this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castorocauda

This beaver guy lived during the Jurassic period.

Imprints for the win!

[–] [email protected] 80 points 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 50 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Oh for sure, without a doubt. Hell it took forever for people to figure out feathers.

Then again, on rare occasion we do get some cool skin/soft tissue evidence like that Nodosaurus in Canada. Sometimes they're strikingly similar to what we thought (or not?). I am not a paleontologist and I am speaking out of my ass.

That Nodosaurus is super cool though, y'all should see it.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

and with the beaver tail ?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Buckee the beaver

Behold, the common ancestor between the deadly T-Rex and the common beaver. You can tell they’re related due to the tiny arms, upright stance, and fierce demeanor.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Mammals are different than reptiles. A better comparison would be today's reptiles.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

A better comparison would be today’s birds, which descended from theropods and are the only remaining members of the clade Dinosauria.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Mammals only got yeeted to their own evolutionary tree branch 40 million years prior to those that would be considered reptilian (sorta dinos too) which was somewhere in the realm of 250 million years ago.

Meaninng the reptiles of today are ~5x further apart in time from dinosaurs, than dinosaurs are from their common ancestors to mammals.

I think we really should just not bother thinking in terms of current speciation concepts. They could have had jellyfish like tentacles dangling allover their skin and we'd never know.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Mammals only got yeeted to their own evolutionary tree branch 40 million years prior to those that would be considered reptilian (sorta dinos too) which was somewhere in the realm of 250 million years ago.

As someone who was raised and taught to believe that the earth was only a few thousand years old (by 'that kind' of Christians/churches,) this still blows my mind to read! I've known what I was taught was bullshit for at least around fifteen years, but it's like my little pea brain still just cannot compute it. Wild stuff!!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

I grew up with a mix of some who shared that view. Its remarkable the box they place their God in to fit their worldview innit? Lol

[–] [email protected] -3 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Dinosaurs aren’t reptiles, they’re birds.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

And birds and dinos are crocs (unlike most other reptiles)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

Birds aren't real

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)

All birds are dinosaurs, not all dinosaurs are birds though

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

A pigeon is not a dinosaur.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

All birds are descended from the theropods that survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event

https://www.birdlife.org/news/2021/12/21/its-official-birds-are-literally-dinosaurs-heres-how-we-know/

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

That's what the the pigeons want you to think.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What if there was a dinosaur that literally was just a walking skeleton? 🤔

[–] [email protected] 53 points 6 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Fucking coffin dodger.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago

In October, he was one of nine senators to vote against legislation intended to outlaw flag burning and other forms of flag defacement and joined Bob Dole and Orrin Hatch, the other two Republicans to vote against the bill,

That's awesome. At least he stood for free speech..

in voicing a preference for a constitutional amendment.

..Jesus Christ

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago

Disgusting! Why have I followed the link. My entire day is ruined

[–] [email protected] 71 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Inb4 the t rex is agreed to have had long, fleshy, limp whip arms that were far longer than the tiny bones.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 6 months ago

They used the long tentacle arms to quickly thwip through the jungle

[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago (5 children)

What’s the current consensus, did dinosaurs look more like chickens?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Check out Prehistoric Planet, they say they used the latest research to make the dinos, feathers and all

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

... some of them.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

From what I know, most raptors had feathers and that's where birds came from.

The broader group of theropods, including the T-Rex, had a precursor to feathers literally called "Dinofuzz".

All other kinds of dinosaurs I believe are actually scaly like we thought.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This is still not something we can answer with certainty. For a couple of years there, paleontology thought that psittacosaurus had feathers on its tail - and as a ceratopsian, on the complete other side of the dinosaur 'tree', that would suggest the base form for dinosaurs must have feathers and any that didn't have them lost them at some point in their lineage (and thus could potentially regain them if the DNA was deactivated rather than lost). Now the feathers are disputed again, as "something else" - spines of some sort unrelated to feathers.

No doubt lots of dinosaurs were scaly, but I don't think anyone would say with certainty that feathers were limited to late theropods.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I've also heard some contention over the ground up evolutionary theory for birds. Mainly that you don't evolve flight from jumping up, but rather from jumping tree to tree and gliding. I'm certainly not an expert in this but as a layman it does make sense to me, if you jump to escape a predator on the ground you inevitably come back down, but if you can make it to the next tree and your predator can't, that would indeed be a significant enough advantage to be passed down to your children. Seems easier to convert lizardy gliders like on the yi qi to wings too, rather than lizardy arms to wings.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

Proto-feathers (basically hair) were basal to dinosaurs + pterosaurs, we have evidence for feathers on some dinosaurs (micro raptor had iridescent black feathers), fuzz on others (Psittacosaurus has long "quills" on its backend), and scales on others (Carnotosaurus, Diplodocus, large portion of T-Rex)

The idea right now is that the smaller ones probably had feathers, bigger ones had scales, unless they're from China, then everything has feathers

[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Some definitely had feathers, and some likely were brightly colored

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

In my mind, I picture of Sasquatch riding a dinosaur chicken

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Mods, why was this piece of absolute poetry removed?