Monday, April 24, 2000
Perhaps dinosaurs aren’t
so strange to us after all
(ARN Editorial)
Dinosaurs have a fascinating, almost eerie
grip on the human imagination. Some of it due to their size and
ferocity. Some to their sudden and mysterious disappearance 65
million years ago. And some to the realization that Earth was
their planet for a lot longer than it has been ours.
And maybe also because dinosaurs are simply
so totally strange from us.
Now comes report of a noteworthy scientific
discovery from researchers in North Carolina who made a rare find:
the fossilized, grapefruit-sized heart of a smallish — 13-feet
long, 660 or so pounds — plant-eating dinosaur that died
66 million years ago.
They made an even more startling discovery
when they subjected the heart to a computer-enhanced CAT scan:
The heart had four chambers and an aorta, meaning that dinosaurs
were more like mammals than reptiles.
Instead of sluggish creatures, reliant on
the environment for their body heat, this dinosaur, called a Tescelosaurus,
had warm, oxygen-enriched blood coursing through its arteries
and romped around Mesozoic South Dakota in a state of high activity.
It is the distant ancestor of birds, not of cold-blooded crocodiles.
This dinosaur was, it seems, warm-blooded,
like us. Perhaps dinosaurs are not so totally strange from us
after all.
Copyright ©2000,
Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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