The substance of the article is a discussion about how shared constraints yield a wide dispersion of variance in appearance but a common substrate of fundamentals.
I have had this conversation with my kids - the reason that modern sedan cars look almost identical compared to the explosion of design and attributes in the early days of common car ownership is because of federal regulations. Not that there are regulations requiring them to look alike. The regulations cover fuel economy, safety, etc. However, they are so extensive and onerous, that there really aren't all that many design variations which can meet all the functional requirements. Hence, all modern cars look alike.
From the article.
From huge titanosaurs to the diminutive Bagaceratops, herbivorous dinosaurs evolved into a massive variety of species. Yet despite this impressive diversity, there were particular features that kept cropping up time and again.
A new paper has shown how unrelated plant-eating dinosaurs repeatedly evolved similar characteristics to help them chomp down on vegetation.
Over the span of 180 million years dinosaurs evolved into a great variety of forms to fill the ecological niches in the environment. While for most of this evolutionary history the dominant plants which formed the basis of these food webs were not the same ones that we see today, the dinosaurs still filled similar roles as that of large mammals.
Today, Earth supports vast sweeping grassy plains being grazed by gazelles and rhinos. In the time of the dinosaurs, there would have been savannas of ferns that supported herds of ornithopod dinosaurs such as Hysilophodon and Parasaurolophus.
Just as giraffes have evolved to eat the tender leaves found on the tops of trees, there were towering sauropods like Brachiosaurus which exploited the crowns of huge conifers. Smaller creatures such as Psittacosaurus developed beak-like mouths to slice through tougher vegetation and possibly even to crack seeds and nuts like modern-day parrots.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment