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Questions that don't need their own topics vol.2; New and fresh
Topic Started: Jan 4 2018, 11:18 AM (26,872 Views)
Dromaeosaurus
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Haemothermic orthostatic matrotrophic lexiphanic deuterostome
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Tartarus
Mar 26 2018, 12:55 AM
Scrublord
Mar 24 2018, 11:20 PM
New question. How did bone skeletons first evolve in vertebrates? Could the same set of features that led to bone skeletons have just as easily arisen in other animals besides chordates?
Seeing as bone is derived from cartilage and cartilage apparently exists in various types of animal besides just the chordates then I see no reason why one couldn't potentially have had bony skeletons evolve in non-chordate animals. Could perhaps make for some good alternative evolution spec.

There's a hypothesis that bones first begun as stores of phosphate to quickly produce ATP, rather than for support or defense - that would explain why bone is made out of calcium phosphate when calcium carbonate is much more common (briefly discussed here, but all the paper is useful)
Edited by Dromaeosaurus, Mar 29 2018, 03:33 PM.
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Mynameisnotdave23
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What do you guys think about the creatures from the Monster Hunter series? (In terms of plausi/possibility.) Could anything like them ever exist?
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DINOCARID
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Monster Hunter has very... Indulgent creature designs. Though their general body plans are definitely not impossible, and indeed have appeared before in earth's history, they are overly "awesomedude", macho creatures that don't make sense except as enemies in a video game.

The elemental powers, extreme aggression, and their cumbersome, elaborate appearances just aren't things that would rationally evolve, at least in an ecosystem anything like ours. I'm not hating on them, in fact, I find them pretty fun as creatures, but they are monsters, fictional enemies, and don't have much to do with speculative evolution, unless you were to try to tone them down, and rationalize them.

And now for my question: what is the advantage to keratinous beaks, or rhamphothecae? Pterosaurs, birds, turtles, several maniraptorans, dicynodonts, and shuvosaurs all independently evolved them, but why make the switch from teeth?
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Ivan_The_Inedible
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For pterosaurs and birds the answer is that of flight. The most advanced clades for both groups with regards to flight are all beaked; it weighs a helluva lot less than a toothy jaw.
As for the others, best guess on my part would be specializations for certain types of food. If anything I'd guess they're like a non-mammalian version of the rodent solution to tooth-wear.
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Scrublord
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Is there any way to predict where new islands will form millions of years from now?
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CaledonianWarrior96
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Well islands usually form where hot spots in the mantle are as magma reaches the surface and is rapidly cooled down by water and forms rock and then eventually islands. Island chains form as tectonic plates pass over these spots and multiple islands form. This is how the Hawaiian and Galapagos islands have formed, which for them is a still ongoing process so there's likely to be more islands added to those archipelagos until the hot spot dies down or is reduced in activity (if that does happen, I'm not too sure if hot spots just stop).

Alternatively continents can go through rifts which pull apart the land and can split landmasses into several parts. That's what's happening in East Africa today and I believe that's what happened to New Zealand too before the rest of the landmass sank beneath the waves.

There's also islands directly connected to continental landmasses that formed due to sea levels rising and flooding lower altitude regions and separating bits of land close to the coast or continental edge from the mainland.

So to summarise on how to predict where islands can form; look for hot spots, look for regions that are currently undergoing or in the future may start to rift and examine the topography of some landmasses at their edge and find out if rising sea levels can make islands in these regions
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ÐK
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DINOCARID
Mar 31 2018, 05:04 PM
And now for my question: what is the advantage to keratinous beaks, or rhamphothecae? Pterosaurs, birds, turtles, several maniraptorans, dicynodonts, and shuvosaurs all independently evolved them, but why make the switch from teeth?

Ivan_The_Inedible
Mar 31 2018, 05:19 PM
For pterosaurs and birds the answer is that of flight. The most advanced clades for both groups with regards to flight are all beaked; it weighs a helluva lot less than a toothy jaw.
As for the others, best guess on my part would be specializations for certain types of food. If anything I'd guess they're like a non-mammalian version of the rodent solution to tooth-wear.


I don't buy the explanation that birds and pterosaurs both lost their teeth as weight-reducing adaptations, and it doesn't seem to hold up when put under scrutiny. Consider that the largest pteranodontoid pterosaurs achieved similar sizes, with edentulous beaks (Pteranodon) or without (Tropeognathus, Coloborhynchus), or how pelagornithids grew heavy bony extensions of their jaws to function as teeth and were some of the largest flying birds period. In some cases, rhamphotheca covered jaws could be heavier than jaws with teeth!

Rather, the development of rhamphotheca in flying animals is more likely to be for the same reasons as its development in terrestrial animals: for their diets. The comparison to rodent teeth could be pretty apt, as it's been suggested that keratinous beaks would provide continually growing cutting surfaces, certainly I've seen this applied to dicynodonts and turtles (which have similar beak structures). The link above also mentions how rhamphotheca is generally stronger for its weight than teeth are, so herbivores can exert greater stress and flexibility on their jaws if they have hard beaks. This could tie in to how beaked animals often have fused jaw tips, providing larger chopping surfaces and a stronger connection between the two dentaries.
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Scrublord
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CaledonianWarrior96
Apr 1 2018, 05:41 AM


So to summarise on how to predict where islands can form; look for hot spots, look for regions that are currently undergoing or in the future may start to rift and examine the topography of some landmasses at their edge and find out if rising sea levels can make islands in these regions
Do we have any idea where hot spots currently exist? Or where rifts could form islands in the future?
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CaledonianWarrior96
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Scrublord
Apr 1 2018, 11:45 AM
CaledonianWarrior96
Apr 1 2018, 05:41 AM


So to summarise on how to predict where islands can form; look for hot spots, look for regions that are currently undergoing or in the future may start to rift and examine the topography of some landmasses at their edge and find out if rising sea levels can make islands in these regions
Do we have any idea where hot spots currently exist? Or where rifts could form islands in the future?
Well here is a list of rift valleys and zones on Wikipedia that you can browse as a starting point for potential islands caused by rifting.

Here is another list of current hot spots on continental plates according to Wikipedia. Again you can use this as a starting point and look up on other sites for more information. There seems to be a lot of plumes in the Pacific so there could be a good starting point for island formation predictions
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The Beryoni Galaxy: The Biologically Rich and Politically Complex State of our Galaxy (Habitational Zone)

- Beryoni Critique Thread (formerly: Aliens of Beryoni)
The Ecology of Skull Island: An Open Project for the Home of King Kong (Alternative Universe)
The Ecology of Wakanda: An Open Project for the Home of Marvel's Black Panther (Alternative Universe)

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Bob-The-Seagull-King
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Mynameisnotdave23
Mar 29 2018, 08:27 PM
What do you guys think about the creatures from the Monster Hunter series? (In terms of plausi/possibility.) Could anything like them ever exist?
I feel like a decent amount of the creatures from the Monster Hunter World at least (I have only played world, so I can't say for the other games) are plausible. Anything that isn't considered a 'monster' (ie, a huge giant creature) I would consider 100% and even the sort of thing I wouldn't be surprised to have turned up in the fossil record. The larger monsters are more iffy. While a fair few of them are quite plausible and even something that once again I would not be surprised to see in the fossil record the larger ones such as elder dragons, or any of the flying big monsters, would need a considerable downsizing or redesign to be plausible imo.
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Setaceous Cetacean
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What would the effects be on a planet’s weather systems and overall climate if it had a slower rotation (around 4 Earth days)?
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opeFool
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Apr 1 2018, 06:31 PM
What would the effects be on a planet’s weather systems and overall climate if it had a slower rotation (around 4 Earth days)?
Depends on the atmospheric density and the amount of sunlight it's getting (for weather), but overall the planet would experience a much more drastic disparity in temperature between days and nights, especially inland. Areas near large bodies of water would probably have less of a drastic change in temperatures (water's ability to retain heat allows for milder temperatures during the night).
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Setaceous Cetacean
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Well, in Solais’s case, the atmosphere is over four times as dense and it’s slightly colder than Earth. I was also wondering how a slower rotation would affect storm distribution due to the Coriolis effect.
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Scrublord
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CaledonianWarrior96
 
Here is another list of current hot spots on continental plates according to Wikipedia. Again you can use this as a starting point and look up on other sites for more information. There seems to be a lot of plumes in the Pacific so there could be a good starting point for island formation predictions


Most of those are existing hotspots that have already formed islands. Do we have any way of knowing where new ones will pop up?
Edited by Scrublord, Apr 1 2018, 09:43 PM.
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