Transylvanian Dinosaurs by David B Weishampel & Coralia-Maria Jianu

Author:David B Weishampel & Coralia-Maria Jianu [Weishampel, David B & Jianu, Coralia-Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781421400273
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2011-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

CONTINGENCY AND THE TRANSYLVANIAN DINOSAURS

If anywhere in the world should reveal the power of contingency, it would be somewhere like Transylvania in the Cretaceous, where historical possibilities and pathways can be altered by chance events in the small, insular populations living there. Because of the geographic isolation of the place, coupled with its considerable tectonic flux (chapter 3), we should find an unusual agglomeration of animals and ecological relationships in Transylvania when compared with those more typical of the nearby North American and Asian landmasses, where the coastal plains were much more extensive, luxuriant, and tectonically quiet. Just who arrived in the Transylvanian region, and from where, are both far from predictable. Equally serendipitous are differences in the structure of predator-prey relationships, patterns of growth and development, intra-specific life histories, social structures, and evolutionary dynamics. When might these colonizers have arrived? Who interacted with whom? What changes in their features might have occurred? These are some of the questions we’ll be pursuing in our attempt to assess contingency in the history of the dinosaurs from Transylvania. Whatever answers we can bring to these questions, they must certainly be couched in the one thing we learned about the Transylvanian fauna in this and the previous chapter—its susceptibility to the vagaries of unpredictable evolutionary events due to its isolation.

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