Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 10, 2015 20:36:16 GMT 5
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Post by theropod on Jul 11, 2015 2:45:47 GMT 5
Only skimmed it so far, but that’s truly interesting. The presence of such a large number of volumetric estimates in a single study is a major advance, but simply seeing that variety of psoposcideans lined up was already very nice. Also I didn’t realize there were such huge mastodons or Palaeoloxodon specimens. Fascinating, I should really learn more about this clade. btw I myself and pretty much everyone here of course knew what you meant, still, the thread title would suggest that Paraceratherium was bigger than a blue whale  |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Jul 11, 2015 3:26:53 GMT 5
Awesome! So I guess rhinocerotoids didn't beat out proboscideans in terms of size after all, akin to their modern representatives. It's also awesome that land mammals can apparently get larger than previously thought and of course, it's always fun to see something dethroned.
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blaze
Paleo-artist 
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Post by blaze on Jul 11, 2015 4:53:29 GMT 5
I'm not convinced by that femur fragment and I feel that one estimates for P. antiquus is too optimistic, same for those of "M." borsoni... But still, nice that it's finally out (in accepted manuscript form at least). I think it was 2013 the first time I read that Larramendi was working in this publication.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 11, 2015 9:07:02 GMT 5
btw I myself and pretty much everyone here of course knew what you meant, still, the thread title would suggest that Paraceratherium was bigger than a blue whale Sorry, there's that character limit in the thread titles. Couldn't fit the more accurate title in. |
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Post by creature386 on Jul 11, 2015 12:00:26 GMT 5
How about "New largest known land mammal"?
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Cross
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The biggest geek this side of the galaxy. Avatar is Dakotaraptor steini from Saurian.
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Post by Cross on Jul 13, 2015 12:39:34 GMT 5
One of my friends who is a member of my Google+ community "Project Paleontology", did share this thread onto the community to which I commented :
He then responded with
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Post by theropod on Jul 13, 2015 13:36:54 GMT 5
That difference in density is pretty insignficant though. Compare that to sauropods presumed to have an overall SG of 0.7-0.8, it doesn't really come close, or even considerably closer to that, and as explained by the paper it is pretty normal for mammals.
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blaze
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Post by blaze on Jul 13, 2015 21:59:34 GMT 5
What Larramendi really wrote is that the SG of compact bones alone can be 2.0 and since mastodonts have proportionally sturdier skeletons that'll increase the overall SG somewhat. Larramendi specifically writes the he used SG of 0.99 for the proboscidenas in his study (with the exception of Moeritherium) and depending on the size of the tusks it went up to 1.01.
Furthermore while what Larramendi wrote about mastodons is true for the american mastodon and to some degree gomphotheres, it is not true for M. borsoni or P. nomadicus and he doesn't say it is. For example, the 133cm Autrey femur of M. borsoni mentioned in the supplementary material has a shaft width of only 16cm (Bergounioux and Crouzel 1960), only ~10% bigger than in an american mastodon femur only 108cm long. The P. nomadicus femur from Narsinghpur described by Prinsep (1834) which Larramendi estimates at 155cm long, has a circumference of 483mm, the same as in a 110cm american mastodon femur (Haynes 1993), these animals are clearly nowhere near as heavily built as the american mastodon and that shows in their estimates, according to Larramendi's equations a 4.1m tall american mastodon would weight 22% more than the largest M. borsoni while a 5m tall american mastodon would weight almost 50% more than the largest P. nomadicus.
All other remains of P. nomadicus come from animals about half the size of that suggested by that femur fragment and there's no known humerus of P. nomadicus as far as I know. If you compare the measurements in table 9 you'll see that P. nomadicus only has a proportionally longer femur than P. antiquus (kinda like P. recki), this is relevant because not only it seems that Larramendi's shoulder height estimate for the largest P. nomadicus is isometrically scaled from his P. antiquus skeletal but the weight estimate also appears to come from his P. antiquus equation, if P. nomadicus just has a taller butt then the shoulder height and weight estimates would go down and that is if that femur fragment is as big as claimed in Prinsep (1834) anyway, downsizing them further requires more assumptions and material that we don't have, Larramendi was consevative enough.
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blaze
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Post by blaze on Jul 16, 2015 0:33:16 GMT 5
Something I learned recently, Qiu and Wang (2007) have described a Paraceratherium specimen tha preserves an skull and complete neck, thoracic and lumbar region, said skull is ~130cm long which will make it grade II in Granger and Gregory (1936) size clases but guess what? the cervicals of this specimens are bigger than the those that all previous workers thought belonged to the largest known individual of the genus but the head and body of this new specimen are at most 90% of Paul's 4.8m tall specimen.
So now the only decent supporting evience for a 480cm tall Paracerathere is the metacarpal... Assuming the cross scaling is correct there and doesn't turn out to be wrong like it happened with the cervicals.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 16, 2015 22:41:11 GMT 5
So the largest Paraceratherii would be actually more in the ~4.3ish meter region?
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blaze
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Post by blaze on Jul 17, 2015 2:46:41 GMT 5
Yes but mmm Paraceratherii?
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Post by theropod on Jul 17, 2015 3:03:50 GMT 5
Correct plural should be Paracerateria, shouldn’t it?
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blaze
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Post by blaze on Jul 17, 2015 3:23:09 GMT 5
I don't think genera are supposed to have plurals, closest thing would be language specific "common name" versions like say, tyranosaurs or brontotheres.
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Post by theropod on Jul 17, 2015 3:36:29 GMT 5
Why aren’t there supposed to be plurals? As we’ve seen, they’d come in handy (though admittedly the english alternatives you gave work just as well, and are perhaps not quite as likely to be mistaken for another taxon).
There are plurals of everyday animal names (lions, giraffes…), and with most extinct taxa the genus name is used as the everyday name too, so it also needs a plural to refer to several individuals. The plural form (in any language) will often be used to refer to a higher-level taxon encompassing that genus of course (elephants=Elephantidae), though in this case it doesn’t exist…
There doesn’t seem to be any real solution, but I guess if you try making a latinised form of the plural, it should be the correct one.
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