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Re: Drinker and Oryctodromeus (was Re: Dinosaurs burrowed to keep warm)



Echidnas etc. have flexible spines (quills) which are not fixed. (They can only go one way through a small burrow too and must have a chamber to turn around. ) Feathers might have been slightly more forgiving but oww! Certainly animals with large bony protuberances that stick out like anchors with solid attachment points didn't make a habit of living down a burrow. If so the burrow must have been much bigger than the dino. The more ancient analogue I fall back on is trilobites. The spiny ones were planktonic, the smooth ones were diggers (mostly).

Frank (Rooster) Bliss
MS Biostratigraphy
Weston, Wyoming
www.wyomingdinosaurs.com


On Mar 22, 2007, at 8:15 PM, Choo, Brian wrote:

Speculation aside, don't count on too many spiny dinosaurs being
burrowers.  Spines usually only go one way into a hole and backing
out isn't very easy.

Having pointy bits hasn't discouraged present day echidnas, hedgehogs
and porcupines from going underground...

All this talk of tunnelling ornithopods also may shed light on another
aspect of the polar Victorian sites. In addition to the
ossified-tendonless Leaellynasaur tails, infilled Cretaceous burrows are
not uncommon in both the Otways and Strzeleckis. The majority are
probably of decapod origin (occasionally complete with fossil crayfish)
but some of them (untouched in the field) are really big - over a foot
across. Makes you wonder what we might find at the bottom of them.


Brian Choo

website = www.geocities.com/ozraptor4
livejournal = http://www.livejournal.com/users/ozraptor4/


-----Original Message----- From: owner-DINOSAUR@usc.edu [mailto:owner-DINOSAUR@usc.edu] On Behalf Of franklin e. bliss Sent: Friday, 23 March 2007 9:23 AM To: dinosaur@usc.edu Subject: Re: Drinker and Oryctodromeus (was Re: Dinosaurs burrowed to keep warm)

Delurking for a moment.

Speculation aside, don't count on too many spiny dinosaurs being
burrowers.  Spines usually only go one way into a hole and backing
out isn't very easy.  No reverse gear is a bad thing. Thumb spikes,
large claws and heavy forearms would have been handy "gardening"
tools however. Regarding burrow raiders, build a niche, and they will
come but then, the home owners invented the "back door".

Field season is starting on the high plains of Wyoming/Montana.  A
couple dozen misc. loose teeth came out the other day from a HC
microsite in less than an hour. Now I am looking for that elusive
burrowing Pachycephalosaur :>

Frank (Rooster) Bliss
MS Biostratigraphy
Weston, Wyoming
www.wyomingdinosaurs.com
On Mar 22, 2007, at 2:21 PM, Jura wrote:

--- Tommy Bradley <htomsirveaux@hotmail.com> wrote:

As long as we're speculating, perhaps the very
large
forearms and "hands" of deinocheires and some
others
were used for digging up small burrowers.

The tyrannosaurs could follow the diggers around
and
scavenge the remains.

Glen Ledingham

That's a good notion. This thread has really opened up the speculation floodgates! I'm starting to think that maybe *Deinocheirus* could've been a "Dino-burrow-digger-outer" specialist. Is it possible that some Dinosaurs specialized in this way?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Personally, I think that this idea is a better
scenario for _Deinocheirus_ than the previous thoughts
of it being a termite eater. It's hard to imagine a
multi-tonne animal living off of termites, without
wiping out an entire colony everytime it got hungry.

Well, maybe if there were some nasty big termites back
then.

Hmm, if only the graboids from Tremors were real. Then
we might speculate that _Deinocheirus_ was actually a
giant worm hunter. :)

Jason

"I am impressed by the fact that we know less about many modern
[reptile] types than we do of many fossil groups." - Alfred S. Romer




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