RE: "Dinosaurs: Return To Life? "

[Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>]

evelyn sobielski writes:
 > > I was very interested to see the tail vertebrae in
 > > the chicken. While, obviously, there is much more to
 > > this reverse engineering idea than was revealed, it
 > > was good to see that the material is already there,
 > > genetically, and anatomically. It just needs to be
 > > manipulated to appear once more in a living
 > > specimen. Not impossible, but highly in-depth.
 > 
 > "Not impossible" in a theoretical way maybe. In real
 > life, the air-sac system is about as impossible to
 > revert as it gets. The entire trunk anatomy would need
 > to be rebuilt.

Why would you want to do awat with the air-sac system?  It's well
established that both theropods and sauropods had this, so it's most
likely primitive for Saurischia.  (And not impossible that
ornithischians also had avian-style flow-through respiration but that,
for some reason, their diverticula never induced skeletal
pneumaticity.)

 _/|_    ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor    <mike@indexdata.com>    http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "Operas are all the same really.  Boy meets girl boy dumps
         old girlfriend new girlfriend dumps boy boy goes back to old
         girlfriend optional repeat one girl dies.  Easy" -- Steve
         Austwick.