HOW MUCH POO CAN A DINO DO?
Most children go through a Dinosaur phase, and why shouldn't they? Dinosaurs are fascinating creatures. Many adults would benefit from going through a rediscovery of these terrible lizards of their own. For some people their passion for dino's is just a passing fancy; others might find it leads to a lifetime of palaeontological research. I'd love to have seen some of these behemoths in the flesh (from a safe distance, obviously – I've seen the Jurassic Park series).
It's generally accepted that most of the dinosaurs were wiped out around 66 million years ago (give or take a fortnight), most probably due to the after-effects of a great big space rock hitting the earth at high speed, but they didn't all disappear. Some of them survived and, through millennia of evolution and adaptations, their descendants live on today as birds. If you've even seen a baby Heron, for example, then you can easily imagine the link.
Try to imagine the things that you cannot do. You can't teleport from place to place. You can't turn invisible or intangible. You can't survive in places where there is no oxygen, and you can't run so fast that you actually leave the ground and soar.
Now imagine a species of creature trying to evolve parts of their body over thousands of years so that they could actually do some of these things in order to escape their hunters. Maybe they'd even try to wish the predator away or appeal to its better nature. These attempts would undoubtedly fail, many times, leading to an evolutionary cul-de-sac and eventual extinction but maybe, after many failed attempts, one of these trials just might show a spark of success. That one slightly amended creature would pass its genes and its inherent evolutionary goal down through future generations. Eventually one of them would indeed run fast enough to leave the ground, just for a little while and a short distance. Spreading its arms wide helped, as did shedding unnecessary muscle and bone mass. And eventually, after many more failed alterations, one lucky winner achieved something that had been unimaginable all those generations ago when its ancestors had first attempted to leave gravity behind. It developed feathers and flew. If you haven't come across Archaeopteryx before, then head to your favourite search engine now. It's one of the missing links between ancient dinosaurs and modern birds. Even though older proto-bird species have since been discovered, this was the one that fascinated me as a kid. It still does. Even though it had a long, serpentine tail which very much resembled that of the ground-dwelling lizards from which it developed, it had feathered wings in the way that we would definitely recognise as bird-like and could probably glide if not actually fly for short distances, certainly enough to escape being eaten.
Along with many people, when I was a child I used to think that Archaeopteryx evolved from Pterodactyls or other flying Pterosaurs but I'm a big boy now and I can admit that I was wrong. Those flying lizards died out millennia ago. It turns out that birds actually evolved from ground dwelling hunters much like the Velociraptors so beloved of film-makers. That's right; even the most humble Wren or Robin is distantly related to the mighty T-Rex. Perhaps that's where they get their bolshy attitudes from.
Of course once some of their prey species had got the hang of this gliding on wings malarkey and perhaps even tried a few exploratory flaps of their feathery arms to rise even higher into the air, the predators started to grow hungry. They were missing out on too many of their potential meals. Now as we know, nature loves everything to be in perfect harmony so to stop the prehistoric world from becoming overrun with feathery flying lizards it set the carnivores on a new evolutionary path of their own. They too began to jump a little higher to catch their airborne victims like a modern day cat leaping after a panicked Blackbird. As the old saying goes, if you can't beat them, join them, so the hunters too began to sprout feathers, become leaner and extend their forelimbs further out from their bodies. Before long they were locked in aerial battle, prey and predator trying to outfly each other in a game of death. They still do. You can see this age-old conflict played out regularly at Old Moor with our Sparrowhawks or Peregrines hunting for their lunch. Sometimes they win, sometimes their intended victim escapes. That's nature in balance, and it's as it should be.
There is a theory that some dinosaurs became extinct because their main food plants died out as the earth's atmosphere changed. This meant that they didn't have as much roughage in their diet and they became fatally constipated... It's a lovely thought but I doubt it. In fact, at Old Moor we currently have a monstrously large pile of something that suggests this definitely wasn't the way it was! You can see this and also participate in our dinosaur trail right now at our main reserve in the Dearne Valley. It will be on all through the summer holidays. Even if the weather is terrible for the rest of the summer, I'm reliably informed that our 'dinosaur poo' is waterproof.
Bring your youngsters to see our modern-day dinosaur descendants. They'll love it. Rawrrrr!!!!
Volunteer Shaun welcomes visitors to RSPB Old Moor. He also writes a weekly blog about life at the reserve titled, "View From the Shed". He usually wears a big hat.