iggy mogo
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How Did the Largest Dinosaurs Grow Such Long Necks?
by Charles Choi
How did the largest of all dinosaurs evolve necks longer than any other creature that has ever lived? One secret: mostly hollow neck bones, researchers say.
The largest creatures to ever walk the Earth were the long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as the sauropods. These vegetarians had by far the longest necks of any known animal. The dinosaurs’ necks reached up to 50 feet (15 meters) in length, six times longer than that of the current world-record holder, the giraffe, and at least five times longer than those of any other animal that has lived on land.
“They were really stupidly, absurdly oversized,” said researcher Michael Taylor, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England. “In our feeble, modern world, we’re used to thinking of elephants as big, but sauropods reached 10 times the size elephants do. They were the size of walking whales.”
To find out how sauropod necks could get so long, scientists analyzed other long-necked creatures and compared sauropod anatomy with that of the dinosaurs’ nearest living relatives, the birds and crocodilians…
(read more: Live Science)
(images: T - Alamosaurus by Dmitry Bogdanov; Bttm 3 - Taylor, Weddel 2013)
always wondered why dinosaurs were so “stupidly, absurdly oversized.” could one of the reasons be that the earth’s gravity was different at the time?
(via sagansense)
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An interesting model of our solar system’s path as it travels through space in the Milky Way.
Certainly a departure from usual models that show the Sun as a static object, which it certainly isn’t
Braingasm
Bam. Science!
spaceship earth!
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Iain McGilchrist on the limits of neuroscience “It’s a mistake to think that this kind of thing will tell you more about what a human being is. There was a huge amount of excitement a few years ago when somebody found what they called the love circuit, what lights up when you fall in love. Well, did you expect your brain to be a virgin when you fell in love? Of course, something in your brain is going to light up. Something in your brain lights up when you eat a cheese sandwich. This isn’t very interesting. It’s interesting in a way in putting into context what bits of the brain may be doing, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the experience of falling love. Brains don’t tell you about persons, they don’t tell us about consciousness, they don’t tell us about life.”
(via hugsta)
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science and nature.
(via sleepyhead0525)
