Think of a dinosaur and what may come to mind is a large, lumbering animal with four legs, a long neck, a tiny head and tail.
Now a new species helps to explain how this iconic dino body shape evolved.
The new dinosaur, Aardonyx celestae, belongs to the Sauropodomorpha, a group that includes the ancestors of sauropods — gigantic, four-legged herbivores — but not the sauropods themselves. The largest animals that ever walked the earth were sauropodomorphs.
The recently documented sauropodomorph, described in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, lived around 200 to 183 million years ago in South Africa and was nearly 30 feet in length.
Discovery News (thanks, Fosca)
So if more and more of us become obese, we’ll eventually evolve into a new (bigger) species of human, and Jack and the Beanstalk might eventually turn out to be a prophecy rather than a fairy tail.
Or something.
Well that makes me feel slightly better about not being able to do up the zip fastner on my old work trousers yesterday: I’m not putting on weight, I’m evolving!
If putting on weight causes the development of a long neck how do we explian naomi Campbell?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090514-dinosaurs-long-necks.html
If you go to the above website you will discover that “long neck” dinosaurs didn’t actually hold their necks up-right, like your picture shows, it would have put too much pressure on their hearts.
How in the world did they fit on the ark?