I dunno, looks pretty gay to me...
Posted on 07/03/2006 12:32:51 PM PDT by Al Simmons
In the 1993 movie Jurassic Park, one human character tells another that a Tyrannosaurus rex can't see them if they don't move, even though the beast is right in front of them. Now, a scientist reports that T. rex had some of the best vision in animal history. This sensory prowess strengthens arguments for T. rex's role as predator instead of scavenger.
Scientists had some evidence from measurements of T. rex skulls that the animal could see well. Recently, Kent A. Stevens of the University of Oregon in Eugene went further.
He used facial models of seven types of dinosaurs to reconstruct their binocular range, the area viewed simultaneously by both eyes. The wider an animal's binocular range, the better its depth perception and capacity to distinguish objectseven those that are motionless or camouflaged.
T. rex had a binocular range of 55, which is wider than that of modern hawks, Stevens reports in the summer Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Moreover, over the millennia, T. rex evolved features that improved its vision: Its snout grew lower and narrower, cheek grooves cleared its sight lines, and its eyeballs enlarged. ...
Stevens also considered visual acuity and limiting far pointthe greatest distance at which objects remain distinct. For these vision tests, he took the known optics of reptiles and birds, ranging from the poor-sighted crocodile to the exceptional eagle, and adjusted them to see how they would perform inside an eye as large as that of T. rex. "With the size of its eyeballs, it couldn't help but have excellent vision," Stevens says.
He found that T. rex might have had visual acuity as much as 13 times that of people. By comparison, an eagle's acuity is 3.6 times that of a person.
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T. rex might also have had a limiting far point of 6 kilometers, compared with the human far point of 1.6 km. These are best-case estimates, Stevens says, but even toward the cautious end of the scale, T. rex still displays better vision than what's needed for scavenging.
The vision argument takes the scavenger-versus-predator debate in a new direction. The debate had focused on whether T. rex's legs and teeth made it better suited for either lifestyle.
Stevens notes that visual ranges in hunting birds and snapping turtles typically are 20 wider than those in grain-eating birds and herbivorous turtles.
In modern animals, predators have better binocular vision than scavengers do, agrees Thomas R. Holtz Jr. of the University of Maryland at College Park. Binocular vision "almost certainly was a predatory adaptation," he says.
But a scavenging T. rex could have inherited its vision from predatory ancestors, says Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont. "It isn't a characteristic that was likely to hinder the scavenging abilities of T. rex and therefore wasn't selected out of the population," Horner says.
Stevens says the unconvincing scene in Jurassic Park inspired him to examine T. rex's vision because, with its "very sophisticated visual apparatus," the dinosaur couldn't possibly miss people so close by. Sight aside, says Stevens, "if you're sweating in fear 1 inch from the nostrils of the T. rex, it would figure out you were there anyway."
Stevens, K.A. 2006. Binocular vision in theropod dinosaurs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 26(June):321-330.
I'm not a creationist or a Darwinist. As I've stated before I believe it "Just Is" and go on about my way. But these threads are always entertaining!
i bet we are the only two people (still living) who saw it!
"i bet we are the only two people (still living) who saw it!"
You would lose that bet. Though my brain cells wish otherwise.
It was definitely MST3K material. (That might be where I saw it...)
Correct. It would be awfully hard to adapt to a hugh rock.
That's what I thought too. :)
I dunno, looks pretty gay to me...
Then what the heck are you doing here? {8-)
I had a college roomate named hugh rockoff. I adapted.
Please. This is a very series subject. You are hurting our "Save the T-Rex" fund drive.
The breed of peace? What about them? I don't understand your breviated question.
I had a college roomate named hugh rockoff. I adapted.
Some parents really have a sense of humor.
I once saw a greyhound stumble out of the gates and go head over heels. He look around and saw the rabbit and dogs rounding the curve. Jump the fence, took a shortcut across the infield and caught the rabbit.
Just hanging out. Watching the fireworks. It is almost the 4th. Plus, maybe someone can convert me. Who knows?
Wrong.
Deinosuchus (15 meters long, ~65 MYA, ate dinosaurs): 
Stromatosuchus (12 meters long, ~65 MYA, was a filter-feeder for small fish like minnows) 
Metriorhynchus (3 meters long, ~145 MYA, swam in the open ocean and ate fish) 
These animals, only three of a vast number of crocodilians both extinct and extant, show *considerable* change ove rthe last 200 million years.
href="http://econweb.rutgers.edu/rockoff/
the "giant" rabbits moved so slowly, they put me to sleep.
all i can remember were really bad special effects and slow moving rabbits that didn't seem to do anything!
yeah, but your pics are all pics of RAPID breeding alligators, while he was talking about SLOW breeding alligators!
(i'm kidding)
By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor Mud Flaps, Arizona, March 29, 2006 A team of creationist paleontologists from the Discovery Institute's main field research arm announced today that they had discovered the remains of a large manmade object confirmed to be an ancient dinosaur saddle. The Discovery Institute's discovery was discovered in the remote Dusty Rivers area of southwestern Arizona. A spokesman for the paleontological team said that the dinosaur saddle provides irrefutable proof that man and dinosaurs lived simultaneously, as predicted by most creationist or "intelligent design" doctrines.
"Like to rethink that?"
No, because nobody said there were people at the time of the dinosaurs.
BTW, you DO know that the article you quoted from is satire, right? :)
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