Posted on 06/06/2007 9:45:09 PM PDT by my_pointy_head_is_sharp
A dinosaur mystery that puzzled paleontologists for nearly a century has been solved by a pound of beef tendons from a butcher, a collection of dead hawks and a brace of frozen quail, two investigative scientists in Berkeley and Idaho say.
The puzzle: Why were fossils of those ancient creatures so often discovered buried with their heads, necks and feet arched bizarrely backward into a distorted posture unlike anything seen alive?
The answer: Kevin Padian, a noted dinosaur expert and curator of the Museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley, and Cynthia Marshall Faux, a veterinarian and paleontologist at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., say the beasts were suffering in violent death throes as they perished -- asphyxiated by volcanic gases or ash falls, poisoned by unknown toxins or drowned in swamps or deepwater lakes.
It was knowledge of animals in veterinary clinics plus a few "kitchen science" experiments that led to this conclusion, say the researchers, and it should provide a new understanding of the dinosaurs' environments millions of years ago. It also adds support for the once-controversial claim that the ancient dinosaurs were all warm-blooded just as modern birds are, and unlike the ancestral crocodiles and lizards whose blood still runs cold today.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
here you go
My Mom always said: "It's probably just gas".
I can’t help but wonder if they would be so condescending as to describe this as ‘kitchen science’ if this fundamental work had been done by a man.
...almost as if there was a catastrophic flood...or something...
Hmmm, what possible could have caused drowning, and/or ash from volcanoes killing so many fossils?
Ping
Found this rather interesting.
It was the Chicxulub Impact 65 million years ago.
And dooooo-gooders would rather let deer die of starvation and disease due to overpopulating their range, rather than let hunters cull the herd.
Ever see that video of the killer whale tossing the seal up in the air, like a cat playing with a mouse?
Never mind this. It's ok if Nature is far more cruel than humans. Nature, Good. Humans, BAD.
What ever happened to rigor mortis? Seems like a perfectly acceptable constuct to me.
They would. The term describes experiments not done in a lab with formal funding. It’s been in use for years.
OK.
My gosh! Scientists still haven’t even figured out if dinosaurs were cold-blooded or warm-blooded, and yet they tell us about all of these other details that they supposedly know. What other basic information don’t they know, and why should I trust them?
Okay, this is just a guess, but maybe they got too close to Al Gore?
wouldn’t it be stupid to hypothesize that every human skeleton dug up had died at the same time , or even within the the same decade or century? If dinosaurs supposedly were around for 10’s of millions of years, then many, many more individuals would have died one by one over that time than would have died in some “final cataclysm.”
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Or drowned in a BIG flood.
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