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Just a few things to think about.
About a year ago there was a discussion here about the
possibility of a wading _Caudipteryx_. T. Mike Keesey suggested that
_Caudipteryx_ may have behaved the same way as a creature in Dixon's _The New
Dinosaurs_ (which "must be based on some real animal") which used its
wings to create shade to which the fish were attracted. The real animal,
as all who saw the last episode of _The Life of Birds_ know, is the black
heron. Jaime A. Headden said that one slight problem with the
_Caudipteryx_ wading scenario is the shortness of the neck, and yet to me the
neck of the black heron seemed only as long as that of _Caudipteryx_.
However, the thing that struck me most was the length of the arms. They
look much longer than _Caudipteryx_'s. But if _C._'s arm *feathers* were
long enough and fanned out the right way, they could fulfill the same
purpose. Are the feathers like this?
Speaking of Dixon's alternative realities, there's one
creature in _New Dinos_ called a "Whulk". It's basically a huge,
open ocean, plankton-eating pliosaur analogous to modern baleen whales.
Could something like this have existed in the Mesozoic?
See ya.
-Grant
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Grant Harding High school student/amateur paleontologist granth@cyberus.ca Visit Grant Harding's Dinosaur Destination at http://www.cyberus.ca/~sharding/grant/ "There's no such thing as a fish!" |