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Re: mating in water?



Characteristic of internet mailing lists.

Much of the study of dinosaurs does involve fine points of anatomy and slightly vague research findings, and these things are often points of great controversy. Atleast on this list people confine themselves to explaining in great detail, using polite scientific language, why it's merely what you said that's completely worthless.

I had to find out if manatees are really ever found on land. Apparently they were once, though the point of controversy below is whether modern manatees are confined to water or merely (mate there because they?) spend most of their time there, and I think that most likely what manatees do was never the primary point.

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/manatee/AdaptationsEvol.html

Of course, now, I've not seen a poll done of manatees to see if they've ever been out of the water, LOL. (Now you know it's Labor Day weekend - only halfway through Friday my mailbox was already stuffed.) I actually can't find any web site that states any scientific view on the subject in clear grammatical English. Two web sites entirely devoted to manatees never address the question. They could come out of the water once, but if they can crawl overland when necessary now, like a catfish, we aren't told.

Now to get back to something boring, like transcribing the County Westmeath 1820's tax census, or (yech) searching for a job.

Yours,
Dora Smith
Austin, TX
tiggernut24@yahoo.com

----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard W. Travsky" <rtravsky@uwyo.edu>
To: <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Friday, September 04, 2009 3:52 PM
Subject: Re: mating in water?



On Wed, 2 Sep 2009, Jura wrote:
I'm always amazed at the ability of DMLers to pick out the most inconsequential piece of information from a post, and make a big deal out of it.

It's a living analogue of sorta and fair game. Also slow news day.

--- On Wed, 9/2/09, Richard W. Travsky <rtravsky@uwyo.edu> wrote:
From: Richard W. Travsky <rtravsky@uwyo.edu>
Subject: Re: mating in water?
To: dinosaur@usc.edu
Date: Wednesday, September 2, 2009, 9:56 AM

On Tue, 1 Sep 2009, Jura wrote:

Crocodylians, hippos (probably. Can't say for sure),
manatees.

I can't say for certain if any of these animals are
specifically taking advantage of the buoyancy of water, or
if they just "do it" there because it is where they spend
most of their time.

Manatees are fully aquatic. Never read of them coming on
land.