There are markers on the bones based on fat weight. This wasn’t known originally when creating the “Jurassic Park Bullshit” dinosaurs though.
they can base muscle attachement based on the bone marks, and scars, they can extrapolate weight from there.
Wait, people say “Jurassic Park Bullshit” dinosaurs?!
Even if they’re inaccurate, they’re my homies.
Also I’m referring to the 1990s Jurassic Park. I haven’t kept up with modern versions.
Before my local pub closed, there was a friendly paleontologist who would pop in from time-to-time.
My favourite thing was to go up to her and say “So in Jurassic Park…”, which always prompted an impromptu lecture about dinosaurs, what Jurassic Park (any of them) got wrong, and whatever else she was thinking about, which was always super interesting.
Last thing I learned about was heated Discord debates among her colleagues about dire wolves.
Having kept up with the new ones myself, I can only recommend you don’t.
God they’re bad.
But I loved the super-military dino they had trained that would attack someone if you pointed a rifles laser at them.
Like - you’re already pointing a gun at them.
you’re already pointing a gun at them
Yeah, a gun with dinosaurs for bullets.
We know what you mean, new ones are Jurassic WORLD.
Are there new illustrations out there based on this? I wanna see the chub dinos!
Isn’t this a while thing? Where archeologists have drawn alternative interpretations of what dinosaurs could have looked like. I think there was a famous example, where red they got people to.draw a dinosaur from a hippo skeleton and the creature was really scary looking?
To be fair, hippos are one of the most dangerous animals for humans
Gotta be about third after humans and mosquitoes.
Chihuahuas are scary af. They could easily be on second or third.
Scary, but not a serious threat.
You can kick a Chihuahua pretty far, a hippo suffers from no such vulnerability.
Depends on the amount.
I’d rather fight against 1 hippo than the equivalent body weight in chihuahuas.
A hippo would definitely be preferable. A fast and brutal death is preferable to getting your ankles bit out from under you by a thousand Chihuahua.
I don’t think getting chewed to death is fast. I’d rather fight the chihuahuas 1000x
Now may or may not be a good time to remember that army ants exist.
Okay, but would you rather fight a pack of Chihuahuas or an equivalent number of mini-hippos?
Would the hippos be chihuaha-sized? Then, without question, the hippos. There’s no way they can make sounds as annoying as an angry chihuaha, let alone a horde.
House hippos are even smaller than chiwawas
New TV show ideas: how far can you punt this animal.
I can tell you from personal experience that I can punt an aggressive juvenile possum about 30ft(I think it was diseased?). Low bar, but any relevant data is useful.
The thing about chihuahuas is they get other dogs to do their dirty work
Caramena said a pack of three dogs dug under two six-inch chainlink fences to reach the communal animal enclosure on the night of Jan. 19. Happy Hollow staff members found the slaughtered equines covered in bite marks the following morning.
The third canine, a chihuahua, has not been caught but is "not considered a threat.
*Paleontologists
Archaeologist study humans in the past and sometimes our evolutionary ancestors through remains and material culture
All Yesterdays is exactly this. The first half reimagines dinos from how we traditionally view them (leaning into things like feathers and a t-rex sleeping) and the second half reinterprets contemporary fauna based on their skeletons to demonstrate how wrong we might be about dinos. It’s a great coffee table book.
Obligatory All Tomorrows mention, one of the most existentially terrifying works of speculative scifi I’ve ever read, drawn by the same paleo artist.
Watching that before bed gave me a weird dream that fucked me up for a few days
Alt Shift X YouTube channel made an amazing video covering this book and since the book is mostly images, just watching this video is enough to understand the entire story.
Hippos are also deceptively docile looking creatures
If anything on this Earth should look like a Jurassic Park dinosaur it’s hippos
Wouldn’t that mean T-Rex actually looked cuddly and friend shaped?
Damn! I was hoping they were friend-shaped this whole time. The babies look kinda cute at least.
i think its them being deceptively fast on land they can outrun humans, consider they technically cant swim under water, they just are capable “running” in the water because thier bone density allows them to sink.
Well it’s also that they’re highly aggressive animals that will attack (and kill) pretty much anything that gets just a little too close for their comfort, despite looking cute and cuddly.
they are very fast on land for looking like a cumbersome blimp for weighing 3000-7000lbs.
a response
I approve of friend-shaped T-Rex.
such a fluffy boi
Sure…“friend.” I think upon meeting one, you would find how friendly the worm finds the songbird.
If friend shaped, why devouring me whole?
I think even scientists from the 80’s and 90’s were able to tell where some connective tissue would have been. So while they got the skin wrong, the overall shape wouldn’t be TOO far off. Also, Jurassic Park is what Hollywood thought dinosaurs looked like, not necessarily palentologists.
To me, this article feels more like “We have an extremely limited idea of the amount of knowledge scientists have. Here’s what a bunch of animals would look like if they were drawn by an idiot like we believe palentologists to be.” Like, some of those are clearly trying to deliberately get it wrong, like the house cat.
Then again, it is BuzzFeed. It’s not like they base their “journalism” on anything except feels.
The original Jurassic Park had a lot of support from paleontologists, and then deviated a bit but not enough for changing how “dinosaur” look in general.
Checking out some walrus skeletons… yeah, I don’t see why not.
That skeleton is surprising - I just thought they had very slopey shoulders.
Interesting thought, but don’t penguins have feathers for insulation from cold weather so without the feathers they probably look less chunky.
Isn’t it primarily fat rather than feathers?
They probably have some fat as well, but penguins are mostly insulated by their special feathers, which are adapted to prevent the cold water from actually reaching the skin.
They definitely do but my point was that the actual volume is from the fat so they are very much fat chonkers. The feathers are laid on top of each other to be waterproof so they don’t really make up volume. You can check the pic below for reference (I am not sure how to add embed sorry).
I am not sure which would he primary insulator but fat definitely helps a lot and pretty commonly found in other animals for the same purpose. You can also see some featherless penguins in zoo are given cute little jackets lol.
their circulatory system is also pretty adapted for them, thier blood vessels usually can do countercurrent exchange of heat, rete mirabilis, this is common in cold adapted creatures. so they technically dont lose heat when it goes near the skin surface.
Nah, you can look at pics of penguins that lost their feathers. Their body shape is from the fat.
penguins do have one of the densest feathers per square centimeter of any bird.
Penguins without their feathers are still pretty chonk, and decidedly penguin-shaped.
Their feathers (adult feathers, anyhow) are actually rather short but their coverage is extremely dense. The feathers make them waterproof, not insulated. Their thick skin and layer of fat is what makes them coldproof.
It looks like me looking at myself in the mirror after a shower.
SPACE LLAMAAA
there used to be a 6ft+ tall prehistoric penguin.
Kind of hard to maintain that bulk on leaves and grass, bud. I guess it would help them with predators, though.
Hippos and rhinos get pretty big on that diet! If anything plants are a better diet for something really chunky because plants cannot run away
Also elephants.
As well as silverbacks, and giant pandas
People use the term “strong as an ox.” Oxen don’t eat meat.
plants cannot run away
Sure, you just need a lot of it.
The largest land animal today is an african elephant which is 14 feet tall. Brachiosaurus was 50 feet tall. They would need to eat an order of magnitude more because the cost of mobility increases with weight.
Penguins, seals, and whales (and to a lesser extent hippos) can maintain this ratio because it gives them bouyancy while travelling in water.
Plus, Hippos and Elephants are actually pretty big boned.
Sauropods had hollow bones and air sacs all throughout for lightweight structural support. You can’t just compare sizes and assume similar density as elephants or other large mammals.
That lends to my notion that a fat Brachio would be unsustainable.
They would, but they also did. They were herbivores
To be clear I do not actually think that they were as stocky as that pic. Point is that for land animals, though, eating plants actually is often the way to being huge
True, that’s why elephants hunt lions for protein.
Lion’s eat Wathogs, Gazelle, Zebra and sometimes birds.
Giraffe and Elephants are likely to kill a lion.
Also an elephant’s height is like 14 feet max. Brachiosaurus height was 50 feet.
What? Can you source that? I’m extremely curious if that’s a real thing.
Elephants eat plants. They’re sarcastically pointing out how stupid the meathead bro’s statement that being big requires eating meat was.
Ah. I was turbo-scrolling and didn’t catch the context. Thanks!
Edit: oh, and the reason I found this plausible is that some herbivores are opportunistic carnivores and will eat anything given the chance.
To provide more context: never engage with finitebanjo. They are the human equivalent of a cork board with pictures and a bunch of red yarn connecting it all together.
They have a good idea how much the big sauropods might have weighed based on fossilized foot prints and bone structure. Still, if something is not preserved in the fossil record it will not be shown in reconstructions.
What if it was reaaaaally fluffy down?
Please do the world a favor and stick to a carnivore diet. We would be subjected to you for much less time as a result. Maybe try some high meat, I hear that really activates your creatines or whatever.
The fuck? I just said you can’t maintain a 50 foot animal covered in fat on 3 feet of grass and that makes me some kind of threat to your vegan lifestyle?
