How Dinosaurs Shrank and Became Birds(quantamagazine.org)
quantamagazine.org
How Dinosaurs Shrank and Became Birds
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150602-dinosaurs-to-birds/
4 comments
Simple version: The amount of Oxygen in the air decreased, giving the Dino-birds less energy. so they became smaller.
Also air with less Oygen is lighter, another good reason for Dino-birds to loose weight.
Also air with less Oygen is lighter, another good reason for Dino-birds to loose weight.
On the contrary: The amount of CO₂ decreased. I see more of a correlation between CO₂, big plants (food supplies) and animals.
Why is 10 million years a blip in evolutionary time when you see the massive chamges that can happen on Islands in 100s of years?
You can see some chang s over 100's of years. Nothing as dramatic as this. I wouldn't call 10 million years quite a blip though. But dinosaurs were around for almost 200 million years! Some animals have not evolved much in hundreds of millions of years, like sharks and crocodiles.
Yeah, it's a remarkable thing that Homo Sapiens is closer in time to Tyrannosaurus Rex than T. Rex is in time to Stegosaurus.
Just so.
In the short span of ~30,000 years, we've managed to turn wolves into corgis that look like puppies their entire lives. We ourselves are often said to be a result of paedomorphosis from other primates -- now with less hair, bigger heads, and weaker muscles.