Re: Ain't No Mountain Low Enough [elephants don't like steep terrain]

["franklin e. bliss" <frank@blissnet.com>]

Interesting about elephants.  I have noticed also that most humans  
that try to follow me around on my walks avoid hills over 43  
degrees.  There are some however that are inclined to prefer greater  
slope.


The Cretaceous Hell Creek I collect was deposited on a fairly flat  
surface.  Is/are there any formations that preserve dinosaurs/fossils  
in general that were obviously high angle environments on a large  
scale.  I would think that most depositional environments in a  
mountainous situation short of certain alluvial fan deposits would  
not be conducive for preservation.  I would think representative  
species from high altitude would be pretty uncommon because of this  
bias. What is in the record?

Frank Bliss
MS Biostratigraphy
Weston, Wyoming



47.57656% of all statistics are made up.





On Jul 25, 2006, at 8:40 PM, Dann Pigdon wrote:

> This might have had implications for sauropods as well:
>
> --
>
> Ain't No Mountain Low Enough
> By Briahna Gray
> ScienceNOW Daily News
> 25 July 2006
>
> In his attempt to conquer the western world in 218 B.C.E.,  
> Carthaginian general Hannibal famously lost all but one of his  
> elephants while crossing the Alps. A new study may explain why:  
> Elephants just don't dig climbing.
>
> It may not be much of a surprise that elephants aren't  
> mountaineers. They weigh an average of 5000 kilograms, after all.  
> And anecdotal evidence suggests that the pachyderms avoid hills  
> when they migrate. So Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a geologist and chief  
> executive of the Save the Elephants charity based in Nairobi,  
> Kenya, decided to spy on a group of elephants in Northern Kenya.  
> Over 2 years, Douglas-Hamilton and colleagues tracked 60 elephants  
> with global positioning technology.
>
> By plotting the routes on topographical maps, they learned that the  
> pachyderms consistently avoided all slopes with inclines over 43  
> degrees...
>
> More here:
> http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/725/2
>
>
> --
> ___________________________________________________________________
>
> Dann Pigdon
> GIS / Archaeologist         http://heretichides.soffiles.com
> Melbourne, Australia        http://www.geocities.com/dannsdinosaurs
> ___________________________________________________________________