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More Joy Day!
Jan. 11th, 2013 03:44 pm1) I woke this morning from a pleasant dream of discovering a long-lost Tolkien manuscript wherein Frodo and Sam have sex and snuggle, to discover that I had overslept. /o\ Actually, in the dream I was just about to post to my journal about this discovery. Anyway, I rushed off without breakfast, and was in time to give my lecture. Whew.
2) Guess who has already written the first draft of the C6DVD card? *smug* I'm happy with how it came out, too.
3) I am a bit stressed out, and so not able to participate in More Joy Day much except for taking advantage of other people's offers, but I thought I'd share an interesting theory about dinosaurs that I read about yesterday. Hey, it's the kind of thing that makes me happy!
Anyway, the idea is this: sauropod dinosaurs were huge, right? But their eggs weren't huge, because eggs have an upper size limit--the shell has to be thick enough to support the size, but can't grow too thick because it needs to let oxygen in. So sauropod babies were small, and it took them years and years to grow to adult size. During that time, they occupied other ecological niches than the adult sauropods, where they out-competed most small and midsize plant-eating dinosaur species. Picture an ecosystem where most of the plant eaters are the same kinds of species, but in all stages of life from tiny to midsize to huge! So at the end of the Cretaceous when that meteorite struck, the sauropod adults were too big and couldn't make it anymore, and all their children died with them. And then there weren't enough small herbivore dinosaur species to compete with the mammal herbivores.
2) Guess who has already written the first draft of the C6DVD card? *smug* I'm happy with how it came out, too.
3) I am a bit stressed out, and so not able to participate in More Joy Day much except for taking advantage of other people's offers, but I thought I'd share an interesting theory about dinosaurs that I read about yesterday. Hey, it's the kind of thing that makes me happy!
Anyway, the idea is this: sauropod dinosaurs were huge, right? But their eggs weren't huge, because eggs have an upper size limit--the shell has to be thick enough to support the size, but can't grow too thick because it needs to let oxygen in. So sauropod babies were small, and it took them years and years to grow to adult size. During that time, they occupied other ecological niches than the adult sauropods, where they out-competed most small and midsize plant-eating dinosaur species. Picture an ecosystem where most of the plant eaters are the same kinds of species, but in all stages of life from tiny to midsize to huge! So at the end of the Cretaceous when that meteorite struck, the sauropod adults were too big and couldn't make it anymore, and all their children died with them. And then there weren't enough small herbivore dinosaur species to compete with the mammal herbivores.
