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
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have found the remains of one of the weirdest creatures ever discovered -- a big flying reptile that lived during the time of the dinosaurs that snapped up fish with a scissors-like beak as it skimmed over the water and had a head crowned by a huge, bony crest.
Brazilian ( news - web sites) scientists Alexander Kellner and Diogenes de Almeida Campos on Thursday described a previously unknown type of pterosaur (pronounced TER-oh-sawr), winged reptiles that were cousins of the dinosaurs.
The find is important both for the oddity of its cranial crest and for the insight that the animal offers into how pterosaurs hunted for food, the researchers said. They named it Thalassodromeus sethi (pronounced thal-ahs-oh-DROH-mee-us SETH-ee), meaning "sea runner" and "Seth," for the ancient Egyptian god of evil and chaos.
Kellner said Thalassodromeus, which lived 110 million years ago, had a head that measured 4-1/2 feet long due to the size of its crest, a wingspan of nearly 15 feet and a body length of about 6 feet.
"If you didn't have the fossils, you wouldn't believe that such an animal would have ever lived," Kellner said in a telephone interview from Rio de Janeiro.
"Can you imagine such an animal just cruising over the water and skimming over the surface in your direction? It must have been, really, a vision of hell," added Kellner, of the National Museum in Rio.
Searching for food, Thalassodromeus probably glided low over the water in a brackish inland lagoon, its lower jaw skimming the surface of the water, ready to nab any tasty fish or crustaceans it encountered, said Kellner, whose findings were published in the journal Science.
Similarities between this pterosaur's flattened jaws, which end in a scissors-like beak, and the beak of a type of living bird called Rynchops prompted the belief that Thalassodromeus, like these so-called skimmer birds, skimmed over the water's surface, with the lower jaw slightly submerged, Kellner said.
"The new pterosaur from Brazil gives us important information about the feeding strategy of pterosaurs," Fabio Dalla Vecchia, a pterosaur expert at the Paleontological Museum of Monfalcone, Italy, told Reuters.
A REMARKABLE FAMILY CREST
The most eye-popping characteristic of Thalassodromeus is its large, thin, cranial crest that looks with its V-shaped end like a giant spearhead or knife blade. The bony crest makes up about three-quarters of the animal's head. Proportionately, it is the largest such crest of any known extinct or living vertebrate, with the exception of one other type of pterosaur.
"This is pretty close to the far end of weird," said Christopher Bennett, a pterosaur expert at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut who has seen the new specimen. "But pterosaurs are really weird animals."
The crest is covered by a network of grooves that Kellner said represented an extensive system of blood vessels that the pterosaur may have employed to regulate its body temperature -- in this case, cooling off.
Bennett called this "a reasonable conclusion," but said there is "an awful lot of evidence to suggest that crests were used for sexual display" in other pterosaurs.
Pterosaurs were not dinosaurs, although both were highly successful types of reptiles. Both appeared about 225 million years ago during the Triassic Period and flourished until 65 million years ago, when an asteroid or other big extraterrestrial object slammed into Earth. Some fossils suggest that pterosaurs had a fur-like body covering.
Pterosaurs were the Earth's first flying vertebrates, appearing many millions of years before birds or bats.
Thalassodromeus lived in the middle of the Cretaceous period -- the final chapter of the age of dinosaurs.
Little is known about pterosaurs because their lightly built bones do not lend themselves to fossilization. Kellner describes Thalassodromeus in the journal Science based on a well-preserved skull found in 1983 at the fossil-rich Santana Formation in northeastern Brazil. He said bones from other parts of the body have been found there, allowing him to determine the animal's wingspan and body size.
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..)
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