Balancing a Sauropod The Physiology of a Dinosaur

Langue : Anglais

Auteur : Isakson Brant E

Couverture de l’ouvrage Balancing a Sauropod

Résumé
Sommaire
Biographie
Commentaire

Balancing a Sauropod: The Physiology of a Dinosaur provides a sound physiological underpinning for how they may have lived 100 million years ago. The book's topics focus on major organ systems and apply it to potential sauropod physiology. Less emphasis is given to the skeletal system, as that has been discussed extensively in other literature. Each organ system is discussed in terms of function and current understanding of how they work in a comparative environment. This resource is written at a technical level to both inform the lay reader and provide a sound argument to scientists in the field.

Sauropods were the largest land animal to ever walk the earth with an incredible distance form heart to brain, begging the question, how did they maintain blood flow in their brain? Also, the climate sauropods lived in was hypoxic compared to what we live in now, so how did the dinosaurs breathe in the hypoxic Jurassic era? These questions and others expand to multiple fascinating questions the book will dissect in order of organ systems.

1. Sauropods were ruled by (crazy) physiology
2. Sauropods to turkeys?
3. Sauropod bones and muscle
4. The neck of a sauropod
5. The (likely) impossible circulation of a sauropod large creature?
6. The (possibly crazy) blood of a sauropod
7. Skinning a sauropod
8. Sauropod poop
9. Sauropod pee
10. The odd breath of a sauropod
11. The (diminutive) brain of a sauropod
12. Sex and the sauropod
13. Will we ever know (if we’re even close to correct) about sauropod physiology?

Dr. Brant Isakson is a tenured Professor of Molecular Physiology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He teaches medical school students vascular physiology, as well as the PhD students Graduate Physiology and Extreme Physiology courses. His research disciplines include physiology, translational science, cardiovascular biology, metabolism, and molecular pharmacology. Dr. Isakson has published over 150 scholarly manuscripts in top-tier journals and serves on several Editorial Boards. He’s exceptionally well-trained in reading, interpreting, teaching and writing about the physiological properties of animals. The proposed book does not take on paleontology in the classic sense but uses extreme physiology to examine the potential fascinating extreme physiology of sauropods.

Introduces how a dinosaur utilized its complete organ system to function as an animal physiologically
Discusses how the once dominant sauropod could have come to specialize and adapt at the physiological level to the Jurassic environment
Explores extreme physiologies