The dinosaur thread

So what's your thoughts on the spinosaurid feather thing? The general consensus is that that most if not all theropods (or at least the small to mid-sized ones) were fully or partially feathered yet of every illustration i've seen of one of them it's featherless. I can see how a lack of feathers would be useful for an animal that spends it's entire life around water but then again we have plenty of water birds and those existed even back then.

I vote nay on feathers in non-coelurosaur theropods.

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

Voting nay just for aesthetic reasons isn't very logical.

I've never understood the idea that feathers makes a dinosaur less scary somehow. Like, a T-Rex is still going to be a giant thing with teeth that can crush you. All that other stuff doesn't go away just because they have feathers. And chickens will fucking swarm mice and other shit in a frenzy of bloodlust when the opportunity arises. Geese have a reputation for being brutal to intruders. Birds are scary as shit man.

(Also as for the art that info is going to take some time to get around and influence paleoartists. And considering how long the idea of dinosaurs as exclusively scaly has been around, it's not a surprise that you're finding mostly non-feathered representations.)

Uh, guys? I asked a rather important question here.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I vote nay because of evidence (Concavenator’s “feathers” are probably muscle attachments).

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

With feathers making dinosaurs less scary-looking-I would argue it actually has the potential to make them look more scary. Think Feathered Fiend at its worst. A giant Cassowary, for example, is one of the scariest concepts I can imagine!

@Marq: Sorry, I don't know the answer to that question :\

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Marq, this isn't even the forum for talking about trope pages?? I'm sure if someone has a suggestion they'll answer, it's been less than half a day at this point.

I remember watching a video from Trey the Explainer made in response to the news that T-Rex was possibly mostly featherless, he seemed pretty anal about it not being likely.

But it's the thread for those tropers who are interested in dinosaurs, which means it's far more likely for me to find people who are well-versed on the subject here. And it concerns adding real-life information into a "trope" article that is mostly about explaining such information alongside popular stereotypes and perceptions about the subject matter.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I suppose you could rewrite it yourself if you’re so inclined.

Edited by Spinosegnosaurus77 on Jan 11th 2019 at 3:36:57 PM

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

@Marq: I cannot find a reference to Amphicoelias anywhere on that page. Could you direct me to where it is discussed?

NVM- I found it, it was in the Sauropod folder. After reading the Wikipedia page, it appears that everything that was previously thought true of the dinosaur still is, it's just called by a new name now? If that is the case, then I would recommend changing the title of the paragraph where it now apprears from "Amphicoelias fragillimus" to "Amphicoelias fragillimus, now renamed Maraapunisaurus" instead. The title is already a link to the current Wikipedia page (which is how I presume you figured all this out to begin with).

Edited by DeMarquis on Jan 12th 2019 at 6:37:48 AM

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Yeah, that link was how I found out. But here's the thing:

• Amphicoelias as a genus was not made pointless with last year's reclassification, because before said event the genus had two species. In other words, Amphicoelias still has a species assigned to it, named A. altus.
• However, the Stock Dinosaurs (True Dinosaurs) entry for Amphicoelias fragillimus is written as if A. fragillimus was all there is to the Amphicoelias genus.
• And to top it off, A. fragillimus being reclassified as Maraapunisaurus fragillimus moves it from Diplodocidae to Rebbachisauridae, which the Stock Dinosaurs (True Dinosaurs) entry notes would automatically disqualify it from being the largest or longest sauropod due to now having a significantly different morphology.

It seems a no-brainer that A. fragillimus should be made into an entry for Maraapunisaurus fragillimus — which would be reworded so that its previous size estimates and being a contender for being the largest/longest sauropod is all in past tense — and that all mentions of Amphicoelias in the context of the size competition should be changed to Maraapunisaurus. However, where does that leave A. altus? I'm personally against ignoring the fact that it exists, but I don't know what to do with it either; from what I could tell from the Wikipedia article, A. altus has literally nothing that could be considered an "outlier" in anyway, especially in size (it was roughly the size of Diplodocus). I suppose we could put it on Prehistoric Life - Sauropods, but what should the entry be like?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

A. altus could be the same as Diplodocus (in which case Amphicoelias would be the proper name).

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

But is Altus a "Stock Dinosaur"? That is, has it ever been featured in a Hollywood production?

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Where was the consensus reached on most theropods being feathered (At least the small-medium ones)? Because when skimming through articles and such on theropods, I've seen a lot of scaly or non-feathered big ones with the T. rex being the real outlier as far as big ones go and even the feathers seem to be debated with ideas proposing a naked chicken look. Also question: is the feathered thing a real consensus for the rex? 'Cause I remember the documentary The Real T. rex showing one with a really weird hybrid look of bird scales save for the face with a long ridge of feathers on the top side with a funny vulture tuff around the neck. And when did the Spinosaurus being fluffy come about?

Also, how extensive is the feathered Dinos thing? Because it's difficult to find a vibe online between people yelling at artists for not having every Dino, including herbivores feathered and those who are yelling back to chill out.

Edited by CommanderAce on Jan 14th 2019 at 11:18:47 AM

Power of Thor!

There's no consensus for... pretty much every major group. The only one I know of where there is a consensus are and ankylosaurs and their close relatives. And that's because they're one of the few groups where we have good details on the skin because of bone nodules in their skin that helped preserve actual skin rather than just impressions.

Actually we got really lucky at one point with a specimen of a Minmi where it had mummified before it fossilised, preserving at least some of the softer tissues.

Right now, I’d limit feathers to coelurosaurs & small ornithischians.

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

I'm of the mind that all saurs had a broader (and crazier) range of fluff than we give them credit for — going all the way back.

The environment was often a lot warmer than we're used to, true, but winter would still be a bind when in the middle of a temperature-swinging supercontinent... while also being warm-blooded and needing to snack a lot out in the relative chill or the blistering heat. Insulation works both ways, after all. And, fluff is sunscreen, too.

Heck, we're supposedly the nakedest ape from one of the warmer places, but we still have fluff even with the fire-and-clothes cheat. <shrugs> And, the remaining elephants have hair, too — even while taking advantage of the square cubed law to not lose heat too quickly even when the temperature drops. Ditto rhinos. Both could also switch their genes to the woolly mode pretty darned quickly given the right external factors — see Ice Ages.

And, the earliest date for feathers/ filaments/ pycnofibers continually gets pushed back and back as techniques around fossil analysis get better. To the point we have to start harbouring thinking like "when did crocodilians devest in filaments, exactly?" or "were there any completely naked archosaurs at all?".

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jan 15th 2019 at 2:17:28 PM

More like there's suspicion that the two genera are the same, but not necessarily that A. altus as the same as D. longus. Furthermore, the Wikipedia article claims that the latest stated opinion by individual scientists on the matter (dating to 2015) is that even in the event of confirming synoymy of the genera, Amphicoelias would be considered a nomen oblitum.

That is a very good question... and the criterion should be either "in many Hollywood productions" or qualified with "and became widely popular as a result of said production". Unfortunately, I'm one of the last people you should ask for the answer to this, as my "watching quota" is very limited.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jan 5th 2022 at 12:39:28 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Romer’s Osteology of the Reptiles used Amphicoelias in 1956, so it’s absolutely not a nomen oblitum.

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

I think the answer to my question is "no", at least I cant any depictions of this specific species at all.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

@Euodiachloris: To be fair, there definitely were-and are-non-fluffy archosaurs. Crocodiles and Alligators are archosaurs.

Also, with the hair on relatively hairless mammals, it's largely a case of The Artifact. In fact, I might even argue the existence of hairless mammals proves that hair is not always a good thing.

Having said that I would argue that it's fairly plausible that fluffiness is a trait Dinosaurs probably evolved relatively early on-my evidence being that pterosaurs had fluff too, which implies it might predate both groups.

Though to be fair I could see that being a case of convergent evolution too. If I had to guess, fluffiness probably evolves when a species becomes warm blooded, and that tends to evolve when a species becomes particularly active. For example, a pterosaur flies, so it has to spend a ton of energy, which in turn has the side-bonus of generating heat.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

It's well established on the Ptero Soarer page that pterosaurs couldn't grab creatures with their feet like modern birds-of-prey, would it have been possible for one species to develop grasping talons due to evolving a similar lifestyle or was there something about pterosaur anatomy that explicitly prevented this?

I think all that's required, based on the second of the articles listed on the trope page, are stronger muscles and opposible digits. I would speculate that pteranodons evoled to hunt big fish might do it, but I dont know what the weight limit on their wings was.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Have they ever done studies that compared the flight muscles of birds to pterosaurs? Do birds have any kind of advantage that pterosaurs lacked or was it that their feet already had that shape when they first evolved from dinosaurs?