Dinosaur pelvic bones seem to support that idea. "The bones are very long, they're very thin. They appear to be quite weak," Farmer observes. "They don't appear to have been able to support a lot of forces that you would expect from locomotion of large animals." Those same characteristics may have made the pelvis useful for breathing, however. "Our hypothesis," she adds, "is dinosaurs were much more active, and they [alligators] have reverted back to a sit-and-wait lifestyle."

Indeed, not only is this kind of research helping to flesh out the scientific picture of living, breathing dinosaurs, it's yielding key information about extant creatures. As Carrier puts it, "Understanding the history of how animals evolved is very important to understanding why modern animals are built the way they are."

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