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.
Just as dinosaurs aren't the same thing as modern reptiles, dinosaur endothermy is different from modern, mammalian "warm bloodedness". Certain dinosaurs were ectothermic, others had endothermic-type features.
You might as well throw in fish and mammals, they are all vertebrates. Seems evolutionists are always trying to change the meaning of well established scientific terms.
Aren't most dragon stories told about people who lived "back when"--even when they were told "back when?" Might not they have found thunderlizard fossils themselves?
We don't have the vaguest idea what dinosaurs were. Just about all we have is bones. That's way insufficient to classify then as anything in particular. That is why they have always been considered some sort of subclass of reptiles. Even that though there is no justification for aside from their living on land and having been around at the same time as reptiles. Every day there is some new theory about dinosaurs. Reason is that there is nothing like it in existence and bones do not supply enough information to tell what they are.
And BTW, the only person to have ever found usable dinosaur DNA is Michael Crichton.
Yes, indeed so many beautiful creatures and the evolutionists only see a pile of bones.
Endothermic (warm-blooded) dinosuars maintained a metabolism that supported a more-or-less constant body temperature. This would represent an adaptive advantage over ectothermy (so-called cold-blooded animals).
It is suggested that the ectothermic dinosuars, especially the very large ones, would require too much "outside" energy (usually in the form of thermal warming by the sun) to get their large body masses moving. I have many times come up on a snake warming itself early on a cool morning. They had difficulty in mustering the energy to try and escape.
Any of the papers I have read on the subject failed to take into account that in the last 20-25 years, paleometeorological studies have indicated that the earth's ambient temperature has dropped about 20 deg F since the end of the Cretaceous. It seems to me that the calculations for warming of dinosaur body mass need to be revisited.
I have also seen suggested that at least some of the dinosuar classes may have been "semi-endothermic."
Wrong, but keep telling yourself that if it gives you some comfort.
There would have to be a FULLY DEVELOPED female and male existing at the same time to reproduce.
Utter nonsense. Back to biology class with you.
Even then, the offspring would be just as likely to revert to the grandparents traits (ie: the old creature) as to continue the mother and fathers traits.
You reveal a gross lack of knowledge of basic biology and heredity, much less evolution.
As soon as you understand any of those topics better, you'll have a chance to make an actual informed opinion on them.
Until then, you're engaging in class straw man fallacies, although in your case it appears to be based on your honest misunderstanding instead of an intentionally dishonest presentation.
What? The gravity is different in Argentina?? :^)
You think wrong. Try actually checking out the "scientific community" before you make silly pronouncements about it.
yet they push forward hoping something will turn-up that will solidify their theory.
The past 100 years has been an unending parade of evidence which "solidifies their theory".
The problem is, every time the Paleo's unearth something new, it seems to further disprove evolution.
Say *what*? There have been thousands of fossil finds over the past decades which strongly confirm evolution, and none that "disprove" it. Care to try again?
And I think most individuals that can think for themselves realize that micro-evolution is occurring around us all the time, by many species --the ability to adapt to our surroundings and environment was designed!
Actualy, it's an inevitable result of inescapable consequences of reproduction. It would, in fact, take a miracle to design the earth such that evolution did *not* take place.
What the evo's can't prove is MACRO-evolution.
Sure they can, in spades. For example:
Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution
The Origin of Whales and the Power of Independent Evidence
Fossil Hominids: The Evidence for Human Evolution
Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics
Evidence for Evolution: An Eclectic Survey
The Philosophy of Science, Evolution, and Scientific Creationism
And that's just for starters.
Wow, that's about the lamest swipe at evolution I've ever seen.
Gosh, why don't you write that up and send it to a science journal, so you can overturn 150 years of biological study on the grounds that "rednecks in a pickup truck can't be taken seriously, therefore evolution is unworkable".
I'm always amazed at how folks like you can be so impressed with their "masterful" demolitions of things they barely understand.
Your "dinosaur pictures proof" is another knee-slapper. The "brontosaurus", for example, is such a vague, ameoba-like figure that it's just as usable as "proof" that ancient man saw the film "Alien" as that they lived with dinosaurs. The rest are either stylized drawings of contemporary animals, or fantasy art. If you lived 1000 years from now, you'd be arguing that pictures of Mickey Mouse proved tha we lived among humanoid animals...
see post #23.
BTW, all this discussion of you people trying to justify evolution just proves that dinosaurs still do exist! use your head.
What about all the turtles on my lake here in Indiana? Gets pretty cold here. I assume they can live here because they burrow into the ground (Assuming again) in the winter?
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