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Originally posted by CreeWolf
At the risk of sounding too simplistic:
Mother Nature/Evolution once tried an experiment. In dinosaurs, she made them gradually bigger instead of smarter. Oops! Looks like I screwed up. Let's go with increased brain power instead of the size thingie.
Dinos: 0 Mammals: 1
Originally posted by Gonjo
Now why would "nature" make insects that would have crushed under current conditions by their own weight in the size and form they were back then? Why were there large enough insects with wings frail enough so they would have snapped right of if it even tried to move em around?
For the giant insects that roamed Earth 300 million years ago, there was something special in the air.
A higher concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere let dragonflies sometimes grow to the size of hawks, and some millipede-like bugs reached some six feet (two meters) in length, a new study suggests.
Now that the proportion of oxygen has decreased, however, bugs can't grow much larger than they do now, the authors write.
...
During the late Carboniferous period (354 to 290 million years ago), however, oxygen levels were much higher than they are now, partly because coal swamps that leaked the gas into the air were very common.
"Back then, there was 31 to 35 percent oxygen in the air," study lead author Kaiser said. "Now we have about 21 percent."
That meant insects needed smaller quantities of air to meet their oxygen demands, allowing the creatures to grow much larger.
news.nationalgeographic.com...
Originally posted by keymaster
Who says dinosaurs died out? Aren't modern day reptiles and amphibians a distant relative to the dinosaurs?
Originally posted by Opulisum
Dinosaurs still exist here on Earth today..
Crocodiles for example.. they look exactly the same from what they looked like millions of years ago, they even ate dinosaurs.
Crocodiles havn't evolved much since those times either. Sure, some dinosaurs gained feathers and later evoled to the different bird species but crocodiles and alligaters have stayed the same for millions of years, that says something doesn't it?
The taxon Dinosauria was formally named in 1842 by English palaeontologist Richard Owen, who used it to refer to the "distinct tribe or sub-order of Saurian Reptiles"
Originally posted by tomcat ha
Dinosaurs never got extinct. Look in your backyard. Do you see a bird? or better said a avian bipedal dinosaur? Yes birds are dinosaurs.
The classic dinosaurs got extinct but the avian did not.