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Re: late night thoughts: misunderstand what?

On Thu, 14 Jun 2007, don ohmes wrote:
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3). Why specialized? Why can't they hang out and eat whatever walks by? Why 'huge wounds', and 'retreat'? Why would you expect that? I always thought "jaws big enough to crush the neck", and "tall enough to reach it" was kind of hard to ignore as a possible outcome/workable strategy. Why risk attacking the body when you have a bite-size, crunchable 10m bundle of vital nerves and arteries/veins right in front of your nose? How much leverage do you have when you get a bulldog grip on any point of the distal 2/3 of a 10m neck, if you weigh over 4000kg? How much weight could you tie to a sauropods head before the neck buckled? Less than the weight of a tall large-jawed biped, I bet. (*T. rex* were _bite-and-hold_ predators from the looks of the teeth, BTW. Not pursuit-and-bite.) 

You're assuming the sauropod stands still.

"Sauropods don't run away, and staying to fight with a sauropod is ill-advised." --D Marjanovic.

4). Well if they don't run away, no need for pursuit. Why not fight a sauropod? What is ill-advised? Lot of food there. What's he going to do, sit on you? He might hurt you w/ a headbutt if you are really, really slow, but he would kill himself in the process, or knock himself out. 

You're being ridiculous.

Slap you with his tail? What happened to the perfectly spaced, ideal 

Yes. Such has been proposed. The large mass of a sauropod comes into play;
if an elephant wants to plow into you, are you capable of withstanding it?

forage trees that are the "parsimonious hypothesis" whenever acquisition of food by sauropods is the topic? Do such trees fold out of the way for a good tail swing? Ever try to swing a bullwhip, or a rope, in brush or trees?

Trees would probably fold if 20 to 40 tons of sauropod flesh and bone thrashed against it.

If he rears up and paws at you, so what? Time he has been forced by 

That's a lot of mass coming down on you.

feints and false charges to do that a few times, he will be too tired to 

Too tired? The evidence for that being...?

hold his head up, and that is if he doesn't pass out from lack of blood to the brain, as some hypothesize. What happens then? What is the 

If it can rear up this would not be a problem.

lifespan of a sauropod w/ his neck between the jaws of a TBJ? 5 seconds, or maybe 10? 

Your evidence for that?

Maybe on flat level ground, w/ no impeding vegetation, a sauropod could hold out for a while against a single attacker. Until it got tired. But defend itself against an ambush from a multi-ton mega-pitbull? In trees? Forget about it... 

The sauropod is multi ton itself. And from what I've read goes in a group.

5). Why even bother to fight a sauropod? Do you posit that sauropods kept 'banker's hours'? Elephants forage as much as 22h out of the day. If an elephant's brain was out on the end of his trunk, do you think lions would eat them as they foraged? Night and day foraging implies a visual compromise, and constant, slow, pre-occupied movement through fresh territory. Do you think foraging sauropods never bumped noses w/ a
TBJ big enough to engulf their entire head? Do you think sauropods could effectively monitor the area on either side of the proximal half of the neck while locating, picking, and ingesting that 'no-swallowing, steady-stream' of forage certain people hypothesize? If something w/ a 

Grazing animals animals today look around as they feed and being in a
group means extra eyes on lookout.

velocity of (x) charged the mid-point of the neck from the side, how fast would the sauropods head be traveling if it matched that speed to avoid the attack? Two times (x), right? Aren't there trees around him, by definition? Wouldn't he run his head into a tree? Have you ever tried to maneuver something 10m long through the woods? It is a 

Carrying something 10m long and a living thing 10m long are two quite
different things.

slow-to-impossible process, critically dependent on high variable local conditions, w/ much backing and turning and picking of routes. And that is just the neck. The whole body is much longer.

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