Shakespeare wrote that "past is prologue," but it's not always that easy to read. Brian Switek on Laelaps tells the tale of P. H. Gosse, a man who tried to reconcile the fossil record with the Book of Genesis, at the same time Darwin was writing his Origin of Species. Convincing no one, Gosse estranged even the faithful with his image of God as "a trickster who planted gags to fool geologists." But given the ample evidence that dinosaurs were once alive, the debate continues: were they warm-blooded? On Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong shows us a new study which says yes, based on the "hip heights of 13 species of dinosaur including Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor and Archaeopteryx." Finally, in the realm of sheer speculation, Richard Dawkins has thrown some weight behind the what-if evolutionary concept of a "humanoid dinosaur." As Darren Naish writes on Tetrapod Zoology, "our body shape clearly works well for an intelligent, tool-using, sentient animal, but where is the convincing evidence that it is the only possible body shape for such a creature?"
Links below the fold.
- P.H. Gosse's Failure to Untie the Geological Knot on Laelaps
- Measuring dino fitness - more evidence that two-legged dinosaurs were warm-blooded on Not Exactly Rocket Science
- Richard Dawkins and the crappy 'humanoid dinosaurs' that just won't die on Tetrapod Zoology
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