RE: Dinosaurs, Size, and Land Area

[HPB1956@aol.com]

Thomas Holtz wrote on 04/12/2001:

> ... those authors observed that gestation period scales with body size
> in placental mammals, so that the largest mammals have multi-year 
> gestation periods: a major stress on the individual mothers, and a
>  very low rate of replacement.
> In contrast, dinosaurs (as egg-layers) had egg clutch sizes and rates
> of replacement which were essentially mass-independant, and thus
> would not face the same constraints to evolving and sustaining 
> immense body size.

As Gregory Paul wote in Dinosaur Eggs and Babies: 
"Dinosaur populations may have consisted mostly of posthatchling juveniles ..." 
"Low population levels of adult dinosaurs enabled individual adults to consume relatively large portions of the available resource base, thereby becoming larger than mammals." 

This may have been the reason why dinosaurs were better suited to reach bio-physiological limits regarding size than mammals.

The sky is the limit for dinosaurs, wherever that may be. So I think that we will see bigger dinosaurs of new genera and individuals of known genera, surpassing currently supposed theoretical limits.

Cheers


Heinz Peter Bredow