Wow.  This finding is absolutely fascinating.  A dog-like mammal ate a dinosaur.

It could shatter everything we thought about the end of the age of dinosaurs.

If you’re my age you remember when dinosaurs were depicted as big, green, scaly lizard-y things.  I have to check myself at times when I’m asked by my kids what happened to the dinosaurs; it’s easy to slip into the old dogma that dinosaurs completely died out completely, or by means that are still speculative. 

My son asked me just last week why he can’t see a dinosaur now.  He sees them on television all the time; he can’t understand why the big gap between reality and television.  I’m sure a lot of this confusion is due to his limited grasp of scale.  How and when does a child ever get a grip on the enormity of a million years?  A billion years?  Whenever he does, he’ll understand more fully what might have happened to dinosaurs.

I tell him that he sees their close cousins every day.  Where? He asks as his head snaps around. 

Outside, in the trees, on the lawn…every time you see a bird, you see a dinosaur’s cousin.

Ah.  Now this he gets.

It wasn’t this way when I was a kid, though; I’ve had to embrace that dino-as-bird theory.  I was taught in grade school that birds were separate from other animals, and that Archaeopteryx was a hybrid dinosaur and nothing more.

So many other theories have gone by the wayside, subsets of this shift in understanding of birds as the heirs of dinosaurs – it’s hard to stay on top of it all.

This new finding I will watch carefully, though.  It makes perfect sense; mammals were smaller than dinosaurs, filling a niche unoccupied by dinosaurs.  Perhaps there weren’t a lot of small egg-robbing dinosaurs at the time.  Along come small rodents not unlike our omnivorous mice or rats, preying on dinosaur eggs or dining on carrion.  (Neither of these activities might require chewing capability, just jaw strength and ripping technique.)  Lots of protein available and presto, larger mammals evolve, the beneficiaries of plentitude.  They begin to prey on small and young dinosaurs as well as eggs and all the small progeny and before you know it, there’s a dearth of mature dinosaurs to propagate the species.  Add a meteor impact or other large, negative environmental event to increase pressure on food supply and bingo, no more big dinosaurs.

Or, only dinosaurs that can escape the feeding habits of small, pedestrian mammals survive.  Ones that can fly and land in trees, nest well above the mammal’s reach are those that survive.

A bird-like hopping dinosaur was found a few years ago in China; the argument that ensued after its finding was based on the conflict of hopping versus gliding as the origin of flight.  Did dinosaurs that were more like hopping turkeys eventually “create” flight, or was it gliders like Archaeopteryx that did so?  I think this question is still in the air (pardon the unintended pun).  This latest finding changes the nature of this argument, don’t you think?  Is it possible that mammals helped determine which dinosaurs became flying birds?  And how does all of this model against the breakup of the continents?

Fascinating stuff.  I can’t wait to talk about it with my kids.  I wonder what archaeologists will find next?

2:21:28 PM    comment []

After being a PC'r all my adult life, I think I might be ready to think differently and buy Apple.

That is to say, I bought stock in Apple.

(NOTE: this is NOT a recommendation.  Your personal financial conditions and opinions are entirely different than mine, do as your personal situation dictates.)

After the announcement about the iPod Shuffle and the Mac Mini, I think Apple finally is going the direction of the market.  It's not about computing and platforms; it's about different forms of data and moving them around easily and cheaply.

I could lose my butt on this, given the naysayers out there who think this is as good as it gets for Apple, that a sell-off is likely to happen at any time.  But I think about the speed at which iPods have gained momentum in the digital player marketplace, how every other manufacturer in the same space is forced to look to the iPod as the market leader, and I have to wonder.  Will the Shuffle cut into iPod sales?  Possibly -- but then other cheaper devices in the same space were already making inroads into iPod marketshare.  The Shuffle will recoup part of that market and offers the cachet of iPod branding that other less expensive devices cannot.

And then the Mac Mini...sweet jebus, I am still running into people who don't have computers and are afraid of them or think they are too expensive.  There's still room in this market space and there's a fit between the folks who don't have computers but do have iPods.  Apple's covering that gap nicely.  I don't see where the competition -- both in terms of equipment and OS -- will do it if they haven't already.

There's one more thing I think the Apple folks could do with iPod; perhaps they are already there, working away on this and I'm ignorant about it.  It seems to me that some folks are more visually-oriented than audiophiles.

What would it take to add a small camera device to the iPod, something that snapped on and downloaded graphic files?  No, I don't mean iPod Photo -- I mean a camera add-on accessory that augments the utility of the iPod.  And something that's not going to lock out other picture formats.  It's about moving data easily, after all, whether audio or visual data.

Wow.  Now I have more homework, research to do as I enter this new, parallel universe.

What about you?  are you going to run out and get an iPod Shuffle or a Mac Mini?  Or do you think Apple has bitten off more than they can chew?

9:38:24 AM    comment []