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Thursday, November 3, 2011

Dinosaurs Today's Dinosaur News

Posted by Mary Traverse on Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 2:40 PM

Have a hot dinosaur news tip? Send it to dinosaurs@thestranger.com

Those in the "birds are dinosaurs" camp will not be surprised at new evidence of migratory sauropods. A study of Camarasaurus teeth strongly suggests that the animals moved around seasonally:

Palaeontologists have long suspected that some dinosaurs migrated, but this is the first solid evidence of it, says Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum in London. Camarasaurus must have put a lot of pressure on food resources, so it makes sense that they moved around. Barrett suspects rarer sauropods such as Haplocanthosaurus didn't need to migrate.

And if the herbivores are migrating, the carnivores probably are as well:

When modern herbivores migrate, they are followed by predators, so the same may have happened in the Jurassic. The most common local predator was Allosaurus, a distant cousin of T. Rex. Fricke is trying to find out if they tracked Camarasaurus. It would make sense if they did: "A mass migration," says Barrett, "is basically a huge walking supermarket."

Comments (12) RSS

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I for one, stand with First Nations people of Canada in keeping our Hadrosaurs in Canada and away from spirit-hating American occupation forces.

Saber Toothed Squirrel for the win!

(now we know why dogs chase squirrels)

Posted by Will in Seattle

on November 3, 2011 at 2:53 PM

Thanks Mary. What kind of nuts was that squirrel eating, anyway? It must have preyed on something pretty freaking tough. Scientists proved that saber toothed cats
were adapted to puncturing the carotid artery on buffalo. Maybe they preyed on baby sauropods.

Posted by Vince on November 3, 2011 at 3:27 PM

Thanks for a nice science post that doesn't attract trolls (and not the fun kind from the Norwegian movie either).

Cool about the saber-toothed squirrel.

Posted by Simone on November 3, 2011 at 4:08 PM

Sauropods, for the most part, HAD to have been migratory. They filled more or less the role that elephants do today, and that means that they put a lot of strain on plant life wherever they went. It;s nice to see the isotopic data backing this up.
And it's not a saber-toothed squirrel; it's a saber-toothed early mammal only very distantly related to rodents.

Posted by venomlash on November 3, 2011 at 4:17 PM

It makes sense. Just because the organisms in the niche change, doesn't mean that the behavioral pressure that the niche imposes upon organisms necessarily changes; folllow the food is a constant. The urge to migrate is innate in many species, how to migrate successfully often has to be taught from parent to offspring. Birds, wildebeest, bison, dinosaurs, nature doesn't throw away genes, it just turns them on or off occasionally.

Posted by thatsnotright on November 3, 2011 at 5:21 PM

@5: ACTUALLY, migration among elephants and sauropods is likely to be homoplasious (the result of convergent evolution) rather than homologous (shared due to inheritance from a common ancestor). They are fairly distantly related, and migration is a fairly complex trait.
Genes are switched on and off (DNA methylation), but this is on the level of an individual organism, not a species.

Posted by venomlash on November 3, 2011 at 6:45 PM

It is not too weird. Ghostbusters 3 is coming out soon.

Posted by Simply Me on November 3, 2011 at 10:27 PM

@6, I get your point and understand convergent evolution, though am probably not as expert as you. Is it not true though that most organisms have far more genes in their chromosomes than are actually used? I have read that they are "legacies" of evolution and under certain cicumstances can, via mutation, become active in different ways, and if beneficial to the species as a whole are passed on as active. I find the subject fascinating and would like to know more.

Posted by thatsnotright on November 4, 2011 at 10:09 AM

@8: Many genes are suppressed or otherwise inactive, but can manifest a phenotype due to mutation or a change in the signal. This explains why whales occasionally grow small hindlimbs.
Pretty much every gene in an organism's genome is "used", even if it doesn't have any noticeable effect. Much of the genome is non-coding, but those regions are just gibberish and would not result in a coherent protein were they to be transcribed.

Posted by venomlash on November 4, 2011 at 10:21 AM