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I’m not even close to being a scientist, and I fail to see how a singular external trauma would alter DNA.
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Tiny arms was the T-Rex equivalent of how humans get hairy palms
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It wouldn’t directly, but it does affect your survival odds and chances of mating. The timescale and number of generations here is so unfathomably massive that little occasional nudges of even low probability could eventually have cumulative effect
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Anglicé: Whenever you feel you have a task that is too difficult, imagine a T-Rex having to make the bed.
ebay
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He who sups with the Devil should have a long spoon, but he who sups with tyrannosaurs should have short arms.
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Not just while feeding, but fighting as well. Or perhaps when competing with other males for dominance during mating season? Those chompers are just too phat.
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Well, the suggestion is it puts selective pressure on the species to develop shorter arms, because the ones with longer arms get outcompeted due to getting mauled in feeding frenzies all the time. Those injuries could cause infections, difficulty eating, or other negative survival pressures.
Still, it’s very very thin reasoning without some other line of evidence. I wish press wouldn’t even report on science that it this early in the ideation phase. Until there’s secondary lines of evidence, it’s just misleading to go around telling people about it.
It’s similar to how every single gravitational anomaly in cosmology gets reported as “alien superstructures!!!” because some scientist was goaded into saying to a reporter that it’s not impossible that it could be that.
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No, it really isn’t “baseless” or “offhand”. Like any of the historical sciences paleontology can only look at the data and interpret it rather than conducting an experiment, but there are ways that the hypothesis can be disproven – for example if a new Tyrannosaur fossil dating to a later period was discovered with larger arms, disproving the idea that the arms shrunk over the course of evolution.
There is an actual paper behind this hypothesis – it isn’t something he just came up with after a night of drinking or something.
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I didn’t say paleontology was illegitimate. I said one paper is not worth national headlines.
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Could it be, it’s to keep him from eating HIS OWN arms?
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