Actually, about zero, because it's not true. I take it you've never seen Chinese dragons?
No wings. Chinese dragons throughout history are virtually never depicted as having wings. You can see lots more examples here.
Posted on 07/18/2002 8:21:03 PM PDT by AM2000
Actually, about zero, because it's not true. I take it you've never seen Chinese dragons?
No wings. Chinese dragons throughout history are virtually never depicted as having wings. You can see lots more examples here.
There's evidence that some of the dinosaurs may have had endothermic features, in a primitive way, that is, not in the same way of modern mammals or birds. Birds are reptiles too, btw.
That would be since the Carlos Casteneda books? :-)
Or a bird watcher.
The article states that is was NOT a dinosaur.
Since we are intelligent (I know that could be debated ;-), if that happened, we would probably be directing it. I don't have any handy data but humans have on average increased in size by a significant percentage just over the last hundred years, so it would seem likely until some kind of limit due to the physics of our basic structure.
Birds are most decidedly NOT reptiles. They are of the class aves, one of the five classes of vertebrates. The other four classes are: fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals.
There is very strong evidence that dinosaurs could not have been cold-blooded and survived. Some of the things that back up this assertion are:
*Large sauropods would never have been able to rely on external temperatures to heat their bodies because of their size, and the amount of time it would have taken them to "heat up" would have left virtually no time for any other activity.
* Predator/prey ratios among concentrations of fossilized remains indicates that the ratio was much closer to that of warm blloded predator environments. For example, consider lions vs. zebras (i.e. relatively small numbers of lions, who must consume eat frequent and consume large numbers of prey to maintain their metabolism, relative to the prey population. If the predator dinosaurs were truly cold blooded, smaller populations of prey animals would be able to support relatively large populations of predators, because reptiles don't need to consume so many calories to maintain their metabolism.
*The apparent lifestyle of the two-legged raptor-type dinosaurs required a great deal of energy to chase and kill prey. The current belief is that they were aggressive predators with a lot of stamina, as opposed to cold blooded reptiles who mostly lie in wait and are capable only of relatively short bursts of energetic activity.
I am not a paleontologist, but I have done a lot of reading on this subject, and was absolutely stunned back in the late '70s when a scientific consensue began to emerge that dinosaurs really were warm-blooded. I know there are some paleontologists who disagree with that premise, but they are relatively few in number, so I am given to understand.
(I know, they were found in the indian ocean... or so..)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
