Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!bcsaic!michaelm
From: michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (Michael Maxwell)
Newsgroups: talk.origins,sci.bio
Subject: Re: Dinosaur Heresies
Message-ID: <629@bcsaic.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 19-Mar-87 13:24:17 EST
Article-I.D.: bcsaic.629
Posted: Thu Mar 19 13:24:17 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 21-Mar-87 10:21:25 EST
References: <14011@cca.CCA.COM>
Reply-To: michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (Michael Maxwell)
Organization: Boeing Computer Services AI Center, Seattle
Lines: 30
Xref: mnetor talk.origins:424 sci.bio:170

In article <14011@cca.CCA.COM> g-rh@cca.UUCP (Richard Harter) writes:
>[mini-review of Bakker "Dinosaur Heresies"]
>...  (2)  One of the striking
>things about dinosaurs is that they were large -- there were no very
>small dinosaurs (and some got very large indeed.)  Why?

I'm curious--how do we know there weren't any tiny dinosaurs, but their bones
just haven't survived in sufficient quantities for us to find and identify?
I suppose the answer is that bones of tiny animals--mammals (and birds?) have
survived, and we have found them.  So my question is perhaps better worded,
how easy is it to distinguish mammal bones from tiny dinosaur bones?  How do
we know that we haven't found fossils of tiny dinosaurs, but just incorrectly
identified them as mammals (or birds)?  If I recall correctly, most of the
Mesozoic mammal bones that have been found are jaws and teeth, and I guess
the dinosaur teeth pattern is quite different from the mammalian pattern.
Is this correct?

Has anyone tried to estimate what percentage of the species of dinosaurs that
were extant during the Mesozoic have been found?  This is related to the
question of the preceding paragraph--if we've found fossils of 1% of the
dinosaur species that existed, then it would seem quite possible that we might
have just missed the small ones.  Clearly we cannot know what percent of the
unknown number number of species that existed N is (where N is the number of
species we've found), but is it possible to estimate what that unknown number
is?
-- 
Mike Maxwell
Boeing Advanced Technology Center
	arpa: michaelm@boeing.com
	uucp: uw-beaver!uw-june!bcsaic!michaelm