Re: Cursorial adaptations (was T.rex and elephants)

[The Armadillo with the Mask <armadilo@daft.com>]

On Sun, 5 Oct 1997, Chris Campbell wrote:

> Jonathon Woolf wrote:
> > 
> > Chris Campbell wrote:

[And even more of a snip]
> > 
> > have the openings in locations that make them look sort of like
> > eye-holes in a mask.  In THE HORNED DINOSAURS, Peter Dodson sketches
> > complete _Triceratops_ heads and frills with a multicolor scheme that
> > places mock-eyes on the skin over the holes, so that when the head drops
> > and the whole frill is facing forward, it looks like a very large face.

Hmmm...interesting, I would have thought that the holes might be something 
like a weight/masss reduction thing more than a display feature. If you've 
got a big crest hanging off your head and need to use your neck to move
all that weight around, wouldn't you want it to be as light as possible
so you could move it around as quick as possible to either A. catch the
attention of that cute little horribilis that just trotted by or B. to 
able to quickly deflect blows from competing males or predators?
(If you can't move your head fast enough, you might not get a chance to
use your frill for flirting...)

I don't have my books in front of me so i can't go look this up, but
what does the fossil record say about hole size growth vs. frill size
growth? Where do the holes first start appearing? What research(if any)
has been done to look into how much weight your average large-frilled
ceratopian's neck could hold up?

Sorry if this has been covered/asked already, I'm just catching up from
about a 2-week backlog here....

----Steve