|
|
|
|
HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
 Posted - 02/17/2009 : 23:55:30
|
A Hatzegotpteryx pterosaur (the name, I think, means, "He's a
bird who's got him a hat"), shown coexisting with giraffe, slacker.
According to an article in LiveScience, scientists have concluded that pterosaurs, the sometimes-gigantic flying reptiles that preceded birds by some 70 million years, used much the same methods as do birds to both lighten their mass, and provide better oxygen uptake.
Not that this is surprising -- some of these pterosaus were such huge flying creatures that in terms of "engineering," some drastic "designs" must have been evolved to allow them to fly at all. But it's great to see that science is now confirming this. (One nit I'll pick with the LiveScience article is below. I'll let you find it):| A study last month suggests the birds, some as tall as giraffes, got airborne by virtue of a leap-frog maneuver, relying on all four limbs to launch themselves. |
The original scientific paper, "Respiratory Evolution Facilitated the Origin of Pterosaur Flight and Aerial Gigantism", is available online at PLoS ONE.
|
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
Edited by - HalfMooner on 02/18/2009 00:11:51
|
|
|
Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 02/18/2009 : 08:32:28 [Permalink]
|
| That so cool. I want one as a pet. Will help me with my shopping. |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
 |
|
|
filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 02/18/2009 : 09:41:02 [Permalink]
|
It is known that many if not most (all?) theropod dinosaurs used the same, efficient system. Thursday, July 14, 2005
PZ Myers •
Next time you're cutting up a fresh bird, try looking for the lungs. They're about where you'd expect them to be, but they're nestled up dorsally against the ribs and vertebrae, and they're surprisingly small. If you think about it, the the thorax of a bird is a fairly rigid box, with that large sternal keel up front and short ribs—it's a wonder that they are able to get enough air from those tiny organs with relatively little capability for expanding and contracting the chest.
How they do it is an amazing story. Birds have a radically effective respiratory system that works rather differently than ours, with multiple adaptations working together to improve their ability to take in oxygen. There is also a growing body of evidence that dinosaurs also shared many of these adaptations, tightening their link to birds and also making them potentially even more fierce—they were big, they were active, and their lungs were turbocharged
|
One might think that this is about the only way short of divine intervention, that these nearly hyperactive creatures (relatively) could function.
|
"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
|
|
|
|
Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
Posted - 02/18/2009 : 10:28:19 [Permalink]
|
Huh. I know it's an artists rendition, but the rear hip and leg arrangement of the Hatzegopteryx as seen in the above picture makes it look like a dinosaur.
File this under meaningless observation. |
Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
Pterosaurs had hollow bones, breathed like birds
