alt Hacker NewsThe biggest dinosaurs couldn't sit on their eggs
Comments
Related only topically, a 1hr YouTube talk I enjoyed a lot: "Hatchling T. rex and the Evolution of Vertebrate Parental Care" by Nick Longrich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd0dR2n9hLA
He's a paleontologist and the talk starts with some pretty interesting statistical analysis aiming to estimate T rex clutch sizes (66 eggs) and hatchling weights (1.5kg) as well as T rex parental care. It ends with looking at evolutionary history trends in increasing parental investment in radically different animals.
He talks a little slow, so a little playback speed bump won't go amiss.
Consider that the bigger the egg, the smaller its surface-area-to-volume ratio, and so the easier it hangs on to heat, and so the smaller the temperature differential that is required to keep it heated.
Would we be able to tell if they had big swinging bellies like cats?
Same technique as Australia's bush turkey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megapode#/media/File:Brushturk...
A more direct link than a crocodile, as birds came from dinosaurs.
As a complete layman, I wonder if it's not how adaptive life is and instead how infectious survival is.
Very Sad.
I would love to know the day-to-day ins and outs of being a archaeologist in today's world. A glamorous edition is "the fly around the world to exotic places to find fossils", but I'd love any good books or blogs that talk about the nitty gritty details I wouldn't expect or even know to look for.