Re: Body Hair Loss in Aquatic Mammals
H. M. Hubey (hubey@pegasus.montclair.cro)
21 Oct 1995 11:25:07 -0400
pnich@globalone.net (Phil Nicholls) writes:
>hubey@pegasus.montclair.cro (H. M. Hubey) graced us with the following
>words:
>>hubey@pegasus.montclair.cro (H. M. Hubey) writes:
>>>If cattle can keep cool by gathering on hilltops, some kind
>>>of an ape should have been able to assume the famous position
>>>and keep cool to "extend the foraging times".
>>Sorry to follow-up to my own post but I should clarify
>>this. I meant to pick on baboons because someone seems
>>to have suggested that baboons are/were plains animals.
>A savannah is not a plain.
savannah: a flat, treeles, tropical or subtropical grassland
plain: an extensive, level, treeless land region
steppe: a vast grass-covered sermiarid plain, as found in in
southeastern Europe and Siberia.
And I don't see why steppe has to be semiarid; the Ukraine used
to turn into a mudhole around autumn. The tall grass in
steppes is talked about by every traveler.
Anyway, we're getting off track. let's talk about
"savannah woodlands", and "mosaic savannah" and maybe
even extend it to a new version of the theory;
"forested steppes", or "savannah steppe", "riverine
savannah", "savannah ocean interface"... :-)..
>Perhaps baboons baboons already occupy a successful ecological
>niche on the savannah. Perhaps baboons are biomechanically too
>specialized to become full time bipeds.
Hmmm, you know the story of the guy who brough a kg of liver
home and asked his wife to cook it? She burned it and threw it
away and blamed it on the cat. the guy weighed the cat; 1 kg!
He said:
"Wife, if this is the cat, where's the liver? If this is the
liver where's the cat?"
So are they too stupid to realize that standing upright will
cool them down or not? Can they feel themselves cool down
or not? If not where is the savings in heat expulsion? If
they can feel themselves cool down, then why shouldn't they
have become more bipedal? Hell, they still got their fur?
So if the savannah did it, there must have been some
special mechanism? What was it? Did the lions step on
their tails?
--
Regards, Mark
http://www.smns.montclair.cro/~hubey
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