Dinosaurs

[Kari Kamiya]

idk about anyone else, but I've gotten REALLY annoyed at the constant insistence with people calling birds dinosaurs. Like not even simply that they evolved from them, just straight up calling them dinosaurs, to the point where some lunatics want to categorize birds as fucking reptiles now.

Do we call amphibans "fish" or mammal "reptiles" because one came from the other? Fuck no. Let birds be their own separate thing dammit.

The constant insistance that the dinosaurs never "truly" died out because they became birds I think has caused some gullible folks to literally believe birds are dinosaurs all along. They're not modern-day fossils like the "living fossils" which are called as such because they evolved so little or not at all since when they first showed up in the fossil record and some species still exhibit primitive features like being lobe-finned or being a jawless fish like the lamprey and hagfish. Then there's the monotremes (platypus and the echidna) exhibiting the primitive method of laying eggs as mammals although the species themselves did evolve at some point.

A few birds are considered living fossils, such as the pelican and the hoatzin whose chicks are born with two-clawed wings to climb trees, but that still doesn't make them dinosaurs. Oh, and much like the horseshoe crab and the coelacanth, mantis shrimps occupied the same waters as other prehistoric marine reptiles, first branching off in the middle of the Carboniferous and remained relatively unchanged since. They're fucking badasses, I bet there was actual claw-to-claw combat between them and the eurypterids.

But uh, yeah, "living fossils" =/= dinosaurs.

 

[UntimelyDhelmise]

The constant insistance that the dinosaurs never "truly" died out because they became birds I think has caused some gullible folks to literally believe birds are dinosaurs all along. They're not modern-day fossils like the "living fossils" which are called as such because they evolved so little or not at all since when they first showed up in the fossil record and some species still exhibit primitive features like being lobe-finned or being a jawless fish like the lamprey and hagfish. Then there's the monotremes (platypus and the echidna) exhibiting the primitive method of laying eggs as mammals although the species themselves did evolve at some point.

A few birds are considered living fossils, such as the pelican and the hoatzin whose chicks are born with two-clawed wings to climb trees, but that still doesn't make them dinosaurs. Oh, and much like the horseshoe crab and the coelacanth, mantis shrimps occupied the same waters as other prehistoric marine reptiles, first branching off in the middle of the Carboniferous and remained relatively unchanged since. They're fucking badasses, I bet there was actual claw-to-claw combat between them and the eurypterids.

But uh, yeah, "living fossils" =/= dinosaurs.

That's probably why. People have latched on to the "birds = dinosaurs" thing so strongly because there are no modern equivalents otherwise so to speak. For example there are no ammonites but the chambered nautilus is a close relative, mammoths/mastodons are gone but we still have elephants, and so on.

It's almost like some kind of bizarre coping mechanism. Pop culture has ingrained dinosaurs into the public conscious so intensely (far more than any other group of extinct organisms) that it's as if it's difficult to accept that none exist today, so people have turned to birds in some sort of strange fashion of pretending that they're still around.

 

[Calandrino]

idk about anyone else, but I've gotten REALLY annoyed at the constant insistence with people calling birds dinosaurs. Like not even simply that they evolved from them, just straight up calling them dinosaurs, to the point where some lunatics want to categorize birds as fucking reptiles now.

The constant insistance that the dinosaurs never "truly" died out because they became birds I think has caused some gullible folks to literally believe birds are dinosaurs all along.

But... why would Wikipedia lie?

 

[RockPaper]

idk about anyone else, but I've gotten REALLY annoyed at the constant insistence with people calling birds dinosaurs. Like not even simply that they evolved from them, just straight up calling them dinosaurs, to the point where some lunatics want to categorize birds as fucking reptiles now.

Do we call amphibans "fish" or mammal "reptiles" because one came from the other? Fuck no. Let birds be their own separate thing dammit.

The problem here is classification is messy, and trying to place extinct groups into little boxes isn't always neat and clean. Are dinosaurs "reptiles"? Are they really? What if they were actually homeothermic? Reptiles like lizards and snakes are cold-blooded. If a number of smaller predatory species did have feathers, then that isn't "reptilian", either. I honestly don't think it's crazy to think of dinosaurs as almost their own Class, different enough from what we think of as "reptiles" to merit their own group, with Birds (Aves) as a Sub-Class.

But we tend to classify things in relation to what's alive now, so people feel the need to force Dinosauria into either the Reptile Box or the Bird Box. Maybe they're another, separate box?

 

[UntimelyDhelmise]

The problem here is classification is messy, and trying to place extinct groups into little boxes isn't always neat and clean. Are dinosaurs "reptiles"? Are they really? What if they were actually homeothermic? Reptiles like lizards and snakes are cold-blooded. If a number of smaller predatory species did have feathers, then that isn't "reptilian", either. I honestly don't think it's crazy to think of dinosaurs as almost their own Class, different enough from what we think of as "reptiles" to merit their own group, with Birds (Aves) as a Sub-Class.

But we tend to classify things in relation to what's alive now, so people feel the need to force Dinosauria into either the Reptile Box or the Bird Box. Maybe they're another, separate box?

I'm positive if there were any living species left today they would be in a class all their own, if not at bare minimum in a very specialized branch of reptile. Most certainly looked reptilian in appearance (we know they had scaly skin for one thing) but as studies have shown they are a far cry from your everyday lizard too. At the same time idk how you can look at all but a select number of raptors and go "Oh yeah that's totally like a bird" either. And let's not even begin with the marine and flying reptiles...

It's like the bizarre Permian dicynodonts and gorgonopsids (so-called mammal-like reptiles) where it doesn't seem like they properly fit in with any other group, extant or extinct.

 

[BullDogsLipBrandClamjuice]

Heres when I sound retarded:
The k2 extinction event killed all the dinosaurs, at least thats what I was told when I was a kid( I know 20 year old information is out dated). Any thing under 100 pounds died off through starvation or weather or what ever.
I never understood how cold blooded turtles or croc ancestors survived the sun being blotted out after the space rock hit

 

[Parasaurolophus]

Heres when I sound retarded:
The k2 extinction event killed all the dinosaurs, at least thats what I was told when I was a kid( I know 20 year old information is out dated). Any thing under 100 pounds died off through starvation or weather or what ever.
I never understood how cold blooded turtles or croc ancestors survived the sun being blotted out after the space rock hit

That's not retarded at all! You'd assume that crocodilians being big, heavy reptiles related to dinosaurs they'd go a similar route, though, from what I could gather, they were just different enough for that particular situation.

It sounds a bit weird, but being cold blooded might actually have given them a bit of an advantage. Dinosaurs and pterosaurs both led more active lifestyles (fast growth, (probably) warm blooded), requiring more energy and thus: food. That being scarce though, they didn't have the best chances.

Crocodilians, on the other hand, can go for long periods of time without having to eat, which might have made it possible for them to simply wait it out until nature recovers. At the same time, freshwater systems, the primary living spaces for them, had it easier with colder temperatures as well, being used to freeze, living with less oxygen and some creatures even going in stasis when it's too rough. Plus, the water that feeds into these systems may also provide a bit of warmth.

Would the nuclear winter conditions have gone on for longer it's unlikely they would have survived so well either, but as it is, I guess they were pretty lucky. Or, as lucky as you can be. What was it again? 20 different species of crocodilians left today?

I'm not quite sure how it was for turtles, but I can imagine the same reasons probably also played in their favour.

Oh, not that anyone mistakes me for a smart person though. I just like prehistoric animals and just quickly read up on it too, here on the freshwater stuff and here to get an overall idea

 

[Brahma]

Any dinophiles want to recommend me a book on prehistoric animals generally?

Jest finished the rise and fall off the dinosaurs by brusatte and tbh I enjoyed it but it was really a biography of the people who have discovered and worked on dinosaurs over the last couple hundred years and it's quite narrow in scope only talking about dinosaurs

Ideally I'd like a good overview from the start of animals getting big so I don't know devonian onward?

There's a bit in a short history of nearly everything that talks about the big stuff from before the dinosaurs like dimetrodon and stuff about how they had different holes in their head etc. That kind of thing, how they're told apart etc

 

[Godbert Manderville]

Name your favorite dinosaur, Kiwis. Mine is the Eustreptospondylus. Daspleteosaurus is a close second.

Don't even fucking bother posting in this thread if you're gonna say T-Rex or Triceratops or some other casual shit.

My favourite dinosaur is also not an actual dinosaur : Dimetrodon. Lived in the early Permian, a few tens of millions of years before dinosaurs became a thing, and had a gansta fin on its back.

 

[Penis Drager]

The problem here is classification is messy, and trying to place extinct groups into little boxes isn't always neat and clean. Are dinosaurs "reptiles"? Are they really? What if they were actually homeothermic? Reptiles like lizards and snakes are cold-blooded. If a number of smaller predatory species did have feathers, then that isn't "reptilian", either. I honestly don't think it's crazy to think of dinosaurs as almost their own Class, different enough from what we think of as "reptiles" to merit their own group, with Birds (Aves) as a Sub-Class.

But we tend to classify things in relation to what's alive now, so people feel the need to force Dinosauria into either the Reptile Box or the Bird Box. Maybe they're another, separate box?

One of the biggest issues here is people conflate different classification methods. Cladistic classification is largely based on ancestry. A dinosaur is ostensibly a reptile because their ancestors are reptiles. But this same logic applies to mammals and birds. They ARE in the reptile clade. This gets confusing though so we use cladistic hierarchy until it stops being convenient and then go on to the more simplistic "this kind of animal is this thing" classification so stupid kids don't ask stupid questions.

 

[Fatrick Hamlinson]

The problem here is classification is messy, and trying to place extinct groups into little boxes isn't always neat and clean. Are dinosaurs "reptiles"? Are they really? What if they were actually homeothermic? Reptiles like lizards and snakes are cold-blooded. If a number of smaller predatory species did have feathers, then that isn't "reptilian", either. I honestly don't think it's crazy to think of dinosaurs as almost their own Class, different enough from what we think of as "reptiles" to merit their own group, with Birds (Aves) as a Sub-Class.

But we tend to classify things in relation to what's alive now, so people feel the need to force Dinosauria into either the Reptile Box or the Bird Box. Maybe they're another, separate box?

The classification of dinosaurs with existing animals becomes interesting when you consider sauropods. They breathed like birds, according to the scientists at the Museum of the Rockies. They had air sacs which functioned like bellows to push air through their bodies, just like birds.

One of my favorite extinct species from the time of the dinosaurs was the archaeopteryx. I was lucky enough to see two archaeopteryx specimens at the museum at Thermopolis, WY.

Edit:

I'm also interested in Cambrian and Ordovician fossils. One of the more interesting places for Cambrian trace fossils is a spot in Wisconsin called Blackberry Hill. The Krukowski quarry is located right on this fossil hotspot.

http://www.fossilmall.com/Cambrian_Shadows/Krukowski_Quarry.htm

Blackberry Hill

Blackberry Hill Cambrian jellyfish, Climactichnites and arthropod tracks in Wisconsin

www.fossilmuseum.net

http://paleoportal.org/index.php?globalnav=flora_fauna&sectionnav=assemblage&submission_id=1697

Second edit:

Any dinophiles want to recommend me a book on prehistoric animals generally?

Jest finished the rise and fall off the dinosaurs by brusatte and tbh I enjoyed it but it was really a biography of the people who have discovered and worked on dinosaurs over the last couple hundred years and it's quite narrow in scope only talking about dinosaurs

Ideally I'd like a good overview from the start of animals getting big so I don't know devonian onward?

There's a bit in a short history of nearly everything that talks about the big stuff from before the dinosaurs like dimetrodon and stuff about how they had different holes in their head etc. That kind of thing, how they're told apart etc

If you're interested in extinction events: When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time by Michael Benton.

 

[furūtsu]

My favourite dinosaur is also not an actual dinosaur : Dimetrodon. Lived in the early Permian, a few tens of millions of years before dinosaurs became a thing, and had a gansta fin on its back.

This was the second result when I DuckDuckGo'd this mf. I approve.

 

[Android raptor]

idk about anyone else, but I've gotten REALLY annoyed at the constant insistence with people calling birds dinosaurs. Like not even simply that they evolved from them, just straight up calling them dinosaurs, to the point where some lunatics want to categorize birds as fucking reptiles now.

Do we call amphibans "fish" or mammal "reptiles" because one came from the other? Fuck no. Let birds be their own separate thing dammit.

Because birds literally are dinosaurs. Taxonomy is weird like that.

It's basically like if a mass extinction killed all mammals except bats. Bats would still be mammals even without any other kinds of mammals around.

Not all non-avian dinosaurs had feathers but I don't get the butthurt over those that do. Birds will fuck your shit up, only ppl that haven't spent much time around them think they suck

Also the Permian extinction and paleozooic critters are the shit. Also anyone else a dinosaur toy autist?

 

[jje100010001]

The constant insistance that the dinosaurs never "truly" died out because they became birds I think has caused some gullible folks to literally believe birds are dinosaurs all along. They're not modern-day fossils like the "living fossils" which are called as such because they evolved so little or not at all since when they first showed up in the fossil record and some species still exhibit primitive features like being lobe-finned or being a jawless fish like the lamprey and hagfish. Then there's the monotremes (platypus and the echidna) exhibiting the primitive method of laying eggs as mammals although the species themselves did evolve at some point.

A few birds are considered living fossils, such as the pelican and the hoatzin whose chicks are born with two-clawed wings to climb trees, but that still doesn't make them dinosaurs. Oh, and much like the horseshoe crab and the coelacanth, mantis shrimps occupied the same waters as other prehistoric marine reptiles, first branching off in the middle of the Carboniferous and remained relatively unchanged since. They're fucking badasses, I bet there was actual claw-to-claw combat between them and the eurypterids.

But uh, yeah, "living fossils" =/= dinosaurs.

You're right, but a part of me always wishes that some more species with primitive features would have survived, like maybe a non-mammalian cynodont or an extremely primitive bird species with teeth & claws.

From this, I guess there is a grasping of straws when looking at species for features that say "Hey this is something from the past that's survived! Look at how dino-like this broody hen is!"

That's not retarded at all! You'd assume that crocodilians being big, heavy reptiles related to dinosaurs they'd go a similar route, though, from what I could gather, they were just different enough for that particular situation.

It sounds a bit weird, but being cold blooded might actually have given them a bit of an advantage. Dinosaurs and pterosaurs both led more active lifestyles (fast growth, (probably) warm blooded), requiring more energy and thus: food. That being scarce though, they didn't have the best chances.

Crocodilians, on the other hand, can go for long periods of time without having to eat, which might have made it possible for them to simply wait it out until nature recovers. At the same time, freshwater systems, the primary living spaces for them, had it easier with colder temperatures as well, being used to freeze, living with less oxygen and some creatures even going in stasis when it's too rough. Plus, the water that feeds into these systems may also provide a bit of warmth.

Didn't many considerably more divergent crocodillian forms also go extinct during the K2 extinction? As such, it could be that just this body plan & type of crocodilian was particularly well suited (not to mention extremely lucky) to waiting out the extinction event, and formed the stem species for the modern crocodilians today.

Now, I do sort of also always wonder if any actual small dinosaur species would have made it into the early Paleogene era, same as how some synapsids survived past the end-Permian extinction, and only faded out during the Triassic.

 

[Positron]

The problem here is classification is messy, and trying to place extinct groups into little boxes isn't always neat and clean. Are dinosaurs "reptiles"? Are they really? What if they were actually homeothermic? Reptiles like lizards and snakes are cold-blooded. If a number of smaller predatory species did have feathers, then that isn't "reptilian", either. I honestly don't think it's crazy to think of dinosaurs as almost their own Class, different enough from what we think of as "reptiles" to merit their own group, with Birds (Aves) as a Sub-Class.

The modern phylogenic classification (that lead to the conclusion that birds are dinosaurs, and many, many groupings that are baffling to laypeople) is not based on common characteristics (or similarities), but on common ancestorship. Each clade, or level of grouping (genus, family, class, order, phylum and their sub- and super- groupings) must include every descendant of an ancestor, and only those descendants and no others. Under such rule, there are only very few ways you can group extant and extinct reptiles. To illustrate, here is a simplified phylogenetic tree that include reptiles, birds, and mammals.

Ignore turtles (whose phylogenetic position is still under dispute). You can see Mammals (and their Synapsid ancestors such as the Dimetrodon) are a group of their own. No problem here. The problem is in the grab-bag of diverse Diapsids (the term refers to the number of "holes" behind the eyeball. Mammals have one on each side; in human it is the space bridged by the zygomatic arch). One way to do it is to let all the Diapsids be their own group (called Sauropsida) and live with the fact that it must include the Birds (Aves). Or else you can preserve the old Class Aves, but for the sake of consistency, you must then assign Crocodiles, Lizards+Snakes+Tuataras, Plesiosaurs, Ichythyosaurs, Ornithischians, Saurischians, and Pterosaurs, each to a class of their own.

If, as you propose, we are to give Dinosauria a Class status and Aves as its subclass (or rather, an infraclass under Saurischia), then we shall need to set up Class Crocodila, Class Plasiosaura, etc. So it isn't that much simpifying.

 

[Kyururu-kun]

5 pages and nobody said this? Shameful!

This dinosaur has 500 teeth! And the name, well... Google it, I dare you.

 

[Lemmingwise]

4 Pages and this wasn't linked?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K40SsKe0d8

ABSURD.

And nobody mentioned the best dinosaur:

Nigersaurus - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Cr1ms0n_&_C10v3r]

Any dinophiles want to recommend me a book on prehistoric animals generally?

Jest finished the rise and fall off the dinosaurs by brusatte and tbh I enjoyed it but it was really a biography of the people who have discovered and worked on dinosaurs over the last couple hundred years and it's quite narrow in scope only talking about dinosaurs

Ideally I'd like a good overview from the start of animals getting big so I don't know devonian onward?

There's a bit in a short history of nearly everything that talks about the big stuff from before the dinosaurs like dimetrodon and stuff about how they had different holes in their head etc. That kind of thing, how they're told apart etc

I would recommend searching for a book specifically about life in the Palaeozoic Era, that should cover it. Most books about the Mesozoic will only briefly mention it because the focus is on dinosaurs. The Dorling Kindersley Dinosaur Atlas does mention these animals but it only takes up a page or two.

Because birds literally are dinosaurs. Taxonomy is weird like that.

It's basically like if a mass extinction killed all mammals except bats. Bats would still be mammals even without any other kinds of mammals around.

Not all non-avian dinosaurs had feathers but I don't get the butthurt over those that do. Birds will fuck your shit up, only ppl that haven't spent much time around them think they suck

Also the Permian extinction and paleozooic critters are the shit. Also anyone else a dinosaur toy autist?

Best toy to receive if you were a dinosaur autist child.

 

[Mnutu]

5 pages and nobody said this? Shameful!
Ver archivo adjunto 2089455
This dinosaur has 500 teeth! And the name, well... Google it, I dare you.

It’s shit like this that makes me wonder if all paleontology is just a massive joke meant to fuck with us. A creature that retarded couldn’t possibly exist.

 

[Kyururu-kun]

It’s shit like this that makes me wonder if all paleontology is just a massive joke meant to fuck with us. A creature that retarded couldn’t possibly exist.

They do, but they can't sneed.