Re: Many questions

["Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>]

<Hi!
 
I have MANY short questions about diverse dinos and I tried to put
them all in the same post. Here they are.

...

3) Are there books about evolution of birds giving statistics about
genera and species (specimens, lenght, epoch, place, etymology,
etc...)? And about other aspects of paleontology (excluding dinosaurs)?>

  The closest I can think of is Feduccia, 1993, _The Origin and
Evolution of Birds_. It gives some info on the topics you requested,
though not all. However, most bird taxa, especially ancient ones, are
pretty straitforward with their etymologies: -ornis this and -pteryx
that, with names, places, and things as the preffix. Using a
dictionary and encyclopedia will probably get you a lont of what you
need to know.

  It's not a book, but Jeff Poling and Ben Creisler's pages on avian
etymology also include general places found, including ages, and
nowadays, many of the new dinobooks are coming out with short sections
on ancient birds, including place, time, etc.

  That URL is:

http://www.dinosauria.com/dml/names/aves.html

<6) What are the records in paleontlogy (number of publications,
number of discoveries, number of new species described, lenght of
career, number of expecitions, number of meetings, etc...)?>

  You'll find the whole list of dinosaur taxa (valid and invalid) at
Dinogeorge's site, updated frequently. Another list shows all the
dinosaur taxa that have been named by month since the last year or so,
and that's Mike Keesey's.

  Here's the URLs:

  For Dinogeorge:
http://members.aol.com/dinogeorge/index.html

  For Mike Keesey:
http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~tkeese1/dinosaur/index.htm

<12) May we discover giant dinosaurs (exept sauropods; I mean a 15
meters long ceratopsian, or a 10 meters high segnosaur, or a 20 meters
long tenontosaur)?>

  I can't vouch for 50-foot ceratopsians, or the tenontosaur, though
no ornithschian is known to achieve more than 51 feet (and that's only
15.6 meters) and that's pushing things, if you've ever seen
*Shantungosaurus*. It's possible, however.

  I can tell you, though that a 10-meter tall segnosaur
(therizinosauroid) is not altogether "may we?" If *Therizinosaurus*
proves to have the same body plan or is the same type of dinosaur and
*Segnosaurus*, than we can postulate a length of about 40 feet or so
(which is 12.2 meters). This is based on a long-tail/short-neck and
long-neck/short-tail set of characters, and even the
long-neck/long-tail idea would work, and increase that length.
However, removing the tail, you have an animal with a long neck of
about 30 feet, or roughly 9 meters, and sitting that animal down on
it's rear with the body positioned upright, which is physiologically
possible based on the spinal column of *Nanshiungosaurus*, then the
animal sits roughly 9 meters tall. That's close.
  I think you meant that the animal was that tall just _standing_
there, body horizontal, but sitting vertically (not to rule out it
could lay down horizontally like any other sane-minded animal) it
would acheive that height, if just closely.

  Jaime A. Headden
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