
A Third of Dinosaur Species Never Existed? - Shamiq
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091009-dinosaur-species-never-existed.html
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brandnewlow
Having attended a 2004 lecture in which Jack Horner told us that dinosaurs
were probably all covered in feathers I find that all and any new dinosaur
discoveries must be taken with a grain of salt. Though scientists have been
studying dinosaurs for 100 years or so, it seems increasingly likely they've
barely scratched the surface of really knowing what that era was like.

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olliesaunders
There's a comment at the end of the video, something along the lines of:

    
    
      Our old image of dinosaurs as ruthless killing machines 
      may be wrong, [...] some of them were caring parents, 
      with teenagers and younger offspring; they may have lived
      in herds; they could have been highly social.
    

That makes sense to me. There are evolutionary advantages to being social and
sociability occurred in mammals in a relatively short time after the
extinction of the dinosaurs. It would be pretty amazing if, in all the time
the dinosaurs had, they never evolved to be social. Don't you think?

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dcurtis
I've never seen a social lizard, and they've had 65 million years longer to
evolve than dinosaurs.

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idm
Just yesterday, I was watching a pack of Komodo Dragons ... well, eat the
corpse of some mammal. It was a video - I didn't see it in real life. But the
point is: they weren't eating each other.

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vinutheraj
Well the adults are cannnibalistic, known to eat the young ones.

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billswift
As far as I know ALL carnivorous snakes and lizards are potentially
cannabalistic, that's why herpetologists have to be extremely careful not to
keep different sized snakes or lizards together.

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jhawk28
Just a good example of how hard it is to tell what things are like based on
remains rather than actually being there.

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abefortas
It's a good example if it's right.

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hristov
But if it is wrong they it would also be a good example, no?

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tlb
The proper definition of a species is that individuals can interbreed and have
fertile offspring. It's impossible to test whether two fossils are the same
species. The usual assumption is that if they look different they were
different species, but that can be wrong for many reasons. Dogs, for example,
are all one species, but you might well classify Chihuahuas and Labradors
separately based on their remains

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gnaritas
I think your definition is a bit off. If I recall correctly, a species is a
group that _does_ interbreed naturally and produce fertile offspring, not just
can.

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tlb
For full discussion, including various proposed definitions and the problems
of identifying species from fossils, see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species>

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billswift
This is a fairly common problem in taxonomy, where to draw the line between
species and subspecies. That is why you will occasionally see mention of
"lumpers" and "splitters", those who include everything possible into one
species, and those who break things up into multiple species rather than
subspecies. (Lumpers and splitters also occur at higher levels of organization
- genera, families, and even orders - in some classes and phyla.) Of course,
in paleontology you also have the problem of different aged animals looking
different and single oddities getting written up as species because of the
extremely small sample size available.

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senthilnayagam
paleontology need to get help from CSI people :)

what they do currently is no more than a educated guess, this might also apply
to evolution theory in general, until we have a time machine there is no way
we can prove they are/were right.

