Dinosaur Questions

i thought we needed a thread that talked about dinosaurs and ppl can pose questions in hopes of getting answers..

have scientist come to a conclusion that dinosaurs were warm blooded?

also i was watching star wars attack of the clones and in the clone army planet factory...

i saw a giant reptilian alien pterodactyl fly in the middle of a storm..

got me thinking did the pterodactyl use updraft to fly and could he fly in a storm?

also did the pterodactyl have proto feathers or was any recent fossils show a flight dino with proto feathers?

also when was the last final dino extinction?

Originally posted by King Castle
have scientist come to a conclusion that dinosaurs were warm blooded?

It's still somewhat in dispute. We don't exactly have a living dinosaur to look at, conclusions about them being warm-blooded or cold-blooded are very much indirect.

Originally posted by King Castle
got me thinking did the pterodactyl use updraft to fly and could he fly in a storm?

There's no way to know if they regularly flew in storms. As of 2008 it wasn't totally clear how they flew at all.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026763.800-albatross-study-suggests-pterosaurs-were-too-big-to-fly.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3352699/Pterodactyls-were-too-heavy-to-fly-scientist-claims.html

Originally posted by King Castle
also when was the last final dino extinction?

65 million years ago. But I was into dinosaurs when I was a really little kid, so it's probably closer to 66 million years ago now.

sounds to me a pterodactyl should be more afraid of me eating him then vice versa..

new question...

do we know what was the last surviving dino to die out?

pls no gator or alligator reference..

i really like to know the final legitimate dino to be considered the last one to die out..

Originally posted by King Castle

have scientist come to a conclusion that dinosaurs were warm blooded?

In The Greatest Show on Earth Richard Dawkins says that dinosaurs weren't even reptiles; that they were their own class and only somewhat related to true reptiles. He says dinosaurs, crocodiles and birds are totally seperate and not very closely related to lizards, snakes and turtles.

About being warm-blooded, he argues that some were and some weren't. That the two-legged predators were, but not the larger four-legged grazing ones. And they can tell from looking at the structure of the bone marrow. Also since birds are warm-blooded, scientists assume that the Therapods (two-legged) must have been too.

Dinosaurs' skulls change so drastically over time that they appear to be different species during different phases of life.

Edit:

In The Greatest Show on Earth Richard Dawkins says that dinosaurs weren't even reptiles; that they were their own class and only somewhat related to true reptiles. He says dinosaurs, crocodiles and birds are totally seperate and not very closely related to lizards, snakes and turtles.

Originally posted by Zampanó
Dinosaurs' skulls change so drastically over time that they appear to be different species during different phases of life

Originally posted by King Castle
i really like to know the final legitimate dino to be considered the last one to die out..

Originally posted by King Castle
i thought we needed a thread that talked about dinosaurs and ppl can pose questions in hopes of getting answers..

The thing about cold blood and warm blood is that the terms are missleading, what should be used in consideration here is wheather metabolic heat is used as a primary mean to maintain body temperature stable. Tehre are several ways to achieve this and even some fishes and plants use metabolic heat to warm up parts of their bodies for specific functions.

Originally posted by Mindship
You mean like a "I Am Legend" dino?

Spoilers!! durhulk

Originally posted by Zampanó
Dinosaurs' skulls change so drastically over time that they appear to be different species during different phases of life.

Edit:

Your emphasis on the "true" in "true reptiles" indicates that you have not understood him. When he says "true reptiles" he means "modern" reptiles. Dawkins is trying to dispel the myth that any modern species is descended from another modern species.

Not quite. Archossauromorpha is the group that contains crocodiles, the exticnt dinossaurs (along with others) and the last extant dinossaurs: birds. From a biological perspective there is no doubt whatsoever about his.

Because folk definition of reptiles is paraphyletic and usually doesn't include birds and because it may be polyphyletic as turtles may not be reptiles at all (in a phylogenetic sense), some authors call lepidossauromorhps - snakes and lizards - 'true reptiles'. Birds and Crocodiles and maybe Turtles (still unconfirmed, sometimes called parareptiles) would not be reptiles in this sense. Crocs and gators are more closely related to birds than to lizards.

Originally posted by King Castle
also when was the last final dino extinction?

i really like to know the final legitimate dino to be considered the last one to die out..

i saw somewhere where scientist found out that some variations of velociraptor were in fact not velociraptor but baby T-rex that their bones simply changed and were altered as they grew to their gigantic size.

Originally posted by King Castle
i saw somewhere where scientist found out that some variations of velociraptor were in fact not velociraptor but baby T-rex that their bones simply changed and were altered as they grew to their gigantic size.

That is not going to happen. However, we used to think there was a lot of different kinds of triceratops, now were realize that as a triceratops grows, it's horns change shape.

maybe its a trick being played on us by the devil

Originally posted by King Castle
maybe its a trick being played on us by the devil

The devil? Maybe it was Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny. 😎

Originally posted by Deadline
Spoilers!! durhulk

Originally posted by Quiero Mota
In The Greatest Show on Earth Richard Dawkins says that dinosaurs weren't even reptiles; that they were their own class and only somewhat related to true reptiles. He says dinosaurs, crocodiles and birds are totally seperate and not very closely related to lizards, snakes and turtles.

About being warm-blooded, he argues that some were and some weren't. That the two-legged predators were, but not the larger four-legged grazing ones. And they can tell from looking at the structure of the bone marrow. Also since birds are warm-blooded, scientists assume that the Therapods (two-legged) must have been too.

I'd imagine the larger quadrupeds were too, otherwise a 50k lbs Brontosaur would have spent all day in the sun trying to warm itself just to take a couple of steps. I know it was warmer back then, but still.

Did he cover the heat-requirement issue?

What interests me is why creatures were so big in them days, was their less gravity or maybe more oxygen in the air?

Originally posted by Bicnarok
What interests me is why creatures were so big in them days, was their less gravity or maybe more oxygen in the air?

Of course, one could then ask, why haven't the predators gotten huge since? My understanding is, they were getting bigger long after the dinos disappeared, but then along came that nasty ice age, which intro'd new factors not conducive to supporting overly large bodies.

Originally posted by Bicnarok
What interests me is why creatures were so big in them days, was their less gravity or maybe more oxygen in the air?

God's a size queen?