Dinosaurs Were Heavy, Wet Breathers

[Still Waters]

The first ever reconstruction of how dinosaurs breathed finds that these long-extinct animals used each heavy, mucous-moistened breath to smell their surroundings and to cool their brains.

The study, published in the Anatomical Record, helps to explain why most non-avian dinosaurs had such long snouts. It also adds another dimension of life to these prehistoric animals, the last of which took its final breath around 65 million years ago.

http://news.discover...hers-141014.htm

Continued:

http://news.discover...ers-1410141.htm

[Kenemet]

I'm...gonna check with my paleontologists on this one.

What makes me suspicious is that this is a PhD student (they didn't say in what) - his coauthor, "Ruger Porter" does not seem to have authored any papers on dinosaurs that I can find -- and the statement "scientists applied the process to modeling how air flows through the noses of modern day dinosaur relatives, such as ostriches and alligators, and then to Stegoceras."

Alligators are only distant cousins and are less closely related to dinosaurs than birds. The "cool the brain" bit was also a tad suspicious/

While that may indeed be correct, it's just "off kilter" slightly in terms of what I know.

[taniwha]

[Jacques Terreur]

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dang, you beat me to it!