This crazy dinosaur was Earth’s largest land animal
Rob Ford?
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Rob ford? I’ve heard he’s dead… should we start a thread?
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I’m not sure that was ever much of a convention. There are zillions of dino names (even lots of familiar ones) without -saurus.
Triceratops
Velociraptor
Archaeopteryx
Diplodocus
Deinonychus
Iguanodon
Troodon
I think I’ve made my unimportant point.
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Is he dead though? Has anyone checked the locked safe?
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The locked safe is a safe bet to find him… but will he be dead or alive… Schroedinger’s Rob Ford?
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Also Ledumahadi mafube is an awesome name that’s fun to say, and it’s nice to see more than just Fake Grecko/Latin Hodge-Podge in a name for once.
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The earth’s largest land animal? Like ever? I don’t think so. I believe the heaviest was the Brachiosaur. The largest overall was Argentinasaurus.
Again, you’re mistaking this for being a statement about biological mechanisms, when instead it is a statement about taxonomy. It’s a useful concept because it helps us categorize and connect a very limited set of datapoints about past evolution. If we had fossils of ever dinosaur that ever lived then the term wouldn’t have any use. Talking about me being a “transitional organism” between my father and my son would just be wasting everyone’s time.
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So when we discover the dodo evolved exceptional camouflage abilities and a taste for vegemite then migrated en mass and in secret to Australia to await the invention of vegimite … then the dodo will be transitional?
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Most new dinosaur species are being given Sino-Latin names as a result of their provenance.
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Yeah, but thats true when you take anything to the limit; describing pond scum as transitional between single celled life and blue whales is just as true - and just as silly - as your father-son-grandson example.
We arent writing doctoral theses here. Rhetorical flourishes and semantic shorthand should be acceptable.
But saying “every species that ever existed was a transitional species” is like saying “every human who ever lived was someone’s ancestor.” It’s not just an issue of semantics, it’s a misstatement of what “ancestor” means.
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We’re not going to refer to any of those things, or any more solid species (common cockroaches, for instance) as transitional, because barring complete collapse of civilization, we have such a comprehensive record of current life on earth that we’ll be following all speciation events very closely.
And this is super-important! When they call this specimen a “transitional species”, they don’t mean that it descended from a known prior species, nor that a known later species descended from it! There’s no way of knowing that without DNA analysis, and even then we’d require more specimens than we’ll ever actually get. What they actually mean, biologically, is that this transitional species most likely descended from species that were probably closely related and presumably morphologically similar to the earlier specimens, and later specimens most likely descended from species that were probably closely related and presumably morphologically similar to this one.
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You are a gracious and worthy adversary.
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But what would Phil Foster and the “terranaut” have to say about this?
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The argument you’re posing is essentially the whole species/speciation spectrum argument, and you seem to be approaching it from the philosophical standpoint it rightly deserves, which I get, because it’s a valid school of thought. Like was most recently mentioned, the term “transitional species” refers to morphological taxonomy, and not speciation.
When a large group of related species (like sauropods) exhibit a series of unifying characteristics (like four stout legs for obligate four-leggedness,) that evolved after a common ancestor of that group and another group that lacks those characters, (theropods), a “transitional species” is one where the evolution of the traits hasn’t completely happened yet and instead looks like a blend of the ancestral and the later traits. Regardless of if the species continued to evolve into what we recognize as a later species or if it went extinct without leaving behind a lineage, it is only a transitional species if it has a blend of traits known from the later group of species and the ancestral species.
Tl;dr: it is a morphological term, NOT a speciation term.
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Thanks for that.
Would that approach not depend on which morphological features you focussed on? Take the four stout legs - then sauropods vs theropods; Fine. But if you took exactly the same set of fossils, but a different morphological feature - cutting teeth vs grinding teeth, say, or 4 molars vs 8 molars, or larger brain capacity, toenails, whatever - then the “transitional species” might be (probably would be) at a different point along the continuum. No?
In other words, ‘transitional’ only makes sense in relation to at least two other specimens (one ‘older’ and one ‘younger’) and in relation to specific features?
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