5 thoughts on “Into Arthropods?”

  2. This is fascinating stuff, but you need to carry around bags of salt. I’m reminded of somebody’s paradox (forget who) wherein some early researcher in dolphins asserted that they didn’t have the muscle mass to swim as fast as they do, and there must be some clever friction-reducing aspect to their skin or something. Turns out, he was just wrong about the hydrodynamics.

    And that’s studying an animal that you can measure, whole, and not just its bones.

    I wonder if this kind of research gets any kind of boost from the tremendous effort put into animating monsters for the purpose of CG in movies? There’s a lot of money there, trying to make realistic movement. Indeed, I read of a European physicists studying fluids who quit science to start up a company dedicated to doing nothing but simulating liquids for movies. Strange times we live in, with such enormous time and effort devoted to simulating reality, so that we can simulate it slightly differently from the way it actually is.

  3. ISTR this discussion going around a number of years ago. The answer proposed at the time was that the pterosaurs got up airspeed by jumping off suitably high cliffs. Or, I guess, climbing and jumping out of also-suitably high trees.

  4. The answer proposed at the time was that the pterosaurs got up airspeed by jumping off suitably high cliffs.

    Yes, except that the article points out that many of the fossils were discovered in areas that had no high cliffs in the era in which they would have lived…

  5. many of the fossils were discovered in areas that had no high cliffs in the era in which they would have lived…

    Fossils are found where the animal died, and what would be more fatal to a pterosaur than landing in a place where it can’t take off again?

    Of course, the researchers undoubtedly take that into account.

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