JCC Census What are your favorite kinds of Dinosaurs?

What are your favorite kinds of Dinosaurs?

(Because who doesn't like talking about dinosaurs?)









Theropods (probably most of the carnivores are in this group, like the tyrannosaurs and raptors, ceratosaurs and dilophosaurs, allosaurus and compsognathus and spinosaurus, etc.)






Sauropods (the long-neck's)






Ornithopods (the ones with duck-bills and all the different head-crests)







Pacycephalosaurs (the head-butters)





Ceratopsians (like Triceratops)





Ankylosaurs (the shelled battle-tanks)





Stegosaurs (plated and spiked)





Pterosaurs (flying reptiles... though not truly dinosaurs)








Plesiosaurs, Pliosaurs, Mosasaurs, & Icthyosaurs (marine reptiles, also technically not dinosaurs)

 

Yo where my ostriches at

 

The dead kind. I’VE SEEN JURASSIC PARK. I KNOW WHAT HAPPENS.


In which case, the answer is diesel.

 

Where's Barney????

 

Grimlock FTW

 

Theropods. I have to say, I never liked the way pterosaurs looked, something odd about their bodies and heads.

 

Pterosaurs, like they were presented in Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World. There are not many things as creepy and scary than a flying reptile that could snatch you from the sky and eat you or feed you to it's youngs.

 

Sauropods. Little Foot's mom was a ****ing beast.

 

Growing up I was always fascinated by dinosaurs. Believe it or not, I even took a dinosaur elective class in college. I had a thing for the largest ones. A few years ago I went to the American Museum of Natural History when they had an exhibit on the largest dinosaurs, and among the exhibits was a femur of one Argentinosaurus Huinculensis. The femur was larger than a grown man over 6ft. Just keep in mind this was a real living and breathing animal and not some Hollywood fantasy.

 

Yeah but look at the physique on that guy. Looks like a turn of the century strongman. Most impressive thing in that image, tbh.

 

Harry-the-Fox's take on it is a bit longer-legged but with a more horizontal posture:

https://www.deviantart.com/harry-the-fox/art/Argentinosaurus-huinculensis-Size-803529376

 

It's crazy how huge a land creature could get without collapsing under its own mass.

It's alright in the Ocean because weightlessness.

No wonder they had so many weight reduction holes

 

Oxygen levels were higher in the atmosphere in those days which could support larger bodied animals. But yeah, the proportions must have been extraordinary.

There were really strange dinosaurs... Therizinosaurs really amaze me:



There's also a very recent discovery of the tail bones of Spinosaurus, which demonstrate that this huge theropod had a much more aquatic lifestyle than was previously suspected:



I was also watching a vid the other day of how dinosaurs and other reptilia had evolved in isolation on some islands, such as Hateg Island in what is now modern day Romania, causing insular dwarfism and other weirdness. Here, Azhdarkhid pterosaurs that likely walked on all fours, appear to have been the top predators. These pterosaurs were far more frightening that the ones portrayed in the Jurassic Park films:

 

That was the original theory. Some doubt has been cast on it:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131118081043.htm

 

Interesting. I vaguely recall reading about that, but then I've also read other stuff that suggests that the picture isn't as straightforward as we think:

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-08/gc-rod081919.php

And this article refers to research done within that 220 million year period that has discovered a rapid rise in oxygen levels rather than a dramatic fall, albeit not in the later evolutionary span of the dinosaurs when gigantism became a thing.

Edit: Forgot to mention, because birds are basically dinosaurs, they have way more efficient lungs/oxygen uptake than mammals. Dinosaurs appear to have had the same highly efficient system, so they would have taken in more oxygen than their mammalian counterparts.

 

Yup. "Birdlike lungs made it easier for dinosaurs to get big" works better than "oxygen levels were much higher than they are now" IMO.

 

whatever kind(s) my kids are pretending to be

 

Yeah, I don't know why I didn't flip this around more easily in my brain; it's late here...

Studies have been done with dragonflies in high oxygen chambers that showed that they grew bigger as a result (about 15% as I recall); so methinks oxygen may be the key here, even if other factors also existed.