Zegh's Dinosaur Thread

zegh8578 said:
Funny you'd mention, since I'm Tweet-following a buncha paleo-heads - some quite serious characters - and one thing that has become a bit of a pet peeve for me, is regular "myth busting", "all the things you are wrong about" etc, I personally find it a bit of a quarrelsome approach to learning and teaching - "how wrong you are!"
BUT - there's plenty of that in the community! I can't reaaaaally think of any other approach here, so... if you're on the Tweeter, try following @TomHoltzPaleo or Thomas R. Holtz, Jr. he is not only one of America's most promiment and prolific paleontologists (and Tyrannosaurid expert), but he is very active online, and has been ever since internet became a thing. He is down on the ground with everyone else, and is not above responding to noobs from time to time. With him, you'll find many other personalities who will often post little didya-know bits and memes and info-pieces, as well as regular links to actual paleontology papers (this is heavy tier shit though :D)
@albertonykus or Alberta Claw is another very active poster of paleo-news, big and small, @TheropodaBlog or Andrea Cau is an Italian theropod-expert who posts regularily, and has a blog that is unfortunately entirely in Italian.

If you're not on Twitter, then I don't really know where to turn to, other than perhaps go into DeviantArt and spend years of your time getting comfy with the resident dino-nerds there, many of whom overlap with the Twitter-sphere (such as Alberta Claw and @Skeletaldrawing / Scott Hartman)

For dedicated textual information, just go to Wikipedia, really.
Back in the day there were massive platforms for dino information, databases etc, but those have dwindled away by now, and Wikipedia really remains the only place to go. Information there is reliable and up to date, for the very most time. Now and then there will be some overzealous statement, like, T. rex had feathers coming out its eyes, but these are typically swiftly moderated.

Dino-specific wikis (of which there are a handful) are complete garbage, pretty much all of the time. They're ran by kids or rabid aspies (cough), and are worth less than shit drenched toilet paper
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Ahh fuck. Twitter. The sum total of our knowledge about the history of life on this planet and I am left with Twitter. Any pdf dumps of the books? I can find terabytes worth of data on damn near everything except archeology and astronomy.
 
TorontRayne said:
Ahh fuck. Twitter. The sum total of our knowledge about the history of life on this planet and I am left with Twitter. Any pdf dumps of the books? I can find terabytes worth of data on damn near everything except archeology and astronomy.
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You don't have a library next to you or something?
 
Library, lol, oh crni :D What are you gonna find in the library? The discoveries of Copernicus? :V

And by that I mean, if the purpose is to stay up to date, then books are counter productive, since they inevitably take a few couple of years to complete, writing, editing, distributing, and by then - there's *a few couple of years* worth of new information available

Just go to Wikipedia

TorontRayne, best way to scower PDFs is to again check Wikipedia. In the sources, there are often direct links to papers in PDF format (some are blocked by paywalls, in which case Sci-Hub comes in super-handy). Most of this is pretty damn dry, though - but if you want the easy-on-the-eye summaries OF those papers, then simply stay on that very same Wikipedia page! That's what Wiki does, it summarizes dry and technical information into encyclopedic format

There are some books you can outright pirate, I've found a couple of good books on piratebay for example, but - see my point above, regarding books. I, for example, got a 1988 book because I really respect the author (I would buy it, but the book has been out of print since the mid 90s). The book itself, and its content, is absolutely outdated, and worth very little nowadays, besides affectional value
 
TorontRayne said:
I'm sure the one or two books in this podunk shithole are from the 70's.
Thanks Zegh. A little information is better than none.
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It is pretty much what I do, and recently I'm compiling my little dinosaur guide. It's all done via Wikipedia. I'll look up a dino - or a taxonomic group, then scroll straight down to the sources, and by now I have a quick reflex to spot DOI numbers, which means the original paper is available right there (in contrast to older sources which are indeed paper-format issues that you will... indeed... find in libraries. Well, large-scale university libraries, anyway, not public ones)
 
Zegh,

do you agree with this "T-rex walking speed" -theory? I guess those computer models could be fairly accurate but I'm not sure about it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-walker/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f11019f32fff

Fifty years ago, if you'd asked the dinosaur experts, they would have told you that Tyrannosaurus rex was a speed freak — a giant predator that could outrun racehorses. The paleontologists would have pointed to its 3-meter hind limbs, leggy for even a big dinosaur, and described the creature as sprinting after prey at speeds of 40 mph.

But a better understanding of physics kneecapped the swift T. rex concept. Scientists, rather than looking at the bones alone, began to gauge dinosaur locomotion via models of skeletons and muscles. The picture that came into focus was a slower beast: T. rex, although no less of a predator, was certainly less fleet of foot.

A new report, published Monday in the journal PeerJ, refined just how fast the dino could go. T. rex wasn't much of a runner, the study authors say. In fact, it couldn't run at all. Instead, the animal speed-walked.

Thanks to its wide stride, T. rex would reach about 12 mph at its quickest hustle. “Most of us would have difficulty jogging to keep up,” said paleontologist Phillip L. Manning, director of the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History at the College of Charleston, S.C. (Not that you'd want a dinosaur with 8-inch-long teeth as a walking buddy.)
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MutantScalper said:
Zegh,

do you agree with this "T-rex walking speed" -theory? I guess those computer models could be fairly accurate but I'm not sure about it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-walker/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f11019f32fff
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Tyrannosaurus is very hyped as an apex predator - which it was - but it was also *very awkward*
The tiny-tiny hands is something everybody knows, but it also had a tremendous head compared to other predatory dinosaurs of similar tier, like Allosaurus.
Compared to Allosaurids, Tyrannosaurids - Tyrannosaurus itself in particular - also had very stubby feet. I'm not at all surprised that Tyrannosaurus could not run with much agility.

v745r61.jpg

(Top skeleton by style-definer Gregory Paul, author of the 1988 book I mentioned, bottom skeleton of Scott Hartman, one of many more talented "apprentices" of this style of skeletal diagram)

An analogy I like to imagine is - Allosaurids being tigers and lions, swift, elegant, ferocious - Tyrannosaurids were more like huge, lumbering grizzly-bears - faster than you'd expect, but mostly just burly and strong.
 
Crni Vuk said:
So a 1988 Book is now OK? But when I talk about libraries I am the idiot!

*Slams door*
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Don't get me wrong, I wuv my public library, it's actually pretty up to date, when I was a kid I'd find David Lambert's "Dinosaur Databook" in there, one of the most comprehensive dinosaur databases of its time
I also discovered Akira, Gen and Frank Miller there, flabbergasting little boy-me. At least on two occasions, the library workers would assume I had erroneously wandered away from the kiddy-section, and would help me back to the little teddy-bear-books and stuff. As soon as they turned their back, I'd scurry right back to the real deal books

However, it didn't take me long to spend more and more time on their computer, looking for -, lamenting the lack of - and attempting to request books, in particular more updated dinosaur books that I knew existed.

I ended up moving from the library to the university book-store, where I became a bit of an amusement for the staff, to the point where they'd light up as soon as I entered the store, and show me right to the latest paleontology books :D

The exponentially growing information concentration of the internet eventually put all that to rest
 
zegh8578 said:
An analogy I like to imagine is - Allosaurids being tigers and lions, swift, elegant, ferocious - Tyrannosaurids were more like huge, lumbering grizzly-bears - faster than you'd expect, but mostly just burly and strong.
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Grizzlies are faaaaaast. When a grizzly 'puts on the jets', it becomes like a missile that goes through branches and knocks over stuff. They are scary. Also, presumably they have the best sense of smell, excluding fish. I don't know anything about dinosauruses. Just wondering if a T-rex might be able to do a kind of lunge attack from the bushes like it did in Jurassic Park when those fast things are running in that field and it lunges from bushes. Maybe not. I have actually read Michael Crichton's book, I remember how he described a T-rex's swimming style.
 
MutantScalper said:
Grizzlies are faaaaaast. When a grizzly 'puts on the jets', it becomes like a missile that goes through branches and knocks over stuff. They are scary. Also, presumably they have the best sense of smell, excluding fish. I don't know anything about dinosauruses. Just wondering if a T-rex might be able to do a kind of lunge attack from the bushes like it did in Jurassic Park when those fast things are running in that field and it lunges from bushes. Maybe not. I have actually read Michael Crichton's book, I remember how he described a T-rex's swimming style.
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Being fairly slow, Tyrannosaurus would be ambush hunter primarily, pursuit second (if at all, most smaller prey would escape easily. The famous Gallimimus scene in Jurassic Park is quite unrealistic in that sense, they would have evaded and escaped a heavy set giant like Tyrannosaurus with ease)

Speaking of grizzlys, I once saw an interview with this zoologist who studied bears in North America, and he was explaining - while gazing off into the distant horizon, pointing towards the hills, explaining that he spotted a grizzly in such and such direction. As is often with bear-attacks, it was a wandering-through bear, nervous, hungry, aggressive, and not one of his usual bears - who in turn were used to him.
He said that once the bear charged at him, the distance between them shrank with shocking swiftness, the bear closed in those few hundred metres with such velocity, there was little the zoologist could really do about it.
Once the bear was on top of him, the guy tried to protect himself by instinctively pushing the bears face away from him. The bear solved this by biting off his fingers and half his hands, snippety snap, and then proceded to bite off a good chunk of his face, bone and all.
By this point, the guy faces the camera, and continues to explain, and indeed, large parts of his skull seem to be missing o_o, including jaw and cheek-bone portions, obviously covered with skin grafts, but damn...

The bear apparently lost interest in him, after some scuffling around, and left.

That's terrifying though, the absolute powerlessness in such a situation. You use your hands, bear bites them off. Then what?

(actually, there's some video from India of some dude fuckin with a black bear (Baloo!) for then to have his face bitten off chomp by chomp, while villagers try to shout abuse at the bear, and whack it with little sticks. I'm not gonna post it, but you can probably find it with some dedication. The worst is seeing how the bear actually has to pull and yank with some force, each time he pulls a chunk of face off the guy)
 
I guess dinosaurs wouldn't make good pets. People really forget, that their intelligence was also prehistoric. Even those of raptors, which are considered a more intelligent predator.
 
Crni Vuk said:
I guess dinosaurs wouldn't make good pets. People really forget, that their intelligence was also prehistoric. Even those of raptors, which are considered a more intelligent predator.
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dinosaur_pet_guide.jpeg

(by excellent paleo-artist John Conway)
 
Crni Vuk said:
Probably from a 1988s book of a library.
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In 1988 only one person drew feathers on dinosaurs - good old Gregory Paul, the most published amateur paleontologist in the world, considered both a pariah and a super-genius of paleontology (pariah because he publishes a lot of litterature, while not having any actual academic credentials. Regardless, he makes shit-tons of sense, and has made remarkable theoretical discoveries that have revolutionized sections of dinosaur paleontology. He's awesome!)

Cover.jpg

The 1988 book I cried about as a kid, I was finally in my early 30s when I got my hands on an illegal, digital copy :'(

Tyrannosaurus.jpg

He set amazing standards for acuracy and detail

Coelophysis.jpg

Here he went berserk and feathered a Coelophysis - even to this day he admits this is highly unlikely and overly flamboyant. Coelophysids are very early, primitive dinosaurs, with zero evidence for feathers, and this was before people accepted even Maniraptorids to be feathered.
Remarkably, and fitting a GENIUS!!! - there are now indications that proto-dinos might have been fuzzy, meaning a flamboyantly fluffy Coelophysis is no longer an impossibility.

He also insisted on drawing agile, running dinos, on their toes, with tails lifted in the wind, when others kept insisting on drawing heavy, dragging dinosaurs
Contemporary John Sibbick:
Apato.jpg

John Sibbick's photorealistic paintings were highly impressive to me, untill I came across Gregory Paul, who'd also come up with detailed oils now and then
yangchu.png
 
Atomkilla said:
Sibbick was my favorite childhood illustrator. I love his works to this day.
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John Sibbick resisted a little bit, but then did come around. In fact, his 90s pieces are still some of my favorite. Once he too begun making dinosaurs swift and dynamic, he REALLY had the hang of that!
This for example is stunning work:
Allorama.jpg


My personal favorite though is Doug Henderson,
hendersond3.jpg

I only ever saw his illustrations in one book (which incidentally also featured John Sibbick)
 
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