RE: Resources, energetics and dinosaur maximal size

[Jaime Headden <qi_leong@hotmail.com>]

David Marjanovic wrote:



  David, sauropods did not chew, but they also didn't lack for oral processing, 
either (and McNab doesn't seem to say sauropods "chewed". To say otherwise is 
to pretend that their heads were just the input for an enormous prehistoric 
Hoover. While that idea is both entertaining and has been contemplated 
(especially in connection with *Nigersaurus*), it is rather at the end of the 
"diningenuous" argument of a parable spectrum for describing what sauropods 
_did_.

  Especially with complex jaw structure in *Shunosaurus*, dental wear regimes 
that differ among eusauropods with dramatically distinct dental arcades, and 
with the strange and bizarre and still complexly arrayed palatal vaults and 
patterns in "sauropods" from *Melanorosaurus* to *Nemegtosaurus*, oral 
processing is in fact a given, and this would alter the way and the speed of 
food intake at the first level, instead of just "open mouth, insert tree branch 
down throat."

Reading the abstract, the word "chew" is not applied or (it seems) implied in 
the abstract. The line "If the food intake of the largest herbivorous mammals 
defines the
maximal rate at which plant resources can be consumed in terrestrial
environments" can only be expressed using oral mastication (rather than any 
other form of processing) of plant matter, I'll take back my comments and post 
an apology.

Cheers,

Jaime A. Headden

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