Kind of an alternative use of the word “evolved,” no?
From “Light Shed On South Pole Dinosaurs” (ScienceDaily, Aug. 5, 2011), we learn:
Dog-sized dinosaurs that lived near the South Pole, sometimes in the dark for months at a time, had bone tissue very similar to dinosaurs that lived everywhere on the planet, according to a doctoral candidate at Montana State University.
That surprising fact falsifies a 13-year-old study and may help explain why dinosaurs were able to dominate the planet for 160 million years, said Holly Woodward, MSU graduate student in the Department of Earth Sciences and co-author of a paper published Aug. 3 in the journal PLoS ONE.
The scientists had expected to find that South Pole dinosaurs differed from others, as an earlier study implied.
“This tells us something very interesting; that basically from the very start, early dinosaurs, or even the ancestors of dinosaurs, evolved a physiology that allowed an entire group of animals to successfully exploit a multitude of environmental conditions for millions of years,” Woodward said.
We also learn that dinosaur bones have annual growth lines and those specimens that don’t have them are not yet a year old.