Can we talk about dinosaurs? My son is all into them and i never

>>1752318
Pro tip. The elephant and the human in the pic are not a dinosaurs

>>1752318
I grew up being told that dinosaurs were not real and that the bones being found are faked.

>>1752331
I think hardcore Jews think that. I had a very religious Jewish teacher(forgot what they were called but the men wear black and have the Jew curls) and she explained to us that they believe dinosaurs were faked.

>>1752334
Everytime I tell people this irl they laugh at my face

>>1752334
Actually I'm googling a combination of 'dinosaurs are fake' and 'Jewish dinosaur hoax' and I'm either retarded or bad at googling because I'm not finding much. Now I'm not sure if she was trolling me but she did like telling us about the Jewish community.

>>1752334
Hardcore jews, christians and muslims. Don't know about hindus and other non-abrahamic religions.

This shit is fascinating. They were around for 150 million years. Humans have been around for 8.

they could have been intelligent, they could have had language.

>>1752331

I was like 6-7 when Jurassic Park came out so I though that Dinosaurs were real and you could go see them in a special dinosaur zoo.

>>1752369

>they could have had language

Oh shit

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>>1752320
Another pro-tip, The Tyrannosaurus and Deinonychus should have feathers

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>>1752387
Look at how ravens and parrots can mimic speech.

>>1752331
This. They're "devil rocks" planted there by the devil to trick people into believing in evolution and not receive salvation through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

>>1752395
Come to think of it, so should the Compsognathus and I'm pretty sure that Pachycephalosaurus was not that tall

>>1752369
>Humans have been around for eight million years

Yeah nah. Our branch of the family tree diverged from the rest of the great apes six million years ago, and australopithecines aren't "Humans". Anatomically modern humans have existed for only 250,000 years.

>>1752400
we have extensive skin impressions from Tyrannosaurus and Compsognathus, neither of them had feathers.

>>1752321
Saved. People need to realize feathers don't make things dorky.

Just ask the Australians about the emus.

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>>1752318
as of last week there are now two known examples of Allosaurus that were killed by Stegosaurus.

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>>1752318
Tyrannosaurus rex is often falsely considered a slow scavenger rather than an active hunter.

two of the dinosaurs in your picture, Edmontosaurus and Triceratops have been found with healed bite wounds from T. rex, proving that rex was an active hunter that attacked very large, very live prey.

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>>1752318
some dinosaurs such as Maiasaura feed and cared for their young. We used to think they were like other reptiles, they laid their eggs and then abandoned them. Now we now many of them took care of their babbies.

The dinosaur Oviraptor, which means egg theif, was named because it was found near nests of eggs, which paleontologists thought it was stealing eggs from. We now know those eggs it was found near were its own. It was sitting on the eggs like a bird sits on its nest.

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>>1752318
while the dinosaurs other than birds were killed by a massive comet impacting the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous, we've found fossils of dinosaurs in New Mexico that may have survived almost a million years after the comet hit.

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>>1752318
T. rex is the only dinosaur commonly know by its species name. All others are informally called by their genus.

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>>1752318
there is at least one known burrowing dinosaur, and as of last month there is only one aquatic dinosaur.

reptiles that lived in the oceans weren't dinosaurs. Now many dinosaurs live on and in the water though, ducks and penguins and such.

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>>1752318
Prosauropods have long been considered the ancestors of the massive Sauropods, the largest land animals to ever live.

They can't be though, because Prosauropods lacked several wrist bones that Sauropods have. Evolution doesn't work in reverse, they couldn't have lost those bones and then later grown them back.

>>1752421
>that may have survived almost a million years after the comet hit
That is amazing.

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>>1752428
I thought so too...

>>1752318
while all the baby dinosaurs we've found so far have been in or near eggs, we don't actually know for a fact that all dinosaurs laid eggs. It's possible that some gave birth to live young.

Recently we've found a large number of small dinosaurs that aren't direct ancestors of birds but have quills, hairs, or feathers. It's likely that most dinosaurs had something like fur and quills covering them.

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>>1752318
Dinosaurs are the most common and diverse clade of vertebrates alive today. They still rule the Earth in that respect. We are living in the age of the dinosaurs.

We've found more new dinosaur species in the last 40 years than we did in the 120 years prior.

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>>1752318
Dinosaur bones were found by the ancient Chinese, and probably gave rise to their myths of dragons.

Native Americans were very familiar with dinosaur bones, they called them ghost horses or ghost buffalo.

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>>1752318
Until the 1990's it was thought that all dinosaur fossils were completely replaced by rock, and no soft tissues such as blood vessels or bone cells could survive. Since then we've found preserved blood cell components, soft bone tissue, and even fragments of DNA from T. rex and other dinosaurs.

One of the first dinosaur paleontologists, William Buckland, spent much of his life attempting to classify every living animal by how it tastes. In his honor I have over the years ground up and eaten small quantities of bone from Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, as well as some other unidentified dinosaur bone fragments.

>>1752415
A species can be an active hunter AND a scavenger. All the best carnivores are. (Bears, hyenas, canids, procyonids, lions, birds like caracaras, corvids and gulls...) If you're a carnivore and you pass up an animal that died of natural causes, you're an idiot. (Kleptoparasitism from a weaker predator also counts under this, particularly for lions and hyenas)

Opportunism breeds success, quite literally.

>>1752450
of course.

Jack Horner argues that it never hunted live prey though, and this is demonstrably false.

>>1752318
Fuckin Pachycephalosaurus was not that big, probably only half the size as the one in the pic

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>>1752461
even half would be a stretch

>>1752461
>>1752462
after the many recent ram GIFS i have seen recently i am convinced a pachycephalosaurus would head butt a man into last weeks tuesday

>>1752369
The could have had the internet...
What kind of scary place would dinosaur 4chan be...

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>>1752464
dinosaur society would be civilized and refined.

>>1752448
>>1752448
Bullshit, DNA has a half life of 521 years.

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>>1752474
there's no such thing as a DNA half life.

it usually decays in a couple hours after death.
in some circumstances it can last much longer.

we've completely sequenced Neanderthal DNA, and that's like 60,000 years old.

but anyways, DNA fragments from dinosaurs-
>http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3110760/

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>>1752474
unless by half life you mean amino acid racemization.
but that also occurs at different rates, and isn't a "half life."

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>>1752451
>makes shit theories
>gets to fuck 19 year olds

>>1752514
meh.
I'm a much younger and better looking paleontologist.
I could fuck all the 19 year olds I want, but they're a pain in the ass to relate to once the fucking is done. Plus I have a kid that's almost 19, so that would be weird.

Horner is alright. He's a bit like Bakker, eccentric but creative. Not usually right, but an interesting guy none the less.

>>1752514
also I can't trash him too much since my first internship was working for him at Dry Mesa. He's a good guy.

So are hens tyrannosaurs? Do I eat tyrannosaur eggs for breakfast? Can a hen hunt me down and kill me? How can awaken hen's primal instincts?

>>1752515
>>1752516
I'm not against his attempt to reverse engineer dinosaurs from chickens. He needs to find a way to market that so it can happen faster and we can all have tailed and toothed chicken pets.

>>1752517
no, they're not Tyrannosaurs.
Hens and Tyrannosaurs are both coelurosaurs though. So a close enough relative.

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>>1752519
Last I read the tooth thing was impossible because birds lost the genes related to thecodonty.

His TED talk came out since that study though, and he's still pushing it as if it were possible. I think gene splicing is the only answer to the tooth problem though.

It's possible he'll run into the same problem with the pygostyle. Embryology is slightly more promising on tails than teeth.

I'd guess less than 20 years we'll see it happen, assuming sufficient interest. Jack may be dead by then.

>>1752521
They're still there. Not sure about all birds but apparently scientists managed to grow chicken embroyos with teeth and longer tails, but they didn't survive.

Its fascinating to me to think about what other genes us or other animals aren't 'using', why is it still there if we don't use it and what makes it inactive.

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>>1752522
the teeth they grew were simple serrations of the beak, like the ones we see in geese.

If he wants to lose the beak and grow socketed teeth he's going to need to do some gene splicing.

there's four genes that control the growth of socketed teeth with enamel, and birds are missing one of them completely.

so it depends on what you call teeth.

>>1752521
Where would the funding come from though?

>>1752525
I thought there was an experiment where there was a more developed tooth structure in the embryo. Crocodilian-like or something.

>>1752525
Whats it like crushing my dreams, anon?

>>1752522
another interesting point is that bird teeth and other dinosaur teeth are very different. We don't exactly know how bird teeth evolved, since the earlier part of the bird lineage is flat out missing.

so even if he managed to grow socketed teeth, a paleontologist would still be able to tell hen's teeth from paravian teeth just by the shape of them.

probably wouldn't matter to the public, but retrograde chickens would be obviously chickens to anyone that's studied anatomy.

>>1752527
same place all funding comes from-
grants from the federal government and Exxon Oil.

>Crocodilian-like or something.
nah. I can hunt you down the paper if you want tomorrow, or you can find it on google scholar if you like. The "teeth" were just jagged edges on the beak.

>>1752528
c'mon now, I told you it will probably happen. Just not as easily as Horner thinks.

>>1752318
What the fuck is with the scale in that picture? Why is pachy so goddamn huge?

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>>1752533
Compy is almost doubled in size as well.

>>1752424
What kind of burrowing dinosaur?

>>1752406
>we have extensive skin impressions from Tyrannosaurus
false

>>1752420
>some dinosaurs such as Maiasaura feed and cared for their young
Yeah, we know that from The land before time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-eRdWIZl2Q

>>1752525
since crocodilians and dinosaurs were closely related is it possible that crocodile teeth dna is a good substitute for what birds are missing?


Anyway I googled a bit, and it seems that this
>the teeth they grew were simple serrations of the beak, like the ones we see in geese.
Is wrong, and it was actually genes involved in tooth development that became activated. And most of the quotes or blogposts from evolutionary biologists and paleontologists say that birds have most of the genes necessary to make teeth.
So once again you are spouting bullshit in a paleo thread.

>>1752569
>since crocodilians and dinosaurs were closely related is it possible that crocodile teeth dna is a good substitute for what birds are missing?
no

>>1752331
yeah it's all a scam for liberal college professors to get rich from

>>1752574
>no
That's a bold statement
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mutant-chicken-grows-alli/

>"They don't make a molar," explains development biologist John Fallon, who oversaw Harris's work. "What they make is this conical, saber-shaped structure that is clearly a tooth. The other animal that has a tooth like that is an alligator."


The most correct answer is "we don't know yet, it's a possibility but there has to be more research."

>>1752369
Probably very primitive though, and since they don't have thuimbs they probably didn't build anything except for nests. Even if they did, dinosaur cave drawings wouldn't be around anymore.

>>1752579
> dinosaur cave drawings wouldn't be around anymore.
but dinosaur space probe on would.

>>1752442
I thought boney fish were?

>>1752405

>give or take a million years or so

>>1752442

>We are living in the age of the dinosaurs.

u wot m8? What are you getting at here?

>>1752420
They are birds after all. >>1752323

Picture related, it is an emu

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>>1752602
Ops

>>1752519

>countless animals suffer
>finally succeeds
>wow it's fucking nothing

I don't get the point.

>>1752577
i like you

>>1752395
There's no evidence that Tyrannosaurus was feathered like there is for other theropods. Some people think it's likely it has some feathers but it was probably not a feathery bird dinosaur like Deinonychus.

>>1752635
They probably had since related species with similar sizes had. Just like Australopitecus probably had hair. We didn't found any Australopitecus hair but other related species had so there is no reason to think they don't

I love this thread.

Drop more facts paleoontobros

>>1752649
The word dinosaur starts with the letter 'd'

>>1752725
What comic is this?

>>1752536
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryctodromeus
>>1752563
Ok. We have several skin impressions from T. rex, and we only need one to know it lacked feathers.
>but what if the feathers fell out
feathers fall out when the skin rots, so if they fell out there wouldn't be a skin impression
>but maybe the feathers rotted away and left the skin
doesn't work that way, skin rots much faster than feathers.
>maybe something plucked it, magic occurred or whatever
lel
>maybe all the parts we don't have impressions of were covered in feathers.
that would be an astounding coincidence. The odds would be astronomical.

there, did I cover all your childish thoughts, oh argumentative one?
>>1752569
>So once again you are spouting bullshit in a paleo thread
Fuck you, moron. It's not my fault you're too stupid to actually google.
>http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2148-8-246.pdf
>>1752577
>What they make is this conical, saber-shaped structure that is clearly a tooth
except it lacks enamel, dentin, and doesn't grow in a socket. other than not being a tooth it does look a bit like one if you get the proper angle though.
>>1752601
I said, they are the most common and diverse vertebrates alive today.
>>1752602
all birds are dinosaurs, not all dinosaurs are birds.
>>1752645
>They probably had since related species with similar sizes had.
"similar sizes" is where you fucked up.
>>1752649
Maybe later. I get bored with argumentative morons disagreeing with everything.

>>1752444
source on this one? very interesting

>>1752522
We have all sorts of stuff hidden in pseudogenes. It's a pretty fascinating topic to think what we living organisims have hiding inside our genomes. It's almost like our genomes keep a record of previous genes (but not everything, obviously) that we can reference if we ever need to bring them back.

I'm still incredibly curious when the uropygial gland arose, since it's important for feather maintanence. At least in modern birds, it is. It's embroyonic in birds, even the ones who lose it as adults.

>>1752649
Troodon is my personal favorite, it's named for it's crazy teeth. But they also had the largest brain size to mass ratio, Had good binocular vision, possibly nocturnal, possibly omnivorous, could grasp things with it's forelimbs. I tend to think of it as the dinosaur take on a raccoon niche.

>>1752864
source is anecdote and speculation.

My understanding is that the Chinese in Hunan Province knew of dinosaur eggs and bones in the 1950's and called them dragon eggs, bones, teeth, etc. This doesn't prove that that's the source of the dragon mythology, but it's a good possibility.

Native American terms come from the first dinosaur hunters to search the west for Marsh and Cope. A couple of them spoke native languages, and they'd ask the Indians where to find the "Ghost Horses" or "Spirit Horses." The Sioux and Navajo both directed paleontologists to major dinosaur bone quarries that they knew of. One of those, Ghost Ranch in New Mexico is named for the Navajo term for the animals.

>>1752867
>I'm still incredibly curious when the uropygial gland arose
Hard to say since early bird evolution is still missing, but it appears that pennaceous feathers evolved before flight so long as we discount Feduccia and Chatterjee.

there must have been some use for well-maintained planar feathers aside from flight, so it seems reasonable that the preen gland probably arose well before Paraves and perhaps in basal Theropoda if Concavenator is properly classified.

So Late Triassic-ish if we consider planar feathers basal, or Middle Jurassic if derived.

>>1752882
Could they be having dust baths beforehand? Some modern birds, even with flight, dust bathe as feather maintenance instead of using preen oil. (I have no idea how Columbidae do it - they don't dust bathe or preen or have powder down. And I can't find any articles on feather maintenance in them. Dirty pigeons.)

>>1752955

>dubs

Did their arms have any value at all?

>>1752930
Possible, but the last half of the Jurassic was seasonally monsoonal. They wouldn't be able to find dust for half of the year. Some waterproof oil would be pretty useful during the wet season.

>>1752955

I always imagined them about as useful as the wing nubbins on an emu, which is not at all.

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>>1752969
>>1752987
Could be worse.
Could be this guy.

>>1753010
Please draw him with feathers. He can't get any worse so maybe feathers will make things better

>>1753017
sorry, he had scales, scutes and osteoderms.

feathers probably weren't in his wardrobe.
big geeky looking terror worm.

>>1753019
At least it didn't lived with humans that would mock them and hunt by making traps for them to trip.

>>1753033

>implying dinosaurs didn't develop social constricts over their 150 million years on earth
>implying other dinosaurs didn't make din of this guy

>>1752607
But muh novelty

Scientists still don't have reasonable justification for extinction of dinosaurs while many other animals older than them, still survive.

>>1753242
Adaptability seems like a reasonable justification. Big animals who depend on certain specific kinds of food are more likely to go extinct

>>1753242
There's been many mass extinctions all of which have many theories of why X died out and Y didn't. In the case of the dinosaurs and pretty much all of them it's probably a collection of reasons rather than simply "a meteor did it".

>>1752444
>probably gave rise to their myths of dragons.

Because of the skull only right? Oriental dragons were more like worms than dinosaurs.

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>>1753010
At least he isn't a niger.

>>1752987
>>1752969
What if T rex arms were almost totaly vestigial, like the leg nubs in some snakes?

>>1752405
Is it weird that it kind of weirds me out that humanity is so fucking young? How much we have altered the earth and reached for the stars in such a short span of time? It's...kind of amazing, really. And kind of depressing how much we've fucked up in a quarter million years.

Maybe my sense of time is weird.

>>1752318
I love dinosaurs

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>>1752369
>humans
>8

Not technically. If you include hominins as human as we include cats that roar as Big Cats then yes, they were human, but pic related is the oldest human within our genus.

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>>1752405
>Anatomically modern humans

Homo Sapiens isn't anatomically modern, and neither is Homo Sapiens Idaltu. I think our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens is at least 100,000 years younger than our original origins.

Pic related, Idaltu with his bigger brain, brows, and slightly weaker chin.

>>1752406
>Compsognathus

That's weird, considering that it's very close relative Juravenator had feathers and scales.

>>1755104
it's not currently considered a Compsognathid, but yes either way it is weird.

weird doesn't make it false.
it's weird that naked mole rats lack fur while other close relatives have it. Not false, just weird.

>>1755104
The current consensus is that T-rex had feathers at least at a point in their life.

>>1755112
the current consensus of fanboys maybe.

>>1755114
“We have as much evidence that T. rex was feathered, at least during some stage of its life, as we do that australopithecines like Lucy had hair,”

Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History.

"In short, the evidence for the possibility of feathers in Tyrannosaurus is piling up and my discussions with several colleagues suggests that a number now think the balance of probability lies with a fluffy or fuzzy Tyrannosaurus rex. I'd put myself in that same bracket – for my money, even big, adult Tyrannosaurus more likely than not had at least some feathers on its body."

Dr Dave Hone: lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, specialising in dinosaurs and pterosaurs.

I would rather put my bets on the opinion of specialists than in some random anon on 4chan.

>>1755119
>I would rather put my bets on the opinion of specialists than in some random anon on 4chan.
indeed, that would be a good bet.
two people isn't a consensus though.

there's about 900 working vertebrate paleontologists out there, 2/900 is what, .22%

and to be fair, Mark has a point. We have no physical evidence of hair in australopithecines, just bracketing. Though in rex' case we have evidence that it isn't feathered.

but anyways, there isn't a single scientist publishing that T. rex had feathers at any point in any scientific journal, much less a consensus of them.

>>1755124
I just posted some examples. They aren't the only ones.

As Dave said:
>and my discussions with several colleagues suggests that a number now think the balance of probability lies with a fluffy or fuzzy Tyrannosaurus rex

Note that he used "several colleagues" not "few colleagues"

Why don't you post some specialists who still think that probably T-Rex didn't had feathers at all?

>>1755131
>Why don't you post some specialists who still think that probably T-Rex didn't had feathers at all?
because scientists don't talk about things that don't exist. It just doesn't come up.

If you want evidence that T. rex didn't have feathers (aside from the skin impressions without feathers), Just try to find a single journal article saying they DID.

or, if you like, count the handful of people you seem to think agree with you and count the remaining 900+ as disagreeing.

>>1755131
>I just posted some examples.
sorry, I wasn't clear.
none of your examples has ever published that T. rex had feathers IN A SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL. (caps for emphasis, not shouting.)

nobody has afaik.

>>1755138
The thing is that since we found feathers on more primitive species and on similar size species the base assumption is that all of them probably had. Now we need a reason to believe that this or that specie didn't had any in any stage of its life.

And fiding skin without feathers marks doesn't prove anything since the conditions to preserve feather signs are rare.

>>1755151
>Now we need a reason to believe that this or that specie didn't had any in any stage of its life.
Yes.
skin impressions are that reason. Also the fact that no bird exists today that has feathers as a chick and loses them as an adult. So it's probably not possible.

>fiding skin without feathers marks doesn't prove anything since the conditions to preserve feather signs are rare.
the conditions to preserve skin are even more rare.

if there were feathers on that skin, they would be preserved.

>>1752406
>we have extensive skin impressions from Tyrannosaurus
Source? Anywhere I search they say they still haven't found any

>Though evidence of skin from many other ancient reptiles exists in the fossil record, T. rex skin has yet to be discovered,
>2014 Smithsonian.com

>>1755151
>on similar size species
also there are no feathered dinosaurs of similar size to Tyrannosaurus.

not even close.

you're comparing mice to elephants here.

>>1755161
Ironic since I believe the Smithsonian bought the skin specimens. I'd guess that's an old post.

I have to run to work for an hour or two.
google "Wyrex." It's pretty recent stuff, maybe last year?

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>>1755164
The best I could find was "small patches of mosaic scales" not even close to "extensive skin impressions"

And seems like most of them were from the underside of the tail. A place I wouldn't expect to be fluffy.

Here is a pic of the skin impression and some emu foot.

>>1755162
It is relatively recent
http://www.xinglida.net/pdf/Xu_et_al_2012_Yutyrannus.pdf

By the way, elephants have hair too.

>>1755172
one would be a lot.
we've got something like seven, from the thigh, tail and neck. The odds of those just happening to be the only unfeathered parts and our just happening to only find skin from those parts are ridiculously high.
>>1755178
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
T. rex weighed somewhere between 5 and 7 TIMES what that animal did.

also of course Yutyrannus lived in a place with an average temperature of 50 F versus T. rex in an average of about 85 F. That's about like the difference between Florida and Southern Iceland.

and yes, elephants have hair. Very very little of it.

>>1755172
>A place I wouldn't expect to be fluffy.
why wouldn't you expect it to be fluffy?
do birds generally lack feathers on their underparts? Feather coverage didn't evolve in patches, you'd have to explain why T. rex lost feathers on the underside of the tail.

and if you can explain why it lost feathers on the underside of the tail, you've got a good explanation for why it lost feathers everywhere else.

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>>1755248
For the same reason birds don't have feathers on their legs?

>>1755255
which is what?

for the record, tail feathers are one of the more common finds on feathered dinosaurs.

>>1755255
also, protip:
those aren't the legs. Those are feet. All of it.

>>1755260
Probably because it was an area that would be exposed to friction often.

>>1755262
Anatomically you are correct. But you got what I meant.

>>1755263
tops of the feet and the upper part of the foot there (the "leg" part) aren't exposed to friction though.

also theropods didn't drag their tails around.

in reality it's the lack of vascularization of the skin that probably left the feet unfeathered.

Feathered dinosaurs also lack feathers on the feet, but have them on the tail.

>>1755263
and of course that wouldn't explain the lack of feathers on the upper thigh and neck of T. rex.

>>1755269
They didn't dragged the tails while walking but probably used it as support while still or resting.

Also back to the elephant thing I found out that sparse hair have a cooling effect considerably better than be totally hairless, something that would be pretty useful for a big dinosaur living in hot climate.

>"Hair works as an insulator when it covers the skin, but in this paper, we show that sparse hair has the opposite effect. What was surprising to us when was the magnitude that we found for this positive effect."
>Elephants have the greatest need for heat loss of any modern terrestrial animal because of their high body-volume to skin-surface ratio, the report points out.
>Many typical elephant behaviors help the giant creatures keep their cool -- from ear flapping to dust baths to water-spraying. They also lose heat through their skin and from blood flowing through their large ears.
>But none of this was quite enough to meet an adult elephant's need to release several kilowatts of heat every day, Bou-Zeid and lead author Conor Myhrvold explain.
>So they turned their attention to the little-noticed wiry hairs spaced out across the elephant's head or back -- and discovered they have a surprisingly significant effect.
>In a slight breeze, the elephant's hair can enhance its ability to lose heat by up to 23%, the team found.

Thinking about it this also explains why we have sparse hair too so it is a good hypothesis that big dinos might have had sparse feathers to aid on cooling.

>>1755276
>it is a good hypothesis that big dinos might have had sparse feathers to aid on cooling.
yeah, that could work, especially if the feathers were more hairlike.

doesn't really answer the fact that T. rex skin impressions from several areas of the body completely lack feathers though.

I mean, even if the feathers were only one per couple inches or something, what are the odds that all the skin that was preserved just happened to be parts without any?

>>1755276
>probably used it as support while still or resting.
this is one of those things that's impossible to tell except from footprints.

we don't have many from T. rex, but we have tons from other bipedal dinosaurs. It seems most of them squatted down on the upper part of the foot (the tarsus or cannon bone, the part you called the legs) without dropping their tails to the ground. Tail prints are really quite rare, and even rarer from resting dinosaurs.

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The imagery of theropods sitting just seems hilarious.
Not that they'd be unable to do it, but they're very rarely depicted in that pose so it's just real weird.

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>>1755292
it's a weird thing to think about.
it reminds me somehow of my friend Stacey peeing in the woods.

>>1752321
one of the few times that shit no-talent hipster comic is actually decent

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>2014
>still thinking feathered dinosaurs are less scary
Who is the dinosaur?

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>>1755340
To be fair, they are pretty fucking horrifying without feathers.

>>1752433
all the dinosaurghosts are thirty or more feet underground. think about it. Ghosts in renovated houses follow the original floor plan, even climbing staircases years after theyve been torn down.

jurassic park could be going on right now, beneath millions of years of sediment right where youre standing.

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>>1755354
I wish I could Dinosauring this hard like you mang, Archosaurians just happen to have the DEEEPEST LORE of all. CrRAzY!.

>>1755101
Bigger brain to control more muscle groups and process visual information better

He was probably about as smart as a modern day human. Most of the brain is used for everything but intelligence.

>the huge ass people alive today are descended from a bunch of ancient manlets that figured out how to impale their giant brethren

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>>1752867
Troodon is my favourite too!

I thought I was the only one

>>1755357
http://www.govrel.vcu.edu//news/Releases/2005/june/McDaniel-Big%20Brain.pdf

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>>1755357
We should at least consider the possibility that we didn't survive because we're smarter but because we're stupider, more violent, and less trusting than idaltu and neanderthalensis were.

brain size and quality of artifacts seem to suggest we were inferior in every regard.

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>>1755354
¡Madre de Dios!

>>1752318
Fun fact: God created the dinosaurs so that Adam and Eve could have something to ride around on.

>>1752369
Not like humans but like dolphins maybe...

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>>1752369
>They were around for 150 million years. Humans have been around for 8.
>they could have been intelligent
They're pretty good evidence that human intelligence is not a normal outcome of evolution.

in fact all animal lineages drive this point home.

we are fucking unique, we are a freak accident.

if we die off there's no reason to think anything like us will ever evolve here again. In billions of years it's never happened before, and in billions more it won't again.

>>1752369
>They were around for 150 million years. Humans have been around for 8
What is that even supposed to say. Dinosaurs are a large, diverse taxon and are still around as birds, so they've been existing for 230M years but that still doesn't mean anything. Archosaurs, a taxon that includes dinosaurs have been around 250M years, Sauropsids for 300M. Since all life on earth very likely descends from a common ancestor every living organism's lineage has been around for 3 billion years. Your cutoff is arbitrary.

So, on the topic of prehistoric life, why don't we have any hominid threads?

>>1755645
they always degenerate into discussions of whether or not Neanderthals are a subspecies of H. sapiens, and back in the good old days /pol/ used to jump in claiming that Africans are inferior because they lack Neanderthal genes.

that and not many people here are interested.

>>1755645
Misanthropy.

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>>1755682
But wasn't it proven that they were a separate species? Just because you're a separate species in the same genus, that doesn't mean you can't have fertile kids. Hell, this has been proven with fucking camels and llamas, who haven't been the same species for 20 million years or so.

Er, sorry if I start another debate.

>>1755720
>But wasn't it proven that they were a separate species?
species are arbitrary.
you can't prove them.

but no, the problem isn't that they COULD have fertile offspring, but that they DID. A lot. Over and over.

and if we retain them as separate species we've got a problem since we wouldn't be a species anymore, but a hybrid.

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>>1755723
But it's such a small amount of Neanderthal DNA in us. Hell, if that were the case, then Neanderthals aren't a real species/subspecies, but a hybrid. Remember Denisovans? They fucked Neanderthals several times, to the point where their DNA has a small amount of Denisovan. And if it makes Homo Sapiens Sapiens a hybrid subspecies of early Homo Sapiens, Neanderthal, Denisovan, and an as-of-yet unnamed archaic human species in Africa (most likely Heidelbergensis, Rhodesiensis if they were a separate species, or a new species that outlived Erectus's reign in Africa, and lived along side Heidelbergensis and Rhodesienis), then so be it. Who knows? Maybe we were the most attractive species of human back then, maybe the Denisovan pussy game was outstanding, or maybe Neanderthal-Sapiens relations were common the second Sapiens stepped into the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Either way, it's fun to know about our ancestors, which is ironic considering how little we know (or care) about the only other true race/subspecies of Sapiens, Idaltu.

Also, I wish we knew what Denisovans looked like. All we have from that DNA sample is that they had dark skin, dark eyes apparently, and dark hair (making this picture silly, unless the northern ones had blonde hair)

>>1755280
Probably it was on top of the head and back like in elephants

>>1755731
Wow, maybe I should have made two paragraphs.

>>1755731
Considering my experience on 4chan humans will fuck anything doesn't matters if it looks human or not. Not that every human would do this but in every group there would be some that would try different meats.

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>>1755731
From gene analysis Neanderthals had light skin and red hair.

I wonder if we got light skin from them and this trait became beneficial due to the colder climate.