Fw: And now for a little ego-boost... National Geographic online

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> Brad, I can't read your postings :P

That's because they don't have line breaks and therefore get the "truncated" 
message attached. (Hotmail even actively removes the line breaks in the 
quoted material!) Here is the latest one, with line breaks:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brad McFeeters" <archosauromorph2@hotmail.com>
To: <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2007 7:42 PM
Subject: RE: And now for a little ego-boost... National Geographic online

> The *Ceratosaurus* in that scene might be seen not so much as dragging its 
> tail, but merely standing in a tripodal posture- maybe it wants to appear 
> more threatening to the *Stegosaurus*, or maybe it's raising its front end 
> away from the advancing plates.  It's a painting of a fight encounter, not 
> of dinosaurs walking.  Rather than looking at the trackways, why not look 
> at the skeleton to see if basal theropods were capable of even standing 
> tripodally?  Has there been a study on this?  Sauropodomorphs are still 
> often depicted in that pose, so it wouldn't be too surprising if it was 
> also possible in other saurisichians.  The ceratosaur's hips and knees do 
> look pretty badly disarticulated, though, and I don't know why Knight 
> didn't know better about that.
>
> > Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:11:15 -0500> From: Danvarner@aol.com> Subject: 
> > Re: And now for a little ego-boost... National Geographic online
> To: dinosaur@usc.edu>
> Charles R. Knight's dinosaur images have been beaten-up for over thirty > 
> years now. We got the message. Yes, his dinosaurs sometimes dragged their 
> tails,
> and, yes, some of them were depicted living up to their armpits in swamps,
> and, yes, they weren't painted in bubblicious colors. The Geographic
> illustrations were painted in 1939 in the context of their time. Now, can 
> we move on
> without repeating this hackneyed storyline without end? DV