RE: Dino coloration and more...

[Jeffrey Martz <martz@holly.ColoState.EDU>]

Wayne Anderson wrote:

>         Let's face it -- there simply wasn't a survival imperative requiring
> the dinos to develop intelligence and humanoid bodies. They never evolved
> because they didn't need to -- they were already masters of the world.
 
   If your reasoning holds true, then we should never see an sort of 
new designs in dinosaurs after they established themselves by the 
Jurassic, or new types of mammal designs after they established 
themselves in the Paleocene.  It is like looking at theropods up to the 
early Cretaceous and saying that no theropod ever has a reason to reduce 
its number of fingers to two or less, or looking at ornithiscians at the same 
time and saying there was never any reason to evolve frills.  A 
particular sort of adaptation requires the right combination 
of existing genotype and phenotype, chance mutations, and environmental 
circumstance.  Just because a morphology nver appeared before doesn't 
mean that it couldn't. 
     Mammals were already the masters of the world when humans 
came along.  For whatever reason, our design just happened to be advantageous, 
either because those environmental circumstances had never existed 
before, or we simply ran across a new and unique way of adapting to them.
      I think a valid criticism or defense of the dinosauroid depends 
more on how congenial the theropod body plan is to developing such 
humanlike traits, not the success of the dinosaurs as a whole.

LN Jeff
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