RWA3006
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Post by RWA3006 on Nov 12, 2020 20:46:48 GMT -5
I've had quite a few questions about what do coprolites look like in the field and how to identify them. I've noticed that many coprolites from fish, reptiles and most other carnivores are quite different from those of the sauropoda tribe I collect. The exteriors of the first group often appear very similar to their counterparts of today while the turds of many sauropods don't have much of a modern equivalent. My opinion is the closest thing we have today are elephants, rhinos, hippos and various bovines. These feces are typically bulky, coarse vegetation remnants deposited in random blobs. It's difficult to describe the appearance of them but a picture often says a thousand words. Here are some typical sauropod samples for comparison.
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RWA3006
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Post by RWA3006 on Nov 12, 2020 20:48:19 GMT -5
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RWA3006
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Post by RWA3006 on Nov 12, 2020 20:50:03 GMT -5
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RWA3006
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Post by RWA3006 on Nov 12, 2020 20:51:46 GMT -5
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RWA3006
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Post by RWA3006 on Nov 15, 2020 13:13:42 GMT -5
How about some coprolite spheres?
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RWA3006
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Post by RWA3006 on Nov 17, 2020 7:43:10 GMT -5
TURD TUESDAY
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RWA3006
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Post by RWA3006 on Nov 17, 2020 7:55:15 GMT -5
The above specimen has something cool going on. Who can identify it?
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RWA3006
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Post by RWA3006 on Nov 17, 2020 7:59:04 GMT -5
Here's a hint
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kyoti
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Post by kyoti on Nov 21, 2020 10:09:02 GMT -5
It looks like it ate a plant stalk or some pithy branch.
Your pictures in your earlier post look a bit like cow pies. Would that make them dino pies or sauro pies,do you think? The sphere pictures were super cool. Thanks for posting them.
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Post by 1dave on Nov 21, 2020 10:32:51 GMT -5
austhrutime.com/dinosaurs_digestive_tract.htmAustralia: The Land Where Time Began A biography of the Australian continent Dinosaurs - Digestive Trace Gastroliths, gizzard stones, have been found in the rib cage of a number of dinosaur groups, often in the form of piles of stones. In the absence of the geological conditions that could explain the presence of rounded stones many polished stones have been found in some dinosaur formations. The author1 suggests that many, and possibly all dinosaurs used gastroliths to grind their food. Among the theropod predators the digestive tracts tended to be relatively short and simple systems, as they had evolved to rapidly process the chunks of flesh that were easily digested. The flesh would have been bitten off by, as the author1 suggests, a simple scissors action of the jaws that contained serrated teeth, then bolted it in chunks as crocodilians do, as they had no teeth that had specialised for the crushing or grinding of their food, especially bone. Undigested bone is often found in large amounts in the coprolites that are believed to have been produced by large theropods, indicating that the food had passed rapidly along the digestive tract. Many gastroliths have also been found in association with some theropods that were herbivores, presumably to help break down the plant material. As with herbivorous birds, most of the sauropods weren't adapted to chew their plant food. The gizzard was the site were the food was broken down physically which the author1 suggests may have been used to stir up the food. Long, complex digestive tracts, housed in long rib cages, were required by the sauropods to ferment and breakdown chemically the leaves and twigs in their food. The titanosaurs took this system to the extreme with their broad bellies.Some prosauropods and therizinosaurs appear to have had cheeks. The author1 suggests that if they did indeed have cheeks it would have allowed them to pulp food before swallowing, the system that was fully exploited by the ornithischians that exploited this system fully. Food that had been cropped with their beak could be crushed by the dental batteries. According to this suggestion any food that lodged between the cheek and the teeth could be held in the cheek pouches until the tongue moved it back between the teeth by the tongue allowing it to be either chewed more or swallowed. The hadrosaurs, that had abdomens of moderate size, made most use of this system, evolving dental complexes further than any other dinosaur. The tooth complexes in some of the ornithischians had tooth complexes that were relatively weak, instead using massive digestive tracts and very large bellies to do the ferment and digest food. An enlargement of the intestines behind the pelvis of pachycephalosaurs was accommodated by the broadening of the tail base. Dense bundles of gastroliths were used by a few ornithischians to supplement the processing of plant material. The known evidence does not support the notion that herbivorous dinosaurs may have developed a ruminant-like system that involved cud-chewing. This system only works with medium-sized animals, so would not be suitable for the large dinosaurs.
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Post by 1dave on Nov 21, 2020 10:47:44 GMT -5
www.factmonster.com/dk/encyclopedia/science/digestive-systemsDK Science: Digestive Systems Carnivore’s serrated tooth Carnivore’s jaws for tearing Carnivore’s stomach Herbivore’s tooth Stomach stones Ornithopod’s stomach Features of a sauropod’s stomach Carnivorous and herbivorous dinosaurs are quite easy to tell apart. As well as the different types of jaws and teeth, their body shapes were distinct from one another because of the different digestive systems they needed to absorb their food. Carnivores had much simpler digestive systems than herbivores, and their hip bones were arranged differently. These two characteristics meant that the carnivorous theropods were two-legged, the herbivorous sauropods were four-legged, and the herbivorous ornithopods could move around on either their hind legs or on all fours. Carnivore’s serrated tooth The tooth of a carnivorous dinosaur such as Tyrannosaurus is shaped like a steak knife. It is narrow like a blade, for slicing through flesh. It is also pointed for making incisions in its prey. Its edges had dozens of little serrations, like a fine saw, to tear through tough meat and tendons. Carnivore teeth quickly wore out and were easily damaged, breaking off if the dinosaur chomped on bone. Inside a carnivore’s jaw, other teeth were constantly growing and replacing those teeth that were lost. Carnivore’s jaws for tearing A carnivore’s skull, like this one of an Allosaurus, was arranged so that it could work backwards and forwards. This movement allowed the rows of teeth to shear past each other, tearing the flesh of its prey between them. The teeth were curved back like barbs, so that anything held in its jaws would not stuggle out. The lightweight latticework of the skull and jaws meant that the sides of the mouth were able to move outwards. This widened the mouth so that the carnivore could swallow huge mouthfuls. Carnivore’s stomach There are very few fossils that actually show the insides of a dinosaur. However, the digestive system of a carnivore would have been quite simple and fairly small compared with the size of the animal. Meat does not have tough fibres, so it is easily digested, and a carnivorous dinosaur did not need the huge guts of a herbivore to process its food. Nearly all of the carnivore’s digestive system would have been carried in front of the pubis bone of the lizard-like hips. This compact arrangement would have allowed the dinosaur to move swiftly when chasing its prey. Herbivore’s tooth The different types of herbivore had different types of teeth, all of them unlike those of the carnivores. Some teeth, such as those of Iguanodon, were coarsely serrated like a vegetable grater for shredding plant material. These were slightly twisted and overlapping, and all tended to be the same size, unlike the jagged rows belonging to the carnivores. Other herbivores, especially the sauropods such as Diplodocus, had teeth that were arranged like the teeth of a garden rake. They used these for food-gathering, not for chewing. Stomach stones Sauropods spent all their time raking the leaves from trees and plants and swallowing them. They did not chew because their teeth were the wrong shape. So, to break down their food, the herbivores swallowed stones. These gathered in an area of the stomach called the gizzard, forming a grinding mill to mash up the plant material. Skeletons of sauropods are sometimes found with polished stones, or gastroliths. Today’s plant-eating birds, such as chickens, swallow grit for the same reason. Ornithopod’s stomach The digestive system of a two-footed ornithopod was much bigger than that of a carnivore – more like a sauropod’s. However, unlike in a sauropod, it was carried well back in the body and the pubis bone was swept back out of the way. This meant the centre of gravity of the animal was much nearer the hips and it could move about on its hind legs. It also lacked a gizzard. With its efficient chewing system, an ornithopod did not need stomach stones. Features of a sauropod’s stomach The digestive system of a sauropod such as this Brachiosaurus was much bigger than that of the carnivores. It needed a large gut to break down the fibres in the plant material it ate. A sauropod would also have had a gizzard, where stomach stones ground up the food before it was passed into the stomach. All this weight had to be carried in front of the pubis bone, and that is why most sauropods could not support themselves for long on just their back legs. Copyright © 2007 Dorling Kindersley To order this book direct from the publisher, visit DK's website.
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Post by 1dave on Nov 21, 2020 10:50:00 GMT -5
www.astrobio.net/origin-and-evolution-of-life/dinosaur-digestion/Dinosaur Digestion Categories: Origin and evolution of life By Astrobiology Magazine - Feb 8, 2008 Sauropod dinosaurs were herbivorous, and some reached sizes as large as ten full-grown elephants. Credit: UC Berkeley Scientists from the University of Bonn are researching which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago. They want to find out how the dinosaurs were able to become as large as they did. In actual fact such gigantic animals should not have existed. The study raises important questions about the links between the evolution of life and the environment of Earth. What was it about the planet 100 million years ago that allowed the dinosaurs to grow so big? The results of the research have now been published in the journal ‘Proceedings of the Royal Society B’. Take 200 milligrams of dried and ground equisetum, ten milliliters of digestive juice from sheep’s rumen, a few minerals, carbonate and water. Fill a big glass syringe with the mix, clamp this into a revolving drum and put the whole thing into an incubator, where the brew can rotate slowly. In this way you obtain the artificial ‘dinosaur rumen’. With this apparatus (also used as a ‘Menke gas production technique’ in assessing food for cows) Dr. Jürgen Hummel from the Bonn Institute of Animal Sciences (Bonner Institut für Tierwissenschaften) is investigating which plants giant dinosaurs could have lived off more than 100 million years ago, since this is one of the pieces which are still missing in the puzzle involving the largest land animals that ever walked the earth. The largest of these ‘sauropod dinosaurs’ with their 70 to 100 tons had a mass of ten full grown elephants or more than 1000 average humans. Larger than permitted How the dinosaurs could ever attain this size is something which scientists from Germany and Switzerland are investigating. The Bonn paleontologist, Professor Martin Sander, the coordinator of the research group ‘Biology of the Sauropod Dinosaurs: The Evolution of Gigantism’, says, ‘There is a law to which most animals living today conform. The larger an animal, the smaller the density of the population, i.e. the fewer animals of the same species there are per square kilometer.’ The larger an animal is, the larger the amount of food it has to have in order to survive. Therefore a specific area can only feed a certain maximum number of animals. This image shows the front view of a Diplodocus skull from the Chicago Field Museum. The Diplodocus was a giant sauropod dinosaurs. Credit: UC Berkeley, Photos © Richard Harwood, Black Hawk College At the same time there is a lower limit to the density of population. If this is undercut, the species dies out: ‘In this case diseases can rapidly wipe out the whole stock. Moreover, finding a mate becomes difficult,’ Martin Sander explains. An animal like the 100-tonne argentinosaurus should have normally not had this ‘minimum population density’, actually it should not have been able to exist. But there are hypotheses for this apparent paradox: for example the giant dinosaurs presumably had a metabolism that was lower than that of mammals. In this context it is unclear how nutritious the plants were that formed their diet. This question is being investigated by Dr. Jürgen Hummel in conjunction with Dr. Marcus Clauss from the University of Zurich. ‘We assume that the herbivorous dinosaurs must have had a kind of fermenter, similar to the rumen in cows today.’ Almost all existing herbivores digest their food by using bacteria in this way. The panda is the exception. Because the panda is not like this its digestion is inefficient. It stuffs bamboo leaves into its mouth all day long, in order to meet its energy needs, despite the fact that it does not move about much, thereby saving energy. Jürgen Hummel transforms glass syringes into simple fermenters, which he fills with bacteria from the sheep’s rumen. ‘These micro-organisms are very old from an evolutionary point of view; we can therefore assume that they also existed in the past,’ he explains. To the mix of bacteria he adds dried and ground food plants: grass, foliage or herbs which still form part of animals’ diet, and for comparison equisetum, Norfolk Island pine or ginkgo leaves, i.e. parts of plants which have been growing for more than 200 million years on earth. The gas formed during the fermentation process presses the plunger out of the syringes. Jürgen Hummel can therefore read the success of the fermentation process directly off their scales. This is measured according to a simple rule: the more gas is produced, the ‘higher the quality’ of the food. Equisetum is bad for the teeth This image shows a close-up view of the Diplodocus teeth (skull from the Chicago Field Museum). Credit: UC Berkeley, Photos © Richard Harwood, Black Hawk College These ‘old’ plants stand their ground surprisingly well compared to today’s flora. ‘The difference is not as great as might be expected,’ Jürgen Hummel emphasises. The bacteria digest ginkgo even better than foliage, but they seem to prefer equisetum most. With it gas production is even higher than with some grasses. Nevertheless, equisetum figures in the diet of comparatively few animals. The reason is that in addition to the toxins present in many modern species it wears down animals’ teeth too much. ‘Equisetum contains a lot of silicates,’ Jürgen Hummel says. ‘It acts like sand paper.’ However, many dinosaurs did not have any molars at all. They just pulled up their food and gulped it down. The mechanical break-up may have been carried out by a ‘gastric mill’. Similar to today’s birds, dinosaurs may have swallowed stones with which they ground the food to a paste with their muscular stomach. However, there are no clear indications of this in the fossil record.
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Post by 1dave on Nov 21, 2020 11:04:57 GMT -5
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/061220095421.htmDinosaurs: Stones Did Not Help With Digestion Date: December 21, 2006 Source: University of Bonn Summary: The giant dinosaurs had a problem. Many of them had narrow, pointed teeth, which were more suited to tearing off plants rather than chewing them. But how did they then grind their food? Until recently many researchers have assumed that they were helped by stones which they swallowed. In their muscular stomach these then acted as a kind of "gastric mill." But this assumption does not seem to be correct, as scientists at the universities of Bonn and Tübingen have now proved. Share: FULL STORY The giant dinosaurs had a problem. Many of them had narrow, pointed teeth, which were more suited to tearing off plants rather than chewing them. But how did they then grind their food? Until recently many researchers have assumed that they were helped by stones which they swallowed. In their muscular stomach these then acted as a kind of 'gastric mill'. But this assumption does not seem to be correct, as scientists at the universities of Bonn and Tübingen have now proved. Their research findings can be found in the current issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society (doi:10.1098/rspb.2006.3763). What do you do if you do not have good teeth, and food is hard to digest? Some herbivorous birds which have a toothless beak, such as ostriches, solve the problem with what is known as a gastric mill. Their muscular stomach is equipped with a layer of horn and contains stones which help to break up, crush and thereby also to digest food. Giant dinosaurs from the Jurassic and Cretaceous period (200 million to 65 million years ago) such as Seismosaurus and Cedarosaurus must have had similar digestive problems. The animals, some of which weighed more than 30 tonnes, were the largest herbivores which have ever existed. Many of them had a very small head, in relation to the size of their body, and narrow, pointed teeth, which were more suited to tearing off plants rather than chewing them. At the same time, they had to digest enormous amounts of food for their rapid growth and the metabolism of their gigantic bodies. Smoothly polished stones, which were found in several cases at excavations involving skeletons of sauropods, are also interpreted as gastric stones. However, Dr. Oliver Wings from the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Tübingen, and Dr. Martin Sander from the University of Bonn have shown that this cannot at least be a gastric mill such as birds, today's relatives of the dinosaurs possess. Among these the ostrich is the largest herbivore. For their investigations, the scientists therefore offered stones such as limestone, rose quartz and granite as food to ostriches on a German ostrich farm. After the ostriches had been slaughtered, the scientists investigated the gastric stones. It became clear that they wore out quickly in the muscular stomach and were not polished. On the contrary, the surface of the stones, which had been partly smooth, became rough in the stomachs during the experiments. The mass of the stones then corresponded on average to one per cent of the body mass of the birds. 'Whereas occasionally stones were found together with sauropod skeletons, we don't think they are remains of a gastric mill such as occurs in birds,' Dr. Sander comments. In that kind of gastric mill the stones would have been very worn and would not have a smoothly polished surface. Apart from that, gastric stones are not discovered regularly at sauropod sites. When present, their mass is, in relation to the body size, much less than with birds. 'In comparing these we extrapolate over four orders of magnitude, from an ostrich weighing 89 kilograms to a sauropod weighing 50,000 kilograms. This may seem a bit daring. However, within birds the range of body weight and corresponding masses of gastric stones also spans four orders of magnitude, from the 17 gram robin to the ostrich,' says Oliver Wings, who moved from Bonn University to Tübingen only recently. Yet what else were the dinosaurs' gastric stones used for? The researchers presume that they were accidentally eaten with their food or could have been swallowed on purpose to improve the intake of minerals. But if the stones did not help to crush vegetable food, the sauropods' digestive system must have used other methods, since the decomposition of large amounts of material which is difficult to digest requires the assistance of bacteria in the digestive system. The smaller the pieces are, the better they can break down the food. Possibly, the scientists conclude, the intestines of the sauropods were formed in such a way that the food was retained there for a very long time, in order to improve the digestive process. There is another group of dinosaurs, however, whose remains of gastric stones can be linked up with a birdlike gastric mill, according to Oliver Wings' research. From these dinosaurs known as theropods today's birds developed. The gastric mill could therefore have developed in the ancestral line of birds. Story Source: Materials provided by University of Bonn. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Cite This Page: University of Bonn. "Dinosaurs: Stones Did Not Help With Digestion." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 21 December 2006. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/061220095421.htm>.
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Post by 1dave on Nov 21, 2020 11:08:46 GMT -5
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RWA3006
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Post by RWA3006 on Nov 21, 2020 23:06:31 GMT -5
Lots of fun thought provoking information there, 1daveI notice some of it appears mutually exclusive, especially the claim from the folks at the University of Bonn that hadrosaurs did not utilize gastroliths. I wonder how they would dismiss the fact that I have literally tons of coprolites with plenty of stones lodged on the inside of them in such a fashion that it's obvious they were excreted with the poo? They also commented that the gastroliths from modern ostriches were jagged and thus inferred the smooth gastroliths we find in hadrosaur coprolites must not be actual gastroliths. Maybe, but when I was a kid growing up on a ranch we saved the gizzards of our game birds for table fare and I can say from personal experience the gizzard stones in the gizzards I cleaned were what I would define as mostly ambiguous in texture. Most of the hobby tumblers here at RTH know very well the different rates of grinding due to the variety of size of batches and/or stones. They could probably teach the Bonn scientists a thing or two about the dynamics of stone tumbling that would transfer to the wear of gizzard stones. I really wonder how many hadrosaur coprolites these folks have actually sawn open and handled. I've handled many tons of the stuff through the years and my observations do not jive with the Bonn gentlemen but I'm open minded enough to consider that they might be right.
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Post by 1dave on Nov 21, 2020 23:14:46 GMT -5
Lots of fun thought provoking information there, 1daveI notice some of it appears mutually exclusive, especially the claim from the folks at the University of Bonn that hadrosaurs did not utilize gastroliths. I wonder how they would dismiss the fact that I have literally tons of coprolites with plenty of stones lodged on the inside of them in such a fashion that it's obvious they were excreted with the poo? They also commented that the gastroliths from modern ostriches were jagged and thus inferred the smooth gastroliths we find in hadrosaur coprolites must not be actual gastroliths. Maybe, but when I was a kid growing up on a ranch we saved the gizzards of our game birds for table fare and I can say from personal experience the gizzard stones in the gizzards I cleaned were what I would define as mostly ambiguous in texture. Most of the hobby tumblers here at RTH know very well the different rates of grinding due to the variety of size of batches and/or stones. They could probably teach the Bonn scientists a thing or two about the dynamics of stone tumbling that would transfer to the wear of gizzard stones. I really wonder how many hadrosaur coprolites these folks have actually sawn open and handled. I've handled many tons of the stuff through the years and my observations do not jive with the Bonn gentlemen but I'm open minded enough to consider that they might be right. In my opinion there are scientists with facts and scientists without facts. THEY need your help!
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Post by jasoninsd on Nov 21, 2020 23:40:54 GMT -5
Lots of fun thought provoking information there, 1dave I notice some of it appears mutually exclusive, especially the claim from the folks at the University of Bonn that hadrosaurs did not utilize gastroliths. I wonder how they would dismiss the fact that I have literally tons of coprolites with plenty of stones lodged on the inside of them in such a fashion that it's obvious they were excreted with the poo? They also commented that the gastroliths from modern ostriches were jagged and thus inferred the smooth gastroliths we find in hadrosaur coprolites must not be actual gastroliths. Maybe, but when I was a kid growing up on a ranch we saved the gizzards of our game birds for table fare and I can say from personal experience the gizzard stones in the gizzards I cleaned were what I would define as mostly ambiguous in texture. Most of the hobby tumblers here at RTH know very well the different rates of grinding due to the variety of size of batches and/or stones. They could probably teach the Bonn scientists a thing or two about the dynamics of stone tumbling that would transfer to the wear of gizzard stones. I really wonder how many hadrosaur coprolites these folks have actually sawn open and handled. I've handled many tons of the stuff through the years and my observations do not jive with the Bonn gentlemen but I'm open minded enough to consider that they might be right. In my opinion there are scientists with facts and scientists without facts. THEY need your help! So in layman's terms, a lot of scientists are in the know, while others don't know crap!!!
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RWA3006
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Post by RWA3006 on Nov 22, 2020 1:23:04 GMT -5
Jason, that's the funniest thing I've heard all day! It might be true, I don't know. What I do know is I've harvested, handled, and cut so much of this stuff that I have opinions. I try to be open minded, but I do have an extensive college education in the earth sciences and have been fairly diligent to keep up with science all my life so when something doesn't smell right (corny pun) I reserve the right to be skeptical.
A few years ago I was involved in selling 24 tons of coprolite to a single customer and I'm sitting on "only" 11 tons of it at the moment. It's possible I might have seen something the Bonn folks haven't. Regardless I certainly recognize that our knowledge has only scratched the surface and many of my ideas and opinions could be changed in a day. I'm careful not to get invested in opinions because the truth will always be the truth no matter what I think. The key is to enjoy the thought provoking marvels of what might have been happening those many eons ago.
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kyoti
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Post by kyoti on Nov 22, 2020 8:29:05 GMT -5
Something the scientists may also not have thought about is weathering and material. A softer stone will get roughed up much easier than something quartzy that a dino scooped up. The stone and skeleton may also have been exposed to wind and sand smoothing prior to being buried and fossilized. One odd thing that caught my eye in Dave's post was the picture of the hadrosaur pelvis. It occurred to me that perhaps these animals didn't walk bipedal or 4 footed but instead hop walked like rabbits and kangaroos? The way their and un-even legs look and the general posture looks a lot like how those mammals do rather than say a duck or goose. What do you all think?
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Post by 1dave on Nov 22, 2020 8:59:08 GMT -5
Something the scientists may also not have thought about is weathering and material. A softer stone will get roughed up much easier than something quartzy that a dino scooped up. The stone and skeleton may also have been exposed to wind and sand smoothing prior to being buried and fossilized. One odd thing that caught my eye in Dave's post was the picture of the hadrosaur pelvis. It occurred to me that perhaps these animals didn't walk bipedal or 4 footed but instead hop walked like rabbits and kangaroos? The way their and un-even legs look and the general posture looks a lot like how those mammals do rather than say a duck or goose. What do you all think? YES! Just what rocks did the discerning gourmet dinosaur choose to dine on with their pea sized brains?
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