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

Enzo Matrix wrote:
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.

Heh, dat's my Bruv <G>


.

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