Re: OT: If you believe this, you'll believe anything

Edward Cowling London UK wrote:
In message
<198f4566-32c6-4400-a6e9-15d57fe51a94@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
hpapillon@xxxxxxxxx writes

I had to step outside for a minute to calm down today after I
heard this utter rubbish on the radio. It's a good reminder to not
believe all surveys you read.

It's about what men say, rather than what they do. The fact is,
there's far less opportunity for men to be gold-diggers compared to
the opportunities available to women, so the survey is pretty
meaningless.

There's tons of ways to interpret any results.

For instance, you could try this reasoning: Men are less faithful,
less interested in love, and less likely to think that marriage is
forever.

In fairness I did read an article in the Economist that reasoned that
in our primitive days we were only designed to last about 30 years.
So if we got married at 20 we had about ten years before the sabre
tooth tiger got us.

AAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!

This is one of my hobby horses.

There was *no such thing* as a sabre tooth tiger!

The anima that you are thinking of is called /Smilodon/ . /Smilodon/ was not
a tiger. In fact, it wasn't even all that closely related to tigers. A lion
is more of a tiger than /Smilodon/ was. Calling it a "sabre-toothed cat" is
far more accurate, although not very specific. Throughout history there have
been literally dozens of sabretoothed cats, such as /Machairodus/ ,
/Homotherium/ , /Hoplophoneus/ [1] and /Dinofelis/ . It has even been
suggested that if the modern tiger survives in the wild and is allowed to
evolve naturally, it too will evolve into a sabretooth. *That* will be a
true "sabretoothed tiger". In the meantime, it is probably best to refer to
/Smilodon/ by its proper name.

Despite being a "big" cat, Smilodon was not a "big cat" in that it was not a
pantherine. It was not even a felid, but belonged to a now extinct group
known as the machairodontids. Machairodontids diverged from felids quite
early and so although they were still cats, they weren't really all that
closely related to the felids and the basal pantherines. However, in a
display of parallel evolution, machairodontids remained morphologically
analogous to the felids - Smilodon was visually similar to a large lynx.

Some writers of popular science once refered to /Smilodon/ as a
"sabretoothed tiger" and sadly the name stuck, despite not being very
descriptive. The popular misconception of a "sabretoothed tiger" is that
they were huge, had stripes and roared all the time.

The popular understanding of really large animals is that they are all
extinct. To a certain extent this is true. The dinosaurs are gone, as are
the mammalian megafauna - Indricotheres, Brontotheres, Mastodons and the
like. However, the biggest animal ever to live - the Blue whale - is alive
today. This animal is far bigger than any dinosaur. Likewise with the cats.
A modern large pantherine is bigger than any extinct cat. The modern tiger
is the biggest form of cat that has ever lived. The largest Smilodon was
about the size of a medium-sized modern lion. Granted, they were more
massive and their stocky front limbs would have made them look huge. But
even the largest Smilodon species, /Smilodon populator/, was nowhere near as
big as a tiger.

/Smilodon/ didn't have stripes! Many reconstructions of smilodons show them
with stripes, simply because of the popular name of "sabretoothed tiger".
The fossil record shows that /Smilodon/ was an ambush hunter which lived on
open plains. Their lifestyle was probably similar to that of modern lions.
Their markings were no doubt similar as well. They would only have stripes
if they lived in a forested area like tigers. Cats that shelter in or under
trees on the open plain are usually spotted, like leopards and jaguars.

And what is this business with /Smilodon/ roaring all the time? The
/Smilodon/ that we saw recently on "Primeval" roared. Modern cats are
divided into two main tribes, the pantherines and the felids. Most cats are
felids while the so called "big cats" (lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars) are
pantherines. There is a ligament at the back of the throat of mammals called
the hyoid ligament. In some mammals it becomes ossified into the hyoid
bone. Humans have a hyoid bone - you may have heard it been spoken about on
CSI. In cats, the hyoid ligament has an effect on the animal's
vocalisations. Felid cats have the ligament and they have a wide vocal
range. Pantherine cats have a hyoid bone, which reduces their vocal range.
Pantherines can growl or roar and that's about it. Felids cannot roar.
Fossil remains of machairodonts show that they were morphologically
analogous to felids and so were likely to have had a hyoid ligament. It *is*
possible that machairodonts may have evolved ossified hyoids in a parallel
evolution. However, there are many /Smilodon/ skeletons in the fossil record
yet so far none have shown conclusive evidence of the existence of a hyoid
bone. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and most fossil
skeletons are incomplete, but I feel that it is just too much of a
coincidence for every /Smilodon/ fossil to be missing its hyoid bone. I
think that it is most likely that /Smilodon/ could not roar, yet film makers
always seem to ignore scientific evidence and give us roaring Smilodons.
Why? Well, lions roar, so Smilodons on the telly just *have* to. Besides,
Diego could roar on "Ice Age", couldn't he? The representation of /Smilodon/
shown on "Primeval" was morphologically accurate in that it was the correct
shape. Sadly, it was about four times the correct size and roared a lot,
just like Diego. Pah!

[1] Strictly speaking, /Hoplophoneus/ was a nimravid, not a cat. Nimravids
were sort of a halfway house between cats and hyenas, but by a process of
convergent evolution, many of them became very cat-like in appearance.

--
Enzo

I wear the cheese. It does not wear me.



.

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