Re: Triassic protofeathers and fake-heads

["Ken Kinman" <kinman@hotmail.com>]

Rob wrote:
> What would you say to the presence of armour in late Triassic 
> ornithischians then, if they were indeed found...
> Peace,
> Rob
****************************************
    Rob, it would not surprised me if some late Triassic ornithischians had 
some armor.  I'm just saying that they would generally have less armor than 
their Cretaceous descendants.  We see a similar sort of arms race with 
trilobites in the Paleozoic.  You don't find the most spiny trilobites in 
the Cambrian----they came later as the Paleozoic arms race escalated.  I 
would expect something similar among non-theropod dinosaurs during the 
Mesozoic.  And in the Cenozoic, armadillos armour didn't just suddenly 
appear.  It gradually improved as its predators got bigger and smarter.
    Jaime said that my hypothesis was "ecologically" unsound because 
predator on predator on attacks are rare.  But I wasn't talking about 
predators on predators.  I was talking about early theropods attacking early 
ornithischians and sauropodomorphs.
    David's objections didn't make sense to me either.  It's the predators 
that are doing most of the brain development.  Gazelles concentrate on speed 
to escape, and their predators must compensate by a combination of some 
speed increase, but mostly on agility and the brainpower to harness that 
agility as the prey got faster and more agile.
    There was a Mesozoic arms race just as surely as their was a Cenozoic 
arms race.  And more and more tetrapods had bigger and more complicated 
brains than their Paleozoic ancestors.  Sure brains are metabolically 
expensive, but the advantages must outweigh the costs, or we would all still 
have simple amphibian brains.  Even if the mean hadn't gone up (and that is 
arguable), the upper end brains have clearly been increasing in size and 
mental ability.
     The biggest doesn't necessarily have to be the smartest brain, but I 
certainly couldn't be communicating with you all if I had the brain of a 
therapsid, much less the brain of a Devonian amphibian.  There are clearly 
general trends from Paleozoic to Mesozoic to Cenozoic that are so obvious, 
it puzzles me why people would want to argue against it.  Is the word 
"progress" so politically incorrect that we have to ignore the obvious 
trends.  This just seems like an overreaction to past mistakes, and the 
pendulum gets swung too far the other way.  A Komodo dragon may be dumb 
compared to its mammalian or avian prey.  But I bet it takes more brain 
power for them to ambush their prey than for a frog to stick out its tongue 
and catch an insect.
       --------- Ken



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