivores? I have no clue, just speculating.
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We're not operating at the fringes of the size limit so our biology can adapt more easily.
A more relevant question might be what limits an Elephant's size. Would a slightly larger elephant have trouble extracting enough oxygen from the atmosphere to survive?
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I'm still waiting for the scientifically accurate remake of Jurassic Park where the dinosaurs are all lying on the ground gasping for air.
Easy Food Helped Dinosaurs Grow to Huge Size (Score:2)
Come on now. There had to be one hell of a lot of easily obtained food in massive fields of easily reached, easily mouthed leaves and stalks for these huge vegetarians to exist (we'll ignore the tiny guys.) There also had to be a limited number of viable predators. Dinos also must have been able to grow fairly fast to reach those sizes within what could be considered a likely lifespan.
How come nobody talks about these other requirements? In other words there is a whole ecosystem and genetic system that
More government lies! (Score:2)
All these years, the government has been telling us that smoking special joints will stunt our growth. Now we find out that special joints led to the dinosaurs growing to extraordinary sizes!
Hmmmm .... (Score:2)
I thought the much larger concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere was supposed too have been a factor, and they'd never have been able to grow that big in our current at
Fact. (Score:2)
- Grow large, forcing an optimization of weight
- Wrong move! Environmental pressures prefer small
- Small and optimized for weight
- Oh shit, we can sort of fly!
- ???? = Ad views
- Profit