Great stuff. Thanks Raptor Chatter. So many papers so much information. (Region appropriate superlative) excellent work. I am from Australia and some of our superlatives do not translate well to other places.
12:24 So the late Cretaceous had its own version of the Great American Biotic Interchange? That’s pretty cool. Hopefully we’ll discover typically South American dinosaurs that traveled north (Although some suggest Alamosaurus is descended from South America titanosaurs they did just that)
It’s cool that bird evolution and flight can be traced through the feet, not the wings. Just as human evolution can be best traced through the feet, rather than through the skull. I like to think of Archaeopteryx as more chicken like really. Roadrunner flight is eerily good, they are capable of shallow, controlled ascents and glides, very unlike the thrashing that chickens usually do and what I believe Archaeopteryx would have had to do. One thing about penguins, their arms were once actual aerodynamic wings. Just wondering if the wing dynamics had any effect on the way they held them.
I am very much an amateur, read a lot of books and watched many videos over the years. Just watched you talking about the dinosaur with preserved stomach contents. Not a very tall dinosaur so even if it lived in a coniferous forest it would eat low growing vegetation as it would rarely get the chance to eat conifers which grow pretty tall. Sometimes Paleoentologists don't use their common sense, I have seen this in several instances over the years. Really enjoy your videos, they have broadened my knowledge of anatomy so much. I have not had many chances to go fossil hunting over the years. I did Geology at nightschool in the 1980's and found a reptile humerus in Triassic sediments near Upton-on -Severn England and would love to know what creature it is from. It is not elongate enough for a Nothosaurid humerus. They are marine sediments as Ichtyosaur fossils were found on the same trip, not by me though.
With the conifers I compare it to the aspen and elk near me, where the elk are essentially preventing new aspen growth because they're eating all of the saplings. So Borealopelta could have easily been eating mostly low laying saplings, as well as low branches depending on the amount of self-pruning in the trees. The Triassic had a lot of weird reptiles knocking about. Sounds like a super neat find even if you don't know what it is!
@@RaptorChatter Thank you for replying. The Deer on Cannock Chase don't much care for the conifers, other than bark in winter, they do eat other growth . Gastroliths would make it easier to digest I suppose, did you ever chew a pine needle? They taste nasty. Our conifers don't seem get much attack other than insects. The more I watch the videos the stranger some of the creatures get, or are they? So much convergent evolution. Things just shape up to their environments and nature keeps kicking up similar solutions. Must admit that fossil is a favourite along with a tiny trilobite pygidium which was my very first find on a Geology field trip.
So after 77 terrabytes of data concerning dinos we take a step back, take a deep breath, close our eyes and gently and firmly say "screw peer review". Kid, you're good, you see things other paleoz don't see, don't wait for them to catch up. The inland sea has changed my perception of the world I live in. I was gifted with 3 days in the Mojave Desert in 2007. I hiked to a mountaintop and looked toward the east. "This was an ocean" I thought, and I saw the Mojave desert underwater. There were probably marine fossils within a yard of where I stood. Nature is too awesome to see all at once, hence mushrooms. Seeing the entire landscape is crucial to Paleontology.
Thinking about how much it hurts getting tailwhipped by an iguana, I'm pretty sure that a sauropods tail is a pretty valuable and valid way of selfdefense no matter if it moves in "super speed" or not. Anyways, those are all some really interesting revelations and discoveries, especially the one about Archaeopterxy potentially being more of as ground dweller is very interesting to me. Seems like it might have lead the lifestyle of a Caracara or a very carnivorous pheasant. Also come to think of it, what if all those Ichthyornis fossils where actually different species? I mean I know it's a pretty big "what if", but if you look at the skeletons of modern day seagulls then a lot of them look very simliar to eachother.
The thing with pheasants is they'll still eat a lot of insects, so that sort of ground dwelling, predator niche is pretty successful, so much so that most birds that are on the ground will do a little bit of eating other animals. The Ichthyornis one is interesting. They're at least the same genus, and I imagine future work will be done to differentiate species, but based on the specimens right now it seems like there's a kind of spectrum of variation in them, something you could expect from a single species.
What are "soots"? Are they pointy scoots? You must watch Distant Origins (Voyager) - season three? Please don't put this off - it is one of the best Treks ever.
