Re: The life of birds

["John V Jackson" <jjackson@interalpha.co.uk>]

--Original Message-- From: Jaime A. Headden <qilongia@yahoo.com>: 05
December 1998 07:40




>Monkey puzzle trees were certainly climbable, very large
>branches and kinda shaggy bark. It's the surface, really, and not the
>branches that matter.

Ooo, well if I were shinning up a monkey puzzle, I agree the surface
certainly WOULD matter to me!  :-)

>
>  I do kinda like the ground up theory in which the ancestral
>dinosaur, (oh, say, *Eoraptor*; we'll call it a "whatever" for now,
>pending Holtz and Padian) scrambled up trees to get at bugs and flying
>lizards, with perfectly adapted wrists, and spawning the terrestrial
>lineage that kept that multi-task function of the hand, and later
>spawned birds, who adapted (okay, exapted) the wrist to fly. Birds are
>spawned by arboreal "whatevers", and terrestrial theropods arose from
>arboreal "whatevers".

Excuse me sir - do you own this theory? ;-)

>Thus birds were both ground-up and trees-down,
>but that's just one possible take on things.
>

I like that theory too, though I'm not sure I think the name
"ground up" is quite right for it !  I realise one of your "whatevers" came
out as arboreal when it probably should have been terrestrial , but the
question still remains, why did the whatevers take from Eoraptor to the
Tithonian before suddenly enlarging the hand?


JJ