The Tyco layout was getting too big to manage easily, so a 4x4 extension was whacked off and everything compressed into the original 8 x 4 space. The previous track plan, a twice around loop was cut in half, creating two electrically isolated ovals, interchanged with diamonds. Poor man's DCC. Having a lot of fun with it, the new track plan is a lot more interesting to run.
Every home should have at least one. In addition to all things on rails, paleontology is also a fascination/obsession. The Common Wisdom is that dinosaurs went extinct 67,000,000 years ago, and mammals took their place. It also Common Wisdom that all dinosaurs were cold blooded reptilians. Both these notions are entirely incorrect. "Living Fossils" generally abound. Everytime one reads about some horror in Florida involving an alligator attack, that is a dinosaur, in all shape and form, attack. Turtles are living fossils. Sharks lost a gill from six to five pairs, but abound in the fossil record. There are still a species of a six gilled shark, a living fossil as several other species of fish long thought gone. Trilobites live on as horse shoe crabs. The most intelligent analysis, led by Drs. Jack Horner and Mary Schweitzer, deduces that in fact many dinosaurs, particularly T Rex, forerunner of the turkey and the chicken, and not to far away from the ostrich and the buzzard, was very much a warm blooded Avian type creature that was a scavenger, not a hunter. The untidyness of the universe is neatly explained in Bill Bryson's best seller, "A Brief History of Nearly Everything." All is not as it seems. I thrill to the mystery of it all.
You might want to update your research on the feeding habits of T-Rex. In 2013, scientists found a T-Rex tooth embedded in the vertebra of a Hadrosaur, having been fused into the victim's bone. In other words, the herbivore victim was alive when attacked by the T-Rex, survived, and subsequently lived long enough for the wound to heal. That is definitely not scavenging. The finding does not prove that T-Rex did not scavenge, but it does prove that T-Rex hunted live prey. But then again virtually all land predators will scavenge at least occasionally, given the opportunity, whether by stealing killed prey from other predators, or feasting on prey abandoned by other predators who had eaten their fill. Such behavior does not categorize them as scavengers. Your point about features of dinosaurs living on in animals today is well acknowledged. That both reptiles (cold blooded) and birds (warm blooded) exhibit many features traceable to dinosaurs likely indicates that different dinosaur species were likely warm and cold blooded, or somewhere in between.
Fun looking layout! The animated dino is cool and I notice several other neat little scenes as well. Nice work. If you want to mess with the T-rex, you could change a gas station to Sinclair or Dinoco
Absolutely, need to get a Sinclair thing going! Thank you, Big Jake, for the interesting views on the tooth in the Hadrosaur tail. I had not come across that before, and I love that sort of thing. There is also, if I remember it right, a tooth mark in like a triceratop shoulder blade, or hip, one or the other, attributed to the size of a T Rex. The speculation that supports T Rex as vulture like scavenger is the size of the olfactory lobe cavity in the skull (really big, like a vulture) and that there is not a lot of meat on a shoulder blade, or I suppose, a hip bone, suggesting that T Rex was gnawing off the gristly bits left over. Could the same be said for the tail? The argument in favor of Hadrosaur as prey is that there is evidence that the vertebrae was healing, e.g. bone growth around the imbedded tooth. That is wonderful, and adds more to the complexity of all this great stuff. The rotten thing is that we will never be quite entirely sure what exactly happened, and when. As you know, paleontology is like a 5,000 piece puzzle with maybe 4,950 of the pieces missing, and we are left with a fraction to try to deduce what in Heaven's name was going on in deep time. In looking at the Theory of Evolution, it is posited, with no breath of doubt, that all life assembled itself from a single celled organism and was shaped by the forces of nature and geology to become one of an untold number of species, from trilobite to Simian monkey. On the other hand, my Fundamentalist friends are unequivocal that God created everything in six days, and the Earth is no more than 7,000 years old. Well, the day "life," of even a most primitive sort, is invented in a laboratory will be a grim day indeed. Getting chemicals to line up and express themselves as DNA is rather like summoning the ingredients of one's pantry to throw themselves into a mixing bowl and become a cake. Thank you again, for directing my attention to this absorbing detail (no pun intended). As it is said, the Debil is in de tails. (Images of trilobite ancestors boarding the trains for Armodilloville).
