RE: Warm-Blooded debate

[brucet@mindspring.com (bruce thompson)]

<snippage>
>     I personally do not see any evidence that dinosaurs were ectothermic.
>
>Caleb

        There exists a scholarly monograph from about 15 years ago called
_A Cold Look at the Warm-Blooded Dinosaur_  or something like that.  I
never read it; could anyone supply the author(s)?
        I don't see why it is such a stretch for dinosaurs to have been
ectothermic.  As evidenced by palm tree fossils near the Arctic Circle in
Alaska, the earth was much balmier then.  Under such conditions ectotherms
could have powered up much more cheaply than they can now, and could have
been as active as we now suppose them to be.  (Though I don't believe in
the further-out stuff, like trotting sauropods and galloping ceratopsians.)
Some dinosaurs did have sails similar to the pelycosaur Dimetrodon--why
should those sails have been used for any different purpose?

bruce



        "Dammit, Philbert; what kind of a lepidopterist are you?  For god's 
sake,
man; stand up to them!"