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Extinct Animal Questions
Topic Started: Nov 26 2013, 10:24 PM (193,234 Views)
magpiealamode
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No good hero is a one-trick phony.

Fruits in the botanical sense are the product of angiosperms, which are first known to be widespread in the lower Cretaceous. I am positive there were fruits at that point, so yes, fruit existed in the Mesozoic.
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Incinerox
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Āeksiot Zaldrīzoti

Araucarias produce fruit too.

And there's been some speculation that they evolved to be such big, spiny things in some modern species because ancestrally they had to counter being eaten by sauropods.

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heliosphoros
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Fruits (as in, fleshy seeds that evolved specifically to be eaten) have evolved multiple times among terrestrial and aquatic plants, so yes.

The new gliding haramiyidans from the Jurassic are thought to be frugivores, for example, even though there are no angiosperms in their formation.
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Posted Image Flish
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What the heck was Anzu actually eating? This has been puzzling me for a bit now, its jaws just seem completely ill-adapted for eating foliage or meat, and its jaws are so different from your run-of-the-mill Oviraptorids that it had to be specializing in some way. The fact the jaws are kind of "scooped" and are super thin and frail makes me think it might have been filter feeding, but maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about.
Edited by Flish, Nov 4 2017, 12:31 AM.
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stargatedalek
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I'm not slow! That's just my moe!

The habitat and body proportions also suit a filter feeder.
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Fireplume
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Snok Snok Snerson

Komodo
Oct 21 2017, 05:12 PM
Did fruits exist during the Mesozoic era? And if they did, is there any evidence on what aspect did they have back then? Could they have resembled modern fruits, and be part of the diet of dinosaurs?
Absolutely, including relatives of modern grapes at the end of the Cretaceous! :)

From Dakota we know there were many fruits around, too.
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Acinonyx Jubatus
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I AM THE UNSHRINKWRAPPER!

Fireplume
Nov 4 2017, 12:47 PM
Komodo
Oct 21 2017, 05:12 PM
Did fruits exist during the Mesozoic era? And if they did, is there any evidence on what aspect did they have back then? Could they have resembled modern fruits, and be part of the diet of dinosaurs?
Absolutely, including relatives of modern grapes at the end of the Cretaceous! :)

From Dakota we know there were many fruits around, too.
Also, Jackfruit/breadfruit/durian relatives were around as well. And of course, Jackfruit can get huge.

How big was Dracopelta? Wikipedia says it was only two feet long (!) but the scale charts I find on google images show it as closer to six feet.
Edited by Acinonyx Jubatus, Nov 4 2017, 02:19 PM.
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Jules
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Mihi est imperare orbi universo

German and Italian wikipedias all list it at close to two metres, so I'd wager that it stems from a translation mistake - two metres being interpreted as two feet.
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Paleodude
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ex-Krampus

@AJ

I think it's a misunderstanding on Wikipedia's part as while the holotype is infact around two feet in length it only describes about the front half of the torso. When it's scaled in comparison to close relatives it is indeed around 2 meters. (Here's the paper if you need anything else: https://sci-hub.bz/http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016699580800817)
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Acinonyx Jubatus
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Paleodude
Nov 4 2017, 08:24 PM
@AJ

I think it's a misunderstanding on Wikipedia's part as while the holotype is infact around two feet in length it only describes about the front half of the torso. When it's scaled in comparison to close relatives it is indeed around 2 meters. (Here's the paper if you need anything else: https://sci-hub.bz/http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016699580800817)
Thanks... How disappointing. 2 foot long ankylosaurs would have been epic. Does anyone know how big Liaoningosaurus was when fully grown?
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Ulquiorra
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I was thinking about the Ice Age Movies the other day and that Sid the Sloth was supposed to be an intermediate stage between a ground sloth and a modern tree dwelling sloth, and that got me thinking, have such intermediate forms of sloth ever existed and if so, what species are they?
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Six Foot Turkey
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Ulquiorra
Nov 27 2017, 09:48 AM
I was thinking about the Ice Age Movies the other day and that Sid the Sloth was supposed to be an intermediate stage between a ground sloth and a modern tree dwelling sloth, and that got me thinking, have such intermediate forms of sloth ever existed and if so, what species are they?
The two most outwardly similar sloths seem to be the Acratocnus and the Neocnus. But it would seem that the evolution of modern tree sloths is not well understood as they represent two groups that have convergently evolved.
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Incinerox
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Āeksiot Zaldrīzoti

Flish
Nov 4 2017, 12:28 AM
What the heck was Anzu actually eating? This has been puzzling me for a bit now, its jaws just seem completely ill-adapted for eating foliage or meat, and its jaws are so different from your run-of-the-mill Oviraptorids that it had to be specializing in some way. The fact the jaws are kind of "scooped" and are super thin and frail makes me think it might have been filter feeding, but maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about.
There's a paper on Gigantoraptor's mandible and implications for feeding strategies among oviraptorosaurs:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-15709-7

Anzu's mentioned as a point of comparison for derived caenagnathidae, which apparently were trending towards shearing, while oviraptorids used their jaws for crushing.
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Furka
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How flexible was the neck of Baryonyx ? Most reconstruction I've seen seem to portray it with just a slight upwards curve, was it really stuck like that ?
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Incinerox
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Āeksiot Zaldrīzoti

IIRC, pretty good vertical flexibility, not great lateral.
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