On Wednesday, September 15, 2021 at 5:07:25 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 9/15/21 12:16 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Sunday, September 12, 2021 at 10:05:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> >> On 9/10/2021 9:57 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>> Carcharodontosauria (shark-toothed saurians) were the last of the
> >>> allosaurids, found in Laurasia up to the end of the Turonian
> >>> (early Late Cretaceous) but surviving in Gondwana to the end of the Cretaceous.
> >>> In a role reversal from what I've been accustomed to, the largest of these allosaurids
> >>> were considerably larger than the largest tyrannosauroids of the time..
> >>>
> >>> The "new" find is actually a rediscovery:
> >>>
> >>> "The chunk of jawbone was found in Uzbekistan's Kyzylkum Desert in the 1980s, and researchers rediscovered it in 2019 in an Uzbekistan museum collection."
> >>> https://www.microsoftnewskids.com/en-us/kids/animals/gigantic-shark-toothed-dinosaur-discovered-in-uzbekistan/ar-AAOhazl?ocid=entnewsntp
> >>>
> >>> The chunk is a partial maxilla, but from comparison with other
> >>> carcharodontosaurs, the following is hypothesized [*ibid*]:
> >>>
> >>> "The 26-foot-long (8 meters) beast weighed 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms), making it longer than an African elephant and heavier than a bison. Researchers named it *Ulughbegsaurus* *uzbekistanensis*, after Ulugh Beg, a 15th-century astronomer, mathematician and sultan from what is now Uzbekistan.
> >
> >
> >> The reason dinosaurs were larger and yet lighter than even mammals today
> >> is because of their respiratory systems.
> >
> > I'd like to see anyone support that claim with a citation to a peer reviewed research article.

> Good luck with that.

It's Oxyaena who needs good luck with that, not I.

I've got no dog in this fight, assuming one develops at all. At this point I certainly can't
endorse the part about dinosaurs being larger yet lighter than mammals today.
A lot depends on how much meat there is on those bones,
as any formerly obese person who has successfully slimmed down can testify.
See also something I repost below, thanks to an elephant in this room, er, thread.

> >> Birds inherited their famous
> >> respiratory systems from somewhere, you know.
> >
> > Yes, but do you have any evidence besides an unreferenced claim
> > at the beginning of a Wikipedia article saying that coelurosaurs
> > had hollow bones?
> >
> > Coelurosaurs are a clade that is included in a larger clade with carnosaurs,
> > and this clade in turn was just a part of Theropoda. What makes you think
> > the giant sauropods, or the ornithiscians had hollow bones?

> Well, giant sauropods had extensively pneumatized cervical vertebrae. So
> that's something.

So is something I am forced to tell you about due to your general
habit of ignoring Glenn. [See below for one possible reason, generalized
as "What Harshman doesn't know can't hurt him."]

------------------------------------ Glenn asking about pneumatic bones ________________________

How much, if any, of this is accurate?

"Birds from chickadees to Sandhill Cranes have hollow bones. Not all bones in a bird’s body are hollow, though, and the number of hollow bones varies among species. Large gliding and soaring birds tend to have more, while diving birds have less.

Penguins, loons, and puffins don’t have any hollow bones. It’s thought that solid bones make it easier for these birds to dive.

Flightless birds do have hollow bones. Ostriches and emus have hollow femurs. It’s thought that the air sac system that extends into their upper legs is used to reduce their body heat by panting.

This bone specialization isn’t found only in birds. Fossils show evidence of air pockets in carnivorous dinosaur bones. Humans have hollow bones around their sinuses. They can also be found in the skulls of other mammals and crocodiles."

https://www.montananaturalist.org/blog-post/avian-adaptations/

========================= end of Glenn's query ====================================
About penguins and loons...this suggests that Spinosaurus did not have hollow bones. True?

The bit about panting is interesting. I thought the main reason for those air sacs was
to support the continuous unidirectional movement in the lungs, in contrast to the
cul-de-sacs in our lungs, the alveoli.

> >> Pound for pound in a
> >> confrontation between a dinosaur and a mammal of equivalent size and
> >> weight the dinosaur would hands down.
> >
> > This may be true of cassowaries today, but I wonder how a cassowary would fare
> > in a confrontation with a leopard, or some other carnivore of no greater size than itself.
> >
> > Over in Africa, there must have been many confrontations of ostriches with
> > mammals of various kinds, and ostriches can hold their own with their famous kicks,
> > but whether they can "win hands down" is a different question.
> >
> > [I often use a simile mixing fiction and fact in talk.origins, when speaking
> > of people with their heads buried in the sand while kicking furiously
> > from time to time at those they have killfiled.]
> >
> >> I know you have an irrational
> >> fondness for Fedducia's bullshit,
> >
> > You "know" all kinds of falsehoods, and this is one of them.
> >
> > However, I am sure Harshman will be delighted to hear you denigrate Feduccia
> > like that.

The shoe surely fits, and you, Harshman, haven't said you don't want to wear it.
A wildly unequivocal claim by you which triggered my stopping where I did below
suggests that you will be wearing it a lot.

> > I have him to thank for my knowing about Feduccia in the first place.
> > The occasion was a thread where Harshman panned a paper of Feduccia
> > without even bothering to show that what Feduccia was proposing was wrong.

> Left as an exercise for the student?

Baloney. Let's see YOU, no student, do what you failed to do back then.

> > IIRC John's main ire was focused on the journal *Auk* for daring to publish anything
> > by Feduccia. By the time I found that thread, it was about 50 posts deep,
> > because he had quite a number of adoring fans, most of whom said nothing
> > scientific that would have even addressed the points Feduccia was making.
> > IOW, they acted just like you are acting now.

> No, your memory has for once failed you.

Maybe the distinction is academic. Read on.

> It's not publishing anything by
> Feduccia that's the problem, it was publishing that particular crap
> article by Feduccia.

Don't you look on everything Feduccia publishes on the BAD issue
as crap? Your reaction to _Riddle of the Feathered Dragons_ was that
it was a pretty useless book because Feduccia did not stick his neck
out to propose an alternative hypothesis on bird evolutions, nor
even to deny outright that birds are dinosaurs.

For me, there was a tremendous wealth of information in it,
partly because of all the information we were given about the new
finds in China. There is a whole chapter largely devoted to enantiornithine birds,
which I had never heard of before I opened the book. There were details
I never would have imagined: literally thousands of fossils of *Confuciusornis*,
in contrast to something like a baker's dozen of fossils of *Archaeopteryx*..

There was much else that was new to me, and your comment showed me where
your priorities lie like nothing else showed me before. Partly, that was because
it reminded me of Prum's 2002 *agent* *provocateur* article in which he condemned Feduccia
for having "abandoned science" because Feduccia didn't want to commit
to a definite hypothesis as to what the sister group of birds was.

>And I must assume that I pointed out at least some
> of its crap features.

Just like you figured you must assume that you had NOT said that the Higgs
field was the Higgs boson. But Glenn showed you that you had indeed said
such a thing. Which may explain a bracketed comment I made up there.

>
> If you want specifics, the one I remember best is that in the middle of
> the article he went from claiming that dromaeosaurs couldn't possibly be
> related to birds to claiming that they couldn't possibly be dinosaurs.

I've never seen such unequivocal things coming from Feduccia, neither
in any of his articles or in either of his books on the subject,
the more recent one being barely a year old. Have you seen it?

And I am forced to conclude that you are flagrantly editorializing,
on the basis of what I've recounted about Prum's pseudoscientific condemnation
and your own reaction to the _Riddle_ book.

Remainder deleted, to be replied to tomorrow. You are spoiling for a fight,
and I've given you enough of it already for one day.

Besides, I want to get an early start tomorrow, and I've got some things to attend to
before I turn in for the night.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
Univ. of South Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos