Word: weishampel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fossilization. The way bones fit together can reveal how an animal's joints worked, how its limbs moved, what kind of food it ate and how agile it was. Comparisons with living animals are also invaluable. "To understand dinosaur bones, you must take apart living animals," asserts paleontologist David Weishampel, who teaches anatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "Fossils don't come with instruction kits...
...earliest dinosaurs were meat eaters, how did they evolve into herbivores -- a key to their ability to survive in a variety of environments? The arrangement of teeth and jaws was probably a major factor, and that may explain in part why dinosaurs were so successful overall. Weishampel is trying to correlate tooth design, patterns of tooth wear, the size of the mouth and other aspects of skull mechanics with the types of plants the dinosaurs might have munched. "You can get a rough feeling for how fibrous the material was that they ate, and whether they sheared, ground or pulped...
...Weishampel is also using his dental analyses to determine how the advent and proliferation of flowering plants during the early Cretaceous might have influenced population levels of large, plant-eating dinosaurs. There is some evidence, he says, that the spread of flowering plants hurt large-bodied dinosaurs like sauropods and helped the somewhat smaller duck-billed and horned dinosaurs. When flowering plants began to dominate the landscape in the mid-Cretaceous, they edged out the conifers, tree ferns and other plants that the long-established sauropods depended on. The smaller vegetarians, which evolved much later, had not become...
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