General Discussion Thread of DOOM

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My dad thinks that a large part of stuff on dinosaurs is absolute rubbish or baseless assumptions, while I can see where he's coming from I have high hopes for the future of fossil science and how we can use technology to learn more about our past. While dinosaurs may seem stale and boring, to me they're really interesting. It's why I love shows like walking with the dinosaurs even though a large part of it is assumed bullshit.
 
Hmmm, the descendants of evolved cockroaches will do the same kind of surveys and theories about us in 65 million years?

It is possible, that the radiation and contamination this species caused, helped our ancestors to evolve out of their primodial state! Because the only living creature capable of surviving in that hazardious environment, was as the ancient cockroach!

What nonsense! Everone knows that the great and holy Roach, with it's mystical antennas clansed the planet, to allow our blessed and superior people to thrive! And it did all of this in just 3 days. This scientific nonsense is full of blasphemous ideas! No decent Roach worth it's chitin would believein such ridiculous thoughts! Mammals! With intelligence? Hah! The thought alone is disgusting! What's next? Giant Lizards maye?!
 
Dr Fallout said:
My dad thinks that a large part of stuff on dinosaurs is absolute rubbish or baseless assumptions, while I can see where he's coming from I have high hopes for the future of fossil science and how we can use technology to learn more about our past. While dinosaurs may seem stale and boring, to me they're really interesting. It's why I love shows like walking with the dinosaurs even though a large part of it is assumed bullshit.
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There's a difference between "bullshit" and "speculation" :D
We simply can't know how they behaved, untill we see them, which is never. So, as scientists we can go "that's it then!" and never study them again, or we can try to gleam whatever we can from fragments - which DOES sometimes yield behavioral information, such as a fascinating incident of finding self-healed bone-fractures on a Tyrannosaurus leg, strongly indicating that it was being fed - kept alive - by a peer, while the foot healed.

Then again, there is a lot of speculation that is groundless, or too directly based on living animals. There is a fine balance to follow, to accept dinosaurs as different from living creatures - but also living creatures just like the ones we have today, smelling, hunting, sleeping, swimming, vocalizing, clawing, digging, pooping, peeing, fucking, and so on

The fauna was, without a doubt, very different from todays mammal fauna though. Mammals "allow" certain ratios of giants/miniatures, certain growth-rates from young to adult, certain limits to size, etc, that dinosaurs defied. This means the "Morrison Formation" for example has a WHOLE lot of enormous Allosaur-like fossils, which compared to Serengeti would mean lions and tigers and jaguars and leopards and bears and wolves all over the place. This was normal then - because a single dead Sauropod could feed all of that - and there were *millions* if Sauropods on those plains :D It's pretty wild to think about, and compare to modern nature.
(in fact there were so many Sauropods, that they might have caused the Jurassic-Cretaceous biological collapse by eating up all the forests. In the Cretaceous dinosaur evolution almost had to "start anew", this is when birds begin to flourish, alongside "raptors", horned dinosaurs, and the famous Tyrannosaurus, evolving from tiny survivors of the collapse)
 
Apparently cockroaches aren't actually well suited to live after a nuclear holocaust because of their reliance on Human temperatures and food. But they'll damn well survive.
 
zegh8578 said:
They were all kinds of weird shit, and it's kind of odd that it's taking the scientific community this long to realize how little a skeleton tells us about the living thing.
Sure, the skeleton DOES provide a template for every single muscle, because skeletons serve as muscle attachment points. But beyond that, cartillage, skin, integument, we are only scratching the surface of how profoundly weird (or ass ugly, depending on how you judge it) many of these creatures were :D
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Was reading an article about the supposed bite force of ancient animals including dinosaurs. Supposedly adult T-Rex had really strong bite force, and I guess it did. It wouldn't have grown that big if it didn't eat it's protein etc. Still, how do they know T-Rex wasn't just a carrion eater? Eating lots and lots of tender rotten meat? Anyway, out of present day animals salt water crocodiles have very strong bite force, you can close their jaws with your hands but it's very difficult to pry the jaws open. And even they also eat rotten meat they've stored in a place in the river or somewhere.

I have a fascination with sharks and find the Megalodon to be quite fascinating. They've been trying to get a movie project going based on Steve Alten's Meg - books but it hasn't happened yet.
 
MutantScalper said:
Was reading an article about the supposed bite force of ancient animals including dinosaurs. Supposedly adult T-Rex had really strong bite force, and I guess it did. It wouldn't have grown that big if it didn't eat it's protein etc. Still, how do they know T-Rex wasn't just a carrion eater? Eating lots and lots of tender rotten meat? Anyway, out of present day animals salt water crocodiles have very strong bite force, you can close their jaws with your hands but it's very difficult to pry the jaws open. And even they also eat rotten meat they've stored in a place in the river or somewhere.

I have a fascination with sharks and find the Megalodon to be quite fascinating. They've been trying to get a movie project going based on Steve Alten's Meg - books but it hasn't happened yet.
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The carrion debate was quite strong for a while, but ultimately most had to realize that it is a moot discussion
1. We will never know untill we see a live T in action
2. There are very few "pure" carrion eaters alive in the animal kingdom, most predators just go with what they get.
3. Tyrannosaurus bite-marks have been found on skeletal remains that show signs of having survived, and lived on. This is real evidence Tyrannosaurus attacked living things. Examples of these bite-fossils include fully grown ceratopsids (Triceratops) and hadrosaurs "duck-billed dinosaurs" (the latter have no actual defenses, and seems to have survived simply by legging it - and outrunning the T)

These points form a pretty realistic and natural image of a Tyrannosaur, a big, heavy animal that would not shy away from a fight against horned dinosaurs, but that would just as likely use its huge size to chase away smaller Albertosaurs for example (smaller, slimmer close relatives) and steal their kill, the same way hyenas and lions harass each others over fresh kills.
Animals are flexible, and do rarely adhere to strict behavioral rules

Take the example of a T with a broken leg, showing signs of caring between individuals. Another T has a large chunk of its neck bitten off by another T. So they were capable of strong bonding, but also deadly rivalry, within the species.
 
Dr Fallout said:
Hey @zegh8578, if you want to make a dinosaur thread and post facts... I'm up for that.
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Dude, I wouldn't know where to begin :D You're basically asking if I want to write a dinosaur book on the forum :D I'll keep providing little nuggets of info now and then though, and I'm always happy to answer specific questions. I'm a well of information regarding them, as you might have noticed :V
 
zegh8578 said:
Dude, I wouldn't know where to begin :D You're basically asking if I want to write a dinosaur book on the forum :D I'll keep providing little nuggets of info now and then though, and I'm always happy to answer specific questions. I'm a well of information regarding them, as you might have noticed :V
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That's good, it's always interesting to learn more about dinosaurs, though Human history will always take first place for me even though it suffers from a lot of political, religious and national bias. But it's really good for finding inspiration when playing tabletop war games.
 
Dr Fallout said:
That's good, it's always interesting to learn more about dinosaurs, though Human history will always take first place for me even though it suffers from a lot of political, religious and national bias. But it's really good for finding inspiration when playing tabletop war games.
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I learned all the major basics when I was little, real dino-nerd there. I would harass my poor parents to get me the most hardcore dinosaur books, which pretty much meant they had to give up (they simply didn't know *how* to aquire university level litterature on the subject), when I became a young teen I discovered a university book store, and found a treasure trove of super expensive dinosaur books of the caliber I had always yearned for: No colorful T. rex drawings, instead, heaps of dry and informative skeletal diagrams. Understanding the skeletons = understanding all you can about extinct animals.

By my early adulthood I felt that I knew most of what there was, and started to seriously cool off, except for picking up new discoveries here and there. I also begun to get serious about how I illustrated dinosaurs myself: No more doodling roaring dinos w bloody mouths, but instead carefully sketching the skeleton in its entirety, attaching muscles, one by one, getting OCD about it - and therefore very correct about it :D

I then had a long hiatus, where I focused on human history, politics, the world we live in right now, the species I belong to, and it is only recently that I re-discovered my love for dinosaurs, as well as taking up drawing again.
 
Dr Fallout said:
You can draw... I'm jealous.
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My whole family draws, on both sides, so, I lucked out I guess :D
But as I've mentioned in a few other posts, I am regretting now a period of almost ten years where I drew rather little, which has made me lag behind when it comes to drawing people and aspects of society (technology, architecture etc) and I am working hard at catching up to that loss now
As one age, it becomes harder to learn new tricks, as we all know...
 
zegh8578 said:
My whole family draws, on both sides, so, I lucked out I guess :D
But as I've mentioned in a few other posts, I am regretting now a period of almost ten years where I drew rather little, which has made me lag behind when it comes to drawing people and aspects of society (technology, architecture etc) and I am working hard at catching up to that loss now
As one age, it becomes harder to learn new tricks, as we all know...
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Unfortunately so. Because of my interest in zoology, history, politics and societies I now lag behind anything more complicated than finance in mathematics. I can fill out a tax form (with slow, painful steps) but algebra makes me either ragequit or groan in anguish. I have no intention in relearning it though, I always hated maths.
 
Back to dinosaurs for sec, I'm still wondering about the 'stance' of the T-Rex, I guess the contemporary view is that T-Rex stands on two legs and it's body is more or less horizontal most of the time. The front legs don't touch ground. I guess it can stand upright but mostly just to scan around. It didnt' walk upright like a human. I guess it's believable that young juvenile T-Rex's could have ran around fast even for long distances and cought suitable size prey that way. But how fast/agile would a fully grown T-Rex be?

I'm also wondering if the legs of a T-Rex were as they are shown now, like in the pic below, like the legs of an ostrich, except much more bigger and muscular? The body, tail and head of T-Rex were so huge and heavy, it would have needed enourmously strong legs to sprint even 100 m relatively fast. Not saying it couldn't do so but, still. I'm wondering.

8632895_1.jpg


Could the legs of T-Rex theoretically be angled to the outside like those of the Comodo Dragon, which actually can sprint quite fast but it has four legs to run with. Could the leg bones 'angle out' in a kind of 90 degree angle and the body would lie lower to the ground making it easier for T-Rex to haul it's bulky frame around?

komodo_dragon_13052_352225.jpg
 
Well, I think we can be pretty sure that it wasn't the king of masturabtion. Which probably explains that angry face.
 
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