Re: RE: Warm Blooded vs. Cold Blooded

[ornstn@inforamp.net (Ronald Orenstein)]

>Give me time, I could come up with more. The point is that the metabolic
>requirements of sauropods can not be known and drawing simple correlations
>between two dimentions. You may be able to describe some possible
>perameters, but you can not be so emphatic in your conclusions.
>
>Cheers, Paul

This, I think, should be generalized further.  Many dinosaurs are so unlike
any living creature that to assume that the suite of adaptations they
possessed in areas that cannot be determined by fossil evidence is bounded
by that of living animals is simply not justifiable.  I am sure that
sauropods and others must have had adaptive mechanisms so distinctive that
it would be sheer blind luck if they occurred to us.  The degree of
certainty some posters here seem to have about what these creatures  should,
or should not, have done should be tempered with a little humility in the
face of the complexity of nature, the vastness of time, the incompleteness
of the evidence and our general inability to understand everything that is
going on with the creatures that are alive today right in front of us.
--
Ronald I. Orenstein                           Phone: (905) 820-7886 (home)
International Wildlife Coalition              Fax/Modem: (905) 569-0116 (home)
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