Re: any Dino-skunks?

[Pedro Colman-Arrellaga <hissatsu@cris.com>]

On Tue, 03 Jul 2001 10:33:08 CDT, "Demetrios M. Vital"
<vita0015@umn.edu> wrote:


>>       Biologists can fairly easily tell a monarch from a viceroy
>butterfly,
>> and even a therizinosaur from an ornithomime, but if viceroys can fool
>> modern birds into thinking they are monarchs, then I think therizinosaurs
>or
>> ornithomimes could also have developed mimicry that would have fooled
>their
>> predators, at least part of the time.
>
>Viceroys have been found to share similar taste defences as monarchs.  This
>means that they aren't outright mimicking monarchs, rather they are
>possibly exhibiting those traits as a result of parallel evolution boecause
>both animals are poisonous in similar ways.  So, recently, the butterflies
>were found to not be a case of mimicry.

Not quite. It would then be Mullerian mimicry - several
poisonous/dangerous species sharing a similar warning pattern, instead
of Batesian mimicry - harmless species imitating the warning pattern of
a poisonous/dangerous species.

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Rev. Pedro Colman-Arréllaga | Believing is easier than thinking. Hence
hissatsu@cris.com           | so many more believers than thinkers.
hissatsu@concentric.net     | - Bruce Calvert
----------------------------|
                            | Do I contradict myself?
"The Typhoid Mary of        | Very well then, I contradict myself,
the shipping business"      | (I am large, I contain multitudes).
                            | - Walt Whitman
----------------------------------------------------------------------