Balancing a Sauropod The Physiology of a Dinosaur

About this book

One completely unexplored area in terms of physiology is the era of dinosaurs – with good reason, they lived over 100 million years ago and we're left to make inferences based on fossilized bones. However, by merging classical, comparative, and extreme physiology and applying it to current palaeontological knowledge of dinosaurs, Balancing a Sauropod: The Physiology of a Dinosaur will for the first time begin to provide a sound physiological underpinning for how they may have lived 100 million years ago.

Sauropods were the largest land animals to ever walk the earth with an incredible distance from 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.

The topics focus on major organ systems and apply them to potential sauropod physiology. Less emphasis is given to the skeletal system, as that has been discussed extensively in other literature. Each organ system will be discussed in terms of function and current understanding of how they work in a comparative environment. Balancing a Sauropod: The Physiology of a Dinosaur is written at a technical level to both inform the lay reader and provide a sound argument to scientists in the field.

Contents

1. What do we know about the sauropods?
2. The environment of the sauropod and it's physiology
3. The sauropod's deep breath
4. Moving blood through a sauropod: the vasculature
5. At the heart of the sauropod
6. Ideas on sauropod kidneys and digestion
7. Balancing the sauropod

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Biography

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, and 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 more than 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. This book does not take on palaeontology in the classic sense but uses extreme physiology to examine the potentially fascinating extreme physiology of sauropods.