Mosasaurs: Masters of the Bronx Cheer
19.05.12
, Or any other dinosaur had a prehensile, forked tongue. All you have to do is look at living birds and crocodylians to understand why. Although all the non-avian dinosaur lineages were extinguished about 66 million years ago, the descendants of dinosaurs (birds) and their distant cousins (alligators and crocodiles) remain . Together these creatures compose what’s known as an “extant phylogenetic bracket” – evolutionary bookends which can be studied to see which traits different lineages shared in common, and, therefore, provide a basis for reconstructing aspects of extinct organisms that can’t be studied directly. Since birds don’t have snake-like tongues, and neither do crocodylians, then there’s no reason to think that dinosaurs did. Sorry, David and Michael.
There was one group of formidable prehistoric predators which probably flicked forked tongues, though. We don’t know this from direct fossil evidence – unsurprisingly, tongues don’t preserve well in the fossil record – but because of the same sort of evolutionary reasoning.
Source: Wired News (blog)