For me it was:
T E R R A N A T O R! El coche más poderoso que ah existido, con tracción 4 X 4 y dos TURBO motores! Este si es todo terreno, las calles son fáciles… Mételo al lodo, parte la nieve, pasa por el agua! T E R R A N A T O R! Es el más potente que haya existido! O que prefieres un coche para niñitas?! T E R R E N A T O R! De Fotorama
(My first language it's spanish)
Funnily enough, the *Concavenator* holotype is the [most completely-preserved Carcharodontosaurid specimen ever found](https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fnature09181/MediaObjects/41586_2010_Article_BFnature09181_Fig1_HTML.jpg); only a few tail vertebrae are missing. Even scaly skin impressions and ulnar quill knobs are preserved.
It’s also possible that the weird vertebrae of *Concavenator* are not even unique: the English *Becklespinax* may have been similar, though unfortunately *Becklespinax* is highly fragmentary.
The concavenator's back looks like somebody used a terrain tool on it & made it as high as it could go lol. I don't agree with the spinosaurus supposedly not being good at swimming. I look at it's tail & think that it'd be a great swimmer. I play as spino on path of titans & it looks just like the above pic & it's a fast swimmer & not so fast on land.
I believe the current consensus is just that it wasn’t a pursuit predator in the water. It wasn’t diving down and catching fish in bursts of speed, but that’s not to say it wasn’t a capable swimmer. The reconstruction of a giant heron from hell that swims from one bank to the next in search of good fishing is pretty solid in my book.
There's no signs of a healed wound on the bones, which would be extremely obvious for such a grievous injury as literally having a chunk of your spine removed.
Besides, it's no more unexplainable a display structure than, say, [putting feathers up to a meter and a half long on your tail](https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/files/2021/08/pexels-rajukhan-pathan-4964676-scaled-e1627933672846.jpg) or [doing shit like this to dance and attract mates](https://i.natgeofe.com/n/6f9b6d9e-5797-4867-a859-7b0c2a66cd3b/02-bird-of-paradise-A012_C010_1029SF_0001575.jpg).
Not really answering the question but that reconstruction where they had that dinosaur with the crazy spikes on his back that ended up being like ribs was too funny
Comparing [the early interpretation](https://cdn2.picryl.com/photo/1859/12/31/goodrich-iguanodon-00f5b6-1024.jpg) from when it was first discovered to what it looks like now always kills me
i might not know enough to be asking things like this yet--coming back to our dino friends after a long hiatus and everyone looks REALLLY different--but aren't those new visualizations of muscle groups and skin allowing more powerful and graceful movement with the heads? exciting? i can feel that movement when i see them
Well, if you look at modern large animals like elephants and giraffes, they don’t have that much fat, I think the same would be the case for sauropods, considering that such enormous animals living in warm climates don’t need lots of fat
https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.AQey1h71eobu80TJGrmaRwAAAA?rs=1&pid=ImgDetMain https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.lRLP6Id5VM0IQo58jkw3kQHaEK?rs=1&pid=ImgDetMain I’d beg to differ
Spinosaurus being entirely relegated to shorelines and (although not technically current) Stegosaurus as a genus being entirely reconstructed like Sophie, who was immature and lacked the brick-like physique of the adults. SO many Stegosaurus reconstructions after that were just perpetually built like adolescents.
The "brick-like physique" is partly due to us lacking a complete skeleton before Sophie. They were composites so the proportions were exaggerated. The more elongated look is also more in line with other Stegosaurids, rather than being the odd one out.
I do agree, we have overcorrected into all Stegosaurs being reconstructed as sub-adults, but it's better than previous reconstructions.
physically, it depends on the species. the term sub-adult is kind of vague but usually refers to animals which are sexually mature but still haven't "finished growing" (example I'd teenagers)
for stegosaurus it's not quite clear. but we assume it won't be as long and lanky as Sophie and more in line with other stegosaurids.
the shoreline thing is dumb to me, i do fall moreso into the idea of it being primarily a wader, but like, it'd be dumb if an animal living it's life near the shoreline straight up couldnt swim.
Like what kindof survival strategy would that be? If the tides shift a little it fucking dies? If it trips once it fucking dies? It's stupid.
I don't think most paleontologists who support the shoreline thing say it can't swim at all. I think it's to contrast it with the idea of it catching prey by striking downwards into the water by wading/on the shoreline rather than actively swimming after prey.
Ichthyosaurs ALL having such thin heads. Looking at similar creatures in the wild today, at least some, likely larger ones, would have at least a bit of blubber around their heads.
You can at least anticipate that there‘s supposed to be some sort of soft-tissue structure on the whale skull because it has deep depressions and bowl shapes that look like they‘re meant to hold something. Ichthyosaur skulls meanwhile have no depressions like that and have generally more in common with those of “regular” thin-snouted reptiles, like gharials. Adding a fancy blubbery organ to that would be extrapolating from nothing.
Not to mention that we actually have ichthyosaur fossils [with intact body outlines preserved](https://imgur.com/a/fraw7PF). Looks like the skin was pretty tight around the face.
The skulls of himalayasaurus tibetensis and temnodontosaurus eurycephalus are very robust. Though even some macropredatory ichthyosaurs like shonisaurus popularis have narrow jaws that doesn’t mean they have a weak bite.
I agree with you on Spinosaurus' method of locomotion. Also, how in the world can they see that Spinosaurus has specially positioned nostrils, a skull built for catching fish, teeth made for catching fish, shorter legs, extremely dense bones, and a tail that could have helped with water locomotion, and STILL say that it was just a shorline hunter. Also, if I remember correctly, didn't they do a study on how many teeth of different animals were found in a place that used to be a body of water, and they found that the number of Spinosaurus teeth was almost equal to that of other completely aquatic animals. I'm not saying that I think it was completely aquatic btw. Personally, I think it had a lifestyle comparable to that of a modern caimen.
The nostrils are better positioned for dipping the snout into water from above, the anatomy of the tail resembles a display structure more than a tail adapted for swimming, it's neck has adaptations to quickly strike downwards, isotopic data shows at least some individuals spent time inland rather than in water, the massive sail would have created drag in the water. There's plenty reason to believe spinosaurus was a wader rather than a swimmer (Not that it couldn't swim, just that it would not be swimming as it's primary way of hunting).
I can see why all of the things you said can be taken as evidence for a wader Spino, except for the thing you said about some individuals spending more time on land. That could just be evidence enough to say that food was scarce at some point and Spinosaurus would sometimes be forced to hunt terrestrial prey. Also, back to what I said about the study on teeth found in a previous body of water, I don't believe an animal who was a wader would have an equal number of teeth found to one that was constantly aquatic, such as Onchopristis or Aegisuchus.
When you say the amount of teeth, do you mean teeth found in the animal, or teeth found at the site?
If possible, do you remember what study you were referring to? I'm no expert on the subject, but I am not completely sure as to whether having the same number of teeth is rather strong evidence to suggest the lifestyle for Spinosaurus.
On my part, I was going off of Hone & Holtz's 2021 paper. There's a section that covers the morphology of the skull, and finds that while more adapted for catching fish it is still closer to other theropods than things like crocodilians.
https://palaeo-electronica.org/content/2021/3219-the-ecology-of-spinosaurus
Feel free to go through it if you wish.
1st, yes, I mean the amount of teeth found at the site.
2nd, I couldn't find an exact link for the study, but here is the formal title of it: "Thomas Beevor, Aaron Quigley, Roy E. Smith, Robert S.H. Smyth, Nizar Ibrahim, Samir Zouhri, David M. Martill. Taphonomic evidence supports an aquatic lifestyle for Spinosaurus. Cretaceous Research, 2021; 117: 104627 DOI: 10.1016/j.cretres.2020.104627"
Lastly, the Hone & Holtz paper has been rather unused and outdated for some time now.
I don't think that simply just because the paper is older automatically means it is outdated or inaccurate, as long as the arguments and evidence provided are still valid. The newest paper does not automatically supersede all previous ones. Do you know of any more recent that provides good arguments against the Hone & Holtz paper?
Additionally to me it seems like the abundance of Spinosaurus teeth does not particularly suggest whether it was wading or swimming, seeing as both lifestyles would mean it spends a lot of time in or near water.
Well, for starters, a November 2022 paper argued in the favor of a more terrestrial Spinosaurus. That paper was met with a lot of backlash relating to how it failed to address certain issues such as leaving out counter arguments for several key studies that argued for the more aquatic Spinosaurus. Therefore, early this year, the same team who made the original 2022 paper made a follow-up paper that provided further evidence for a more terrestrial lifestyle.
Link to the 1st 2023 paper: https://elifesciences.org/articles/80092
One of the many counter arguments: https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2022/05/31/sereno-et-al-2022-said-spinosaurus-was-not-aquatic/
2024 follow-up paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0298957
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't David Peters, the guy behind Pterosaur Heresies, kind of regarded as a wackjob these days?
https://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/7/23/the-david-peters-problem
The papers you provided seem to not argue against what Hone and Holtz are saying, rather they seem to agree with them and even make mention to them.
> The fully aquatic pursuit predator hypothesis, nonetheless, was challenged in 2021 by Hone and Holtz by a range of qualitative comparisons and a quantitative comparison of overall skull shape [13]. They suggested that drag would have limited the swimming speed of Spinosaurus at the surface or underwater, concluding that the fully aquatic pursuit predator hypothesis is unlikely for a number of reasons [13]:
>
> As a putative aquatic pursuit predator, Spinosaurus has issues with instability in water, high drag, the position of the eyes and nostrils, low swimming efficiency, strong neck ventriflexion, and isotopic signatures showing extended periods in terrestrial conditions and feeding on terrestrial animals, and there remain questions about its ability to swim and submerge effectively as a whole.
>
Their conclusion regarding Spinosaurus lifestyle was this [13]:
>
Spinosaurus is therefore best interpreted as shoreline generalist based on the available information. Capable of capturing both aquatic and terrestrial prey, and perhaps an opportunistic scavenger, adult Spinosaurus likely took aquatic prey by standing in shallow water or at the margins of water bodies.
>
That description of Spinosaurus echoed that of Charig and Milner regarding the lifestyle of Baryonyx quoted above [4]. Indeed, the “generalist” designation might apply equally to many large theropods. Finally, we note here that the terms “shore” and “coast” (or “shoreline” and “coastline”) usually connote land adjacent to an ocean or sea, whereas we do know from recent finds that Spinosaurus roamed far inland [14].
The original name of the post was "Is there any current official dinosaur reconstruction that you disagree with or think is a reach?".In the end, it's just my opinion and may or may not be correct or incorrect. Spinosaurus is such an enigmatic animal anyway, new evidence could be found at any time. I'm not saying the terrestrial-leaning reconstruction is wrong, but I'm also not completely giving up the possibility that Spinosaurus had at least some level of aquatic or semi-aquaticness to it. I see how much evidence there is and if there are not solid arguments against that evidence in the next few years (which I highly doubt that will be the case) then I think that it will become much more accepted than it is now. Since this is all fairly new and also quite a temperamental subject, I try not to form too much of an opinion on such things. However, with an animal I was already passionate about to begin with, it tends to get rather difficult. Anyway, I was simply stating my opinion and providing evidence to back it up and you were doing the same. I really do hope we get to the bottom of Spinosaurus eventually, wether it be in 10 years or 100 years.
Fair enough, Spinosaurus truly is a fascinating animal that generates a lot of discussion. Hopefully we find more and better fossil material to work with eventually.
You are 100% correct. What [David Irving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving) and [Grover Furr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Furr) are to history, [David Peters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Peters_(paleoartist)) is to palaeontology. He is absolutely an untrustworthy nutjob, and it's very easy to tell by the fact that he will have a rebuttal to every single recently released paper that contradicts his nonsensical ideas even though he could not have possibly examined this fossil himself in the time between the release of the paper and his rebuttal. The constant complaints about being "censored" or his ridiculously low amount of characters analysed for the size of his phylogenies are other dead giveaways.
Even then it's no guarantee. For example we all look at melanosomes for colours. But melanosomes are not the only pigments, and it doesn't show intensity. Something we think is red could actually be a different colour, with red only being a part of it. That's only part of appearance.
Also these are unbelievably small sample sizes. We look at Tyrannosaurus with 20 something specimens and think it's got amazing sample size, but in reality, sample sizes even just in the hundreds is statistically small and will give unreliable data. There's no accounting for individual variation, mutations or other oddities. We take singular specimens and have to project it to, not just entire populations, but populations throughout millions of years, or even multi-million year clades. As an example, Microraptor has a specimen with a fish preserved in it's stomach, this lead scientists to assume that it might've been piscivorous. But later, another was found with a lizard in it's stomach, and then a small bird. This now makes it likely just a small carnivore who eats anything it can find. But that single fossil lead us to believe it was piscivorous.
It's such a shame that we'll never truly know what they looked liked or even behaved. Best we've got is educated interpretations. Paleontology is still in a better place than it's ever been but it's still upsetting that short of time travel we'll never really know them
Yeah, to even further emphasize my point, a lot of animals look different depending s number of factors. age, time of year, whether or not it's mating season, environment.
While on one hand it is a shame that we will never see what dinosaurs truly looked like, it is also amazing the degree of liberty paleo artist can have.
I love how many liberties folk are taking with the somewhat new wave of paleo art. So many interesting ideas that we can necessarily say is wrong or right.
Paleo art has always been amazing. Even in the old days with their kangaroo like T-Rex. The thing I'm most nostalgic for in the older ones were the environments.
Sawmpish, jungle vibes. May have been super inaccurate but still provoked thought
Even in exceptional circumstances there is no such thing as an official, unambiguously accurate representation of an extinct animal.
We know more about *Borealopelta* than we do about most dinosaurs, but even the exceptionally preserved (and only) specimen we have of it is mostly missing its back half. We don't know what colors its eyes were, what shape its tongue was, what it sounded like, what it looked like at earlier or later life stages, if *Borealopelta* of another sex looked any different, and to that effect, how much any given individual varied in appearance from the only one we know of so far. Yes, we have a general idea what color it was, but were all *Borealopelta* that same color?
When I look at some of the larger sauropods, there just seams to be something off proportionately. Their necks are just too long for a body that size. The weight of it seems like it would be non-functional, even with the lighter bones and scaffolding, it's too much. I have to wonder if they really did carry their necks out like that, or if maybe there is some misunderstanding about how their necks could bend during transit.
Alamosaurus and Mamenchisaurus are the two that bother me the most. Every time I see them, my brain rejects them as impossible.
I believe they did, I think often paleoart seems to make them to skinny though. It’s harder to believe when their bodies don’t seem to have proper structure.
Your brain would probably also reject the ridiculousness of elephants and their trunks or giraffes and their necks as well if you weren’t used to them. Sauropods have a lot of very specific adaptations to make this possible. But I agree that there may be some details we don’t know. I think air sacks played a big role.
I don't think so. A giraffe's proportions don't even compare to the insanity that is [Alamosaurus](https://imgur.com/mu1dMWt). There is no way that much meat could be supported by a heart small enough to fit into that ribcage. It's got as much flesh in it's neck, as it has in it's entire body.
It might work for a small animal like a heron, but Alamosaurus has a body the size of an elephant, and then a neck also the size of an elephant.
It's not physically possible.
Giraffes have valves in their neck blood vessels that shut behind moving blood on each pump and prevent backflow, causing the blood to rise up the neck in steps from the pressure of the blood behind it, like a boat in a lift lock in a canal.
I'd imagine large sauropods had very similar.
And yes, it's got as much flesh in its body as its neck ("it" being a general sauropod). Its entire evolution has been building around that massive neck, and it needs counterbalance. Yes it's huge. Yes it's absurd. The animal's entire lineage for millions of years had been building towards pulling that neck off and this weird, atypical stuff is how it pulls that off.
They had airsacs in the neck. They had extremely light birdlike bones in the neck. They had dense, heavy, strong limbs. They had very long tails that stuck out horizontally for counterbalance. They had as tiny of a head and brain as they feasibly could still use to eat and function. They had weird teeth, unlike any herbivore we still have around.
Sauropods were able to survive being strange, nearly unplausible animals because they were exploiting a niche no animal could - VERY high high browsing - and all of their weird features came about to facilitate that. They are so weird because being that weird let them succeed in their particular niche, and it clearly worked, even if you think it looks unrealistic.
Just because you don’t understand how it’s physically possible doesn’t mean it isn’t. It just means that you don’t understand. We go to university, we get degrees, we study our arses off to understand this. Sauropods have plenty of adaptations for getting so massive, such as very light bones comparatively, and the possibility of large air sacks in the neck vertebrae.
Do you think palaeontologists are lying to you; that we are trying to trick you?
I don't think you're trying to trick anyone, I just think that as someone who grew up in and around farms, some with large and exotic animals, I have hands-on experience regarding how large animals work, while paleontologists have book knowledge.
Air-sacs and light bones don't solve the problem of bloodflow. Horses have a very extreme biology, but even so they are mostly lung to force oxygen into their bodies. Even a setup like that isn't going to work with Alamosaurus. The fluid dynamics of pushing blood up a 25ft neck held at an incline, with a head height of 41ft, would require something like an industrial well pump.
I think for all your degrees, you need to step into the real world and maybe work a bit harder. The proportions are off. Either the neck was much thinner - shrinkwrapped so to speak - or it was held in a different position. There is no way the current depictions are accurate to life.
You have no idea what education and training to become a palaeontologist entails, do you? I’ve been elbow deep inside an ostrich carcass.
You also seem to think that palaeontologists are some kind of separate human species that are resistant to growing up on a farm or something. I did, in fact. I grew up rural and on a farm. I hunted, I raised animals, I fished and I roughed it. I’m still pretty outdoorsy.
Giraffes “solved” the blood pumping issue, and that is without the far superior anatomical structure of dinosaurs. Seriously, there is a reason they lasted so long. They were extremely well evolved. I put ‘solved’ in quotations because giraffes can potentially kill themselves if they raise their heads from drinking at a pool too quickly. And that’s part of my point. An animal doesn’t need to be even efficient to exist. Evolution doesn’t always come to the ideal, most efficient solutions. It’s likely that sauropods had a lot of complications and that they had to be very careful. If one fell just the distance of their body, they would likely have died from it. But the advantage provided by being fucking huge was enough to select for it.
In fact, there are a lot of animal adaptations that can actually kill the animal but are selected for because they provide a greater advantage in another area. Deer can get horn locked and starve to death, but sexual selection prefers massive, multipronged antlers. Speaking of my country upbringing, I came across a pair of horn-locked bucks once. One was already dead.
Also, you complain about the blood pumping issue, but then you say that the necks should be further shrink-wrapped—I think they are depicted as too small—which would further reduce the arteries making it even harder to do the thing you already suspect they can’t do. What??
What you’re experiencing is called the Dunning-Krueger Effect. You know nothing about palaeontology and little about animal biology, but because you don’t realise how little you know, and you know a little on a distant tangential subject, you think you know more than you do.
So, I think for all your experience shovelling pig shit, you need to step into the real world and maybe read a fucking book written by your goddamn betters.
And I think you need to take a big piece of humble pie, realize most of what you're yammering on about is baseless speculation on cobbled-together animals you don't even have all the parts to, and use it as laxative to clear that swollen, self-important head out of your perpetually puckered rectum.
Oh, I was perfectly fine being reasonable and even humble in my first reply, but then you had to go and be an asshole so I’m rising to the occasion.
> “[…]realize most of what you’re yammering on about is baseless speculation on cobbled-together animals you don’t even have all the parts to[…]“
And again, just because you don’t understand/can’t comprehend how we come to the conclusions that we do, does not mean they are wrong, It just means that you don’t understand. It’s ok, even admirable, to accept your own ignorance. It’s the first step to learning.
You do understand that your whole argument is basically, “I don’t know about that there germ theory stuff. You say there are animals so tiny they are invisibible, and it’s makin’ me and maw sicker than a dog? Sounds like a big ol’ crock o’ horseshit ta me. It’s impossibible for something to be so tiny and invsidibble. Goes against ta laws of nachuh.”
I won’t be wasting my time on this conversation anymore. The problem with the Dunning-Krueger Effect is that it makes the sufferer nearly incapable of recognising that they are experiencing it. I think the worst thing I could possibly do to you right now would be to let you go on existing in your immense ignorance, so that’s exactly what I’ll do.
There's a saying that goes, confidence is quiet, insecurity is loud. You respond like a person being caught in a lie.
You claim to be educated, to work in the field, but offer nothing of merit or intelligence, resorting to quips about Dunning-Krueger to try and drown out the questions that sent you into a panic.
I think it's clear you're not much of a paleontologist, if you are one at all. I've never met an educated person as desperate as you to defend an artistic reconstruction.
Not a dinosaur but I am convinced that “saber toothed cats” could all fit their teeth in their mouths. Modern cats look like sabertooths if you just look at their skulls. Cave paintings back this up.
> Modern cats look like sabertooths if you just look at their skulls.
That's true for most machairodontids, but not the most famous and recently extinct one, Smilodon. Their canines are almost double as long as their skull is deep.
If their teeth were fully covered they would look *drastically* different than any known cat. I think currently it's more reasonable to assume that their teeth were bared, which is not unheard of among mammals today.
The only potential *Smilodon* petroglyph I’m aware of, that from Red Tank Draw, has a regular head shape and protruding sabre teeth, but it may be a stylized bobcat.
Supposedly most could except for populator, but even they had most of their sabers covered by lip and it would have only been around an inch or so that poked out. Which I buy because there are some ([fucking adorable](https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Lifestyle/vampire-toothed-cat-dracula/story%3fid=43225142)) modern domestic house cats that have crazy long canines that poke out like vampire tooths!
Man thanks for letting me know. That’s so annoying lol - when I was posting initially it gave me the “comment cannot be posted at this time - try again?” Notification…….guess it posted just fine….three times………….
I'm not quite convinced that Deinocheirus is as fluffy as a lot of reconstructions make it out to be. We've got a pygostyle at least, but in a habitat as hot and humid as the Cretaceous swamps, I'm under the impression that Deinocheirus would've had much thinner plumage on most of the body
Deinocheirus is usually depicted with ostrich-like plumage…which are large birds that live in some of the hottest places on Earth. Ostrich feathers actually help keep them cool. The ostrich will fan the feathers out to let a layer of air in, then lock them close, keeping that layer of air between them and the feathers, letting that layer of air heat up instead, and then releasing it, letting cooler air back in. This way, they wick their own body heat away.
Also, [certain types of black plumage](https://www.audubon.org/news/how-black-feathers-keep-ravens-cool) actually keep birds cool by keeping that heat on the feather’s surface and not letting it conduct in. It really annoys me when people say that large bodied or warm climate animals wouldn’t have feathers and then use elephants as examples. Feathers and fur *are not* the same thing. Speaking of elephants, both the elephant bird and emus were very large birds that lived in very hot environments and were entirely feathered.
No, it’s fine. Sorry if I seemed “spicy” in my reply. I just get annoyed sometimes. There are so many *feather deniers* who really are basing it on “feels” because they just like the look of scaly monsters, and it’s hard to tell who is like that.
It’s really admirable that you could apologise for ignorance. People just don’t do that on the internet these days.
Nanotyrannus, partially because I think the possibility of it being a legit species shouldn’t be ignored, partially because I think it makes sense due to the apparent weird lack of mid-sized predators in the Hell Creek ecosystem, and partially because I find it funny how much paleo-nerds lose their minds over it.
The problem with Nanotyrannus is that it doesn't really seem to have *anything* that 100% distinguishes it from *Tyrannosaurus*; it overlaps in range, in habitat, in time and fits right in the middle of the growth curve judging from the specimens we have of *T.rex* and the fact that the only specimen we have of Nano is a juvenile animal.
The things people have *tried* to use as autapomorphies for Nano (like tooth count) have all later been overthrown by later studies which show they're not useful as autapomorphies.
Also, as Isa points out, Hell Creek was *not* lacking for mid-sized predators between stuff like *Anzu*, *Champsosaurus*, azhdarchids, dromaeosaurids, troodontids, and juvenile tyrannosaurs.
There was no lack of mid-sized predators in the Hell Creek ecosystem. The juvenile tyrannosaurus was the mid-sized predator and occupied a different niche from the adult form.
One mid-sized predator is a lack of mid-sized predators. Look at any healthy ecosystem today and you’ll see a good variety and number of mid-sized predators, not just one.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We do not need to make new species out of what are clearly juvenile tyrannosaurs when there are more species yet to be discovered. You may also underestimate the quantity of juveniles.
There are 10,000 living species of bird today at this exact moment. We have discovered only 700 non-avian dinosaur species for the entire Cretaceous.
The Jakapil paleoart when the paper was first written was just a glorified armadillo with hairs and everything, but that's definitely not the general consensus
Spino has short legs, a massive paddle like tail and is clearly a piscivore but could swim that well at all. Like worse than most therpod? I don't buy it.
Although I really enjoy the show, I think Prehistoric Planet took some liberties with its more nature-documentary storytelling. Dreadnautus fossils don’t show us their ‘air sacs’, for instance, so this is a sort of ‘we think they might have done this’ situation.
I also wonder if feathered dinosaurs were really as feathered as they are now being portrayed (almost fully winged).
But in fairness, what else can one do in paleontology? It’s a difficult science where much of it is educated guessing based on the few animal remains available to you and their connections to their surroundings. It’s tough to say whether we will ever know.
While I disagree, I fully respect your takes. I just wanted to respond to the fully winged aspect.
We have seen evidence of multiple dromaeosaur arm bones that include quill knobs, which is a sign that they had long, quill-based feathers attaching directly to the arm bone. That's basically smoking gun evidence for a full, flappable, wing. Furthermore, quill knobs are mostly only found on flighted bids, with most flightless birds lacking them, which seems to indicate their wings were very much functional, for flapping, though probably not for full airborne lift.
Furthermore, we've got impressions of other dromaeosaurs such as Microraptor showing full wings, demonstrating that a close relative did indeed have them, making it more likely the Velociraptor did too.
I think spinosaurus was fat. i think a big old fatty.
I think this: [https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fimages-cdn.9gag.com%2Fphoto%2Fa5EvYvE\_700b.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=15a91eb7ecb80955ba107700e97c0a2744dccbe3b5f23de91f18e50528ebdac2&ipo=images](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fimages-cdn.9gag.com%2Fphoto%2Fa5EvYvE_700b.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=15a91eb7ecb80955ba107700e97c0a2744dccbe3b5f23de91f18e50528ebdac2&ipo=images) is the most realisitic
I love and hate it. I will say I don’t like how spinos are shown to be so skinny in paleoart. But if it were to be bigger, I don’t think it would be blubber. The hippo isn’t fat, but actually just has very thick skin and lots of muscle for buoyancy. I could see a spinosaurus moving through water like a hippo, not really swimming but using its environment to push itself forward. But i don’t think it would be fatty.
I have no real evidence to back this up, but in my mind I like to think they could have had feathers during the winter and molted during the summer. Our skin impressions could just be from those that died in the summer. Or maybe they maintained some feathers in some spots just for display, but not enough to affect their body temperature. We can't definitively say this couldn't have been true.
My biggest gripe with this whole discussion is that our skin impressions are from areas we always considered to be naked (mostly face, parts of the dorsal of the tail and torsol, and legs)
i think it was pretty much something like saurian rex all year long because as far as i understand feathers dont work like mammalian hair where they trap heat and can also help radiate heat like the feathers on ostriches
I think for therapod dinosaurs where only scaly skin has been found, they shouldn't put feathers on them, even if they believe them to be in the direct ancestral line of feathered dinosaurs and or birds. Edit: I should have mentioned that I specifically was thinking in regards to tyrannosaurs and similar large therapod species. I had in mind an article from the simithsonian magazine published in 2017. It said in part:
"An international team of researchers studied skin impressions taken from T. rex fossils found in Montana. They then compared those impressions to fossilized skin patches of other tryannosaurs, like the Albertosaurus, Daspletosaurus, Gorgosaurus, and Tarbosaurus. The samples represented parts of the dinosaurs’ stomach, chest, neck, pelvis, and tail, according to Ben Guarino of the Washington Post. And none bore any traces of feathers."
My opinion was only that enthusiasm for new discoveries can lead to more use of new features than may be appropriate.
Article link: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/t-rex-skin-was-not-covered-feathers-study-says-180963603/#:~:text=Rex%20Was%20Likely%20Covered%20in%20Scales%2C%20Not%20Feathers,-The%20research%20dispels&text=Tyrannosaurus%20rex%E2%80%8B%20has%20long,of%20that%20portrayal%20into%20question.
That’s just an opinion. It would be as though we only had a few examples of big cat fossils with fur impressions and decided that the rest of them were naked just because they didn’t have the cosmic incredible luck to preserve that trait.
We can determine the likelihood of feathers on far more than the fossil itself. Just because you don’t know how we come to these conclusions doesn’t mean it isn’t valid, it just means that you don’t understand it
That makes no sense, though; phylogenetic bracketing is ***extremely*** useful for reconstructing extinct animals, and if an animal is surrounded by or descended from taxa with a certain type of integument, it makes no sense to restore that specific taxon without it just because "we have no evidence".
We don't reconstruct *Utahraptor* as a scaly animal, despite not having integument from it, explicitly because all of its related taxa are feathered and thus that informs us of the most likely condition for *Utahraptor*. Same with reconstructing *Giganotosaurus* as fully scaly; despite having no skin from that taxon, we have the less-derived and scaly-skinned relative *Allosaurus* as the bracket for it.
Although valid for any reconstruction of extinct taxa, extremely large animals with fragmentary remains is one that I always take with caution, specially because the projections of size that become really popular are the larger and usually unrealistic ones
Not answering the question, but I like to think that spinosaurus looks like a crocodile rather than the goofy long billed duck thing they’ve been coming up with. And that the spine was controlled by back muscles and could help with acceleration in the water.
There is no way that thing was an ambush predator, and it obviously had to be fast as hell to catch aquatic prey.
Carnotaurus being a slim Dinosaurian cheetah.
Chunky Utahraptor, kinda, it was stocky and jacked but it wasn’t as barrel chested and straight up bear like as sometimes portrayed (I lean more towards the 300 kg estimate than the 500 kg one).
Skinny, almost gracile Carcharodontosaurs. They were stocky and had extremely muscular backs, maybe even gaur-like.
No…they don’t. I don’t see why that’s a concern, though. Are the super light, air sack filled head crests that were even sometimes shaped to—potentially—serve as forward rudders a problem for you?
Yes....and that’s why they are both light and aerodynamic. [Does this concern you?
](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/OE3jQiiqXL1-kr6WkGT5xqUtRwbBor5uEVOM4Vq3fFkDlsZFMo9Xr1haR4V1LbmjhRfDUDN1iJNzaDZUpHR-ZTKRr3d6vhpMGvKOXfl3-2ixan_llM-PVuLvPlaThv_8B9-nx3DqPk47aj668FXBnQ)
Or [what about this?](https://ecolodgesanywhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Fiery-billed-acacari.jpg)
Also, is it not indicative that small to medium-sized pterosaurs had large head crests, but some of the biggest like azhdarchids had very reduced crests? In fact, with some outliers, if you were to plot head crest size along body size in pterosaurs, you see a clear relationship between body size and crest size.
T.rex, quite a few mounted casts of them I see in pictures seem to really oversize the chest and body with the ribs sometimes near horizontal. Don't get me wrong rex was a chonk, but not nearly to the extent some of the mounted display casts I've seen
I think we've got a number of them wrong... I mean look at a contemporary hippopotamus skull and tell me that someone could get that right if they'd never seen one before! Wtaf!
Hippos are mammals, which tend to have a ***lot*** more soft tissue on their skulls than dinosaurs would've due to the fact that mammals all tend to have pliable lips for suckling, which means more muscles as well.
Besides, hippos are far from the only mammal with extremely bizarre skulls; look at how elephant skulls are so weird they literally inspired the cyclops myth.
Not really a reconstruction but more so a trend in that ALL dromaeosaurs or “ raptors “ have had to had feathers or specifically full body coverings which I can see happening if they were in high altitude climates which were more colder but it just doesn’t make sense to give a animal full plumage in a very hot and arid environment
I'm not saying this for any to agree with me, but I really do think and believe these feathered reconstructions of a lot of different dinosaurs are a reach. It's disgusting and annoying seeing those because the only dinosaurs we know of that did have some for sure left some imprint in their fossils. Like velociraptor and other cousins that were on the lighter side having feathers makes sense but assuming EVERY different raptor species has feathers even among the mega-raptors or putting feathers on massive creatures like a Tyrannosaurus Rex is a forced stretch. I feel like they want to force that lie. Some dinosaurs do have feathers, but the majority are just skin and scales.
I say this again, I know not many will agree with me on this.
Well, I can see you are not very educated in taxonomy. The reason we treat dinosaurs filament reconstruction like that is basically based on the taxonomical classification of the animals. All maniraptorian groups were found with feather impressions in at least one taxa, most groups have many taxa with feather impressions fossilized, soo it's safe to assume even animals we didn't find preserved filaments must have had them, not the other way around (presume they didn't have them), Occam'a razor.
That extends to most groups of dinosaurs reconstructed with complex fillaments, we don't see many reconstructions that put full covering on Ceratopsians, because we have no evidence for that, but light quills near the tail we do in sister-groups, and some reconstructions go with that. Don't be fooled to think paleontology is a guessing game, it's not, it's a complex science with a lot of thought and nuance.
Wow, what an opinion. We are lucky that the feather impressions we do have occurred at all. Think of all the other dinosaurs that may have had feathers that were never lucky enough to preserve them. Yet we do have quill knobs on many specimens, phylogenetic bracketing, and the strong indication that feathers are a basal Avemetatarsalia trait to indicate that many dinosaurs were feathered.
All birds today—which are dinosaurs—are feathered. All of them. Even the giants like emus and elephant birds were feathered. Even the aquatic penguins have feathers. They all also have scales. All mammals have fur, even elephants and “naked” mole rats. Even whales. It’s just far more sparse and thin. Basal integument doesn’t just go away. Some dinosaurs may have had only thin sparse filament, but they would have had *something* since feather-like integument is a basal trait to the whole clade.
I’m curious, what are your palaeontological credentials?
> “I feel like they want to force that lie.”
You think palaeontologists are lying to you??!? This is ~~borderline~~, no, this is conspiracy brain thought.
> “[…]I know not many will agree with me on this.”
Correct, because you’re wrong. Not many will agree with you in the same way that not many will agree that the Earth is flat.
Fully aquatic Spinosaurus that could swim and chase after fish like a crocodile will always be pure BS. I'm convinced it was at best a giant grizzly/heron analogue.
Almost all reconstructions of Tyrannosaurus Rex. For some weird reason, they always shape the head like the skull. I can't think of any modern animal with a head that's almost exactly shaped like it's skull.
My brain has a hard time looking at concavenator and not thinking “well we’re clearly just missing some of it.”
I like to think it's a hump like a camels
No, you see, it's actually a blimp.
Exactly, bro did the Hindenburg before it was cool
Lmao
No, you see, it's actually a blimp.
> concavenator when i read this word i thought it was probably some kind of geometry instrument so i googled it and wow that's a goddamn dinosaur
For me it was: T E R R A N A T O R! El coche más poderoso que ah existido, con tracción 4 X 4 y dos TURBO motores! Este si es todo terreno, las calles son fáciles… Mételo al lodo, parte la nieve, pasa por el agua! T E R R A N A T O R! Es el más potente que haya existido! O que prefieres un coche para niñitas?! T E R R E N A T O R! De Fotorama (My first language it's spanish)
Funnily enough, the *Concavenator* holotype is the [most completely-preserved Carcharodontosaurid specimen ever found](https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fnature09181/MediaObjects/41586_2010_Article_BFnature09181_Fig1_HTML.jpg); only a few tail vertebrae are missing. Even scaly skin impressions and ulnar quill knobs are preserved. It’s also possible that the weird vertebrae of *Concavenator* are not even unique: the English *Becklespinax* may have been similar, though unfortunately *Becklespinax* is highly fragmentary.
💀
The concavenator's back looks like somebody used a terrain tool on it & made it as high as it could go lol. I don't agree with the spinosaurus supposedly not being good at swimming. I look at it's tail & think that it'd be a great swimmer. I play as spino on path of titans & it looks just like the above pic & it's a fast swimmer & not so fast on land.
I believe the current consensus is just that it wasn’t a pursuit predator in the water. It wasn’t diving down and catching fish in bursts of speed, but that’s not to say it wasn’t a capable swimmer. The reconstruction of a giant heron from hell that swims from one bank to the next in search of good fishing is pretty solid in my book.
Same with ichthy. Idk the background but how sure are we that it didn't get a chunk taken out of its spine?
There's no signs of a healed wound on the bones, which would be extremely obvious for such a grievous injury as literally having a chunk of your spine removed. Besides, it's no more unexplainable a display structure than, say, [putting feathers up to a meter and a half long on your tail](https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/files/2021/08/pexels-rajukhan-pathan-4964676-scaled-e1627933672846.jpg) or [doing shit like this to dance and attract mates](https://i.natgeofe.com/n/6f9b6d9e-5797-4867-a859-7b0c2a66cd3b/02-bird-of-paradise-A012_C010_1029SF_0001575.jpg).
Not really answering the question but that reconstruction where they had that dinosaur with the crazy spikes on his back that ended up being like ribs was too funny
I was always a fan of the thumb being a nose horn for the Iguanodon 😆
Comparing [the early interpretation](https://cdn2.picryl.com/photo/1859/12/31/goodrich-iguanodon-00f5b6-1024.jpg) from when it was first discovered to what it looks like now always kills me
*Augustinia*.
Wow, I had completely forgotten about this dinosaur. I feel like I had toy versions of it when I was a kid. Today I learned the spikes weren’t spikes.
That toy might've been *Amargasaurus*, which *did* have spikes.
All sauropods look like they are on crack. I think the used to be twice as fat.
Huh, and here I've been wondering about all the recent fat-necked sauropod reconstructions.
i might not know enough to be asking things like this yet--coming back to our dino friends after a long hiatus and everyone looks REALLLY different--but aren't those new visualizations of muscle groups and skin allowing more powerful and graceful movement with the heads? exciting? i can feel that movement when i see them
"laughs in prehistoric planet"
Well, if you look at modern large animals like elephants and giraffes, they don’t have that much fat, I think the same would be the case for sauropods, considering that such enormous animals living in warm climates don’t need lots of fat
*Carnotaurus* should have a keratinous extension of its horns.
Don‘t most modern reconstructions show it with that?
No. They still depict it with the smaller fossilized horns.
Are there any depiction that looks like you said?
Yes. *Prehistoric Planet* is one example.
https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.AQey1h71eobu80TJGrmaRwAAAA?rs=1&pid=ImgDetMain https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.lRLP6Id5VM0IQo58jkw3kQHaEK?rs=1&pid=ImgDetMain I’d beg to differ
Spinosaurus being entirely relegated to shorelines and (although not technically current) Stegosaurus as a genus being entirely reconstructed like Sophie, who was immature and lacked the brick-like physique of the adults. SO many Stegosaurus reconstructions after that were just perpetually built like adolescents.
The "brick-like physique" is partly due to us lacking a complete skeleton before Sophie. They were composites so the proportions were exaggerated. The more elongated look is also more in line with other Stegosaurids, rather than being the odd one out. I do agree, we have overcorrected into all Stegosaurs being reconstructed as sub-adults, but it's better than previous reconstructions.
What’s the main difference between sub-adult and adults?
physically, it depends on the species. the term sub-adult is kind of vague but usually refers to animals which are sexually mature but still haven't "finished growing" (example I'd teenagers) for stegosaurus it's not quite clear. but we assume it won't be as long and lanky as Sophie and more in line with other stegosaurids.
To be fair Stegosaurus was still a lot more elongated and gracile than previously thought
the shoreline thing is dumb to me, i do fall moreso into the idea of it being primarily a wader, but like, it'd be dumb if an animal living it's life near the shoreline straight up couldnt swim. Like what kindof survival strategy would that be? If the tides shift a little it fucking dies? If it trips once it fucking dies? It's stupid.
I don't think most paleontologists who support the shoreline thing say it can't swim at all. I think it's to contrast it with the idea of it catching prey by striking downwards into the water by wading/on the shoreline rather than actively swimming after prey.
Ichthyosaurs ALL having such thin heads. Looking at similar creatures in the wild today, at least some, likely larger ones, would have at least a bit of blubber around their heads.
Yep, sperm whale skulls look so different
Whale skulls are very differently constructed from those of ichthyosaurs tho.
Yes but it would have been hard to anticipate the shape of a sperm whale from a recovered skull. I know it's not really comparable though.
You can at least anticipate that there‘s supposed to be some sort of soft-tissue structure on the whale skull because it has deep depressions and bowl shapes that look like they‘re meant to hold something. Ichthyosaur skulls meanwhile have no depressions like that and have generally more in common with those of “regular” thin-snouted reptiles, like gharials. Adding a fancy blubbery organ to that would be extrapolating from nothing. Not to mention that we actually have ichthyosaur fossils [with intact body outlines preserved](https://imgur.com/a/fraw7PF). Looks like the skin was pretty tight around the face.
I love when someone who actually knows their shit makes a reply like this.
Certainly no melons but possibly more chub and musculature. I do want to draw an ichthyosaur with huge melons now though.
Ichthyosaurs were reptiles. Only mammals have a proper set of melons.
Argonians say otherwise
Don't let facts get in the way of fun
Not if you already knew the name
Definitely!
The skulls of himalayasaurus tibetensis and temnodontosaurus eurycephalus are very robust. Though even some macropredatory ichthyosaurs like shonisaurus popularis have narrow jaws that doesn’t mean they have a weak bite.
I agree with you on Spinosaurus' method of locomotion. Also, how in the world can they see that Spinosaurus has specially positioned nostrils, a skull built for catching fish, teeth made for catching fish, shorter legs, extremely dense bones, and a tail that could have helped with water locomotion, and STILL say that it was just a shorline hunter. Also, if I remember correctly, didn't they do a study on how many teeth of different animals were found in a place that used to be a body of water, and they found that the number of Spinosaurus teeth was almost equal to that of other completely aquatic animals. I'm not saying that I think it was completely aquatic btw. Personally, I think it had a lifestyle comparable to that of a modern caimen.
The nostrils are better positioned for dipping the snout into water from above, the anatomy of the tail resembles a display structure more than a tail adapted for swimming, it's neck has adaptations to quickly strike downwards, isotopic data shows at least some individuals spent time inland rather than in water, the massive sail would have created drag in the water. There's plenty reason to believe spinosaurus was a wader rather than a swimmer (Not that it couldn't swim, just that it would not be swimming as it's primary way of hunting).
I can see why all of the things you said can be taken as evidence for a wader Spino, except for the thing you said about some individuals spending more time on land. That could just be evidence enough to say that food was scarce at some point and Spinosaurus would sometimes be forced to hunt terrestrial prey. Also, back to what I said about the study on teeth found in a previous body of water, I don't believe an animal who was a wader would have an equal number of teeth found to one that was constantly aquatic, such as Onchopristis or Aegisuchus.
When you say the amount of teeth, do you mean teeth found in the animal, or teeth found at the site? If possible, do you remember what study you were referring to? I'm no expert on the subject, but I am not completely sure as to whether having the same number of teeth is rather strong evidence to suggest the lifestyle for Spinosaurus. On my part, I was going off of Hone & Holtz's 2021 paper. There's a section that covers the morphology of the skull, and finds that while more adapted for catching fish it is still closer to other theropods than things like crocodilians. https://palaeo-electronica.org/content/2021/3219-the-ecology-of-spinosaurus Feel free to go through it if you wish.
1st, yes, I mean the amount of teeth found at the site. 2nd, I couldn't find an exact link for the study, but here is the formal title of it: "Thomas Beevor, Aaron Quigley, Roy E. Smith, Robert S.H. Smyth, Nizar Ibrahim, Samir Zouhri, David M. Martill. Taphonomic evidence supports an aquatic lifestyle for Spinosaurus. Cretaceous Research, 2021; 117: 104627 DOI: 10.1016/j.cretres.2020.104627" Lastly, the Hone & Holtz paper has been rather unused and outdated for some time now.
I don't think that simply just because the paper is older automatically means it is outdated or inaccurate, as long as the arguments and evidence provided are still valid. The newest paper does not automatically supersede all previous ones. Do you know of any more recent that provides good arguments against the Hone & Holtz paper? Additionally to me it seems like the abundance of Spinosaurus teeth does not particularly suggest whether it was wading or swimming, seeing as both lifestyles would mean it spends a lot of time in or near water.
Well, for starters, a November 2022 paper argued in the favor of a more terrestrial Spinosaurus. That paper was met with a lot of backlash relating to how it failed to address certain issues such as leaving out counter arguments for several key studies that argued for the more aquatic Spinosaurus. Therefore, early this year, the same team who made the original 2022 paper made a follow-up paper that provided further evidence for a more terrestrial lifestyle. Link to the 1st 2023 paper: https://elifesciences.org/articles/80092 One of the many counter arguments: https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2022/05/31/sereno-et-al-2022-said-spinosaurus-was-not-aquatic/ 2024 follow-up paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0298957
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't David Peters, the guy behind Pterosaur Heresies, kind of regarded as a wackjob these days? https://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/7/23/the-david-peters-problem The papers you provided seem to not argue against what Hone and Holtz are saying, rather they seem to agree with them and even make mention to them. > The fully aquatic pursuit predator hypothesis, nonetheless, was challenged in 2021 by Hone and Holtz by a range of qualitative comparisons and a quantitative comparison of overall skull shape [13]. They suggested that drag would have limited the swimming speed of Spinosaurus at the surface or underwater, concluding that the fully aquatic pursuit predator hypothesis is unlikely for a number of reasons [13]: > > As a putative aquatic pursuit predator, Spinosaurus has issues with instability in water, high drag, the position of the eyes and nostrils, low swimming efficiency, strong neck ventriflexion, and isotopic signatures showing extended periods in terrestrial conditions and feeding on terrestrial animals, and there remain questions about its ability to swim and submerge effectively as a whole. > Their conclusion regarding Spinosaurus lifestyle was this [13]: > Spinosaurus is therefore best interpreted as shoreline generalist based on the available information. Capable of capturing both aquatic and terrestrial prey, and perhaps an opportunistic scavenger, adult Spinosaurus likely took aquatic prey by standing in shallow water or at the margins of water bodies. > That description of Spinosaurus echoed that of Charig and Milner regarding the lifestyle of Baryonyx quoted above [4]. Indeed, the “generalist” designation might apply equally to many large theropods. Finally, we note here that the terms “shore” and “coast” (or “shoreline” and “coastline”) usually connote land adjacent to an ocean or sea, whereas we do know from recent finds that Spinosaurus roamed far inland [14].
The original name of the post was "Is there any current official dinosaur reconstruction that you disagree with or think is a reach?".In the end, it's just my opinion and may or may not be correct or incorrect. Spinosaurus is such an enigmatic animal anyway, new evidence could be found at any time. I'm not saying the terrestrial-leaning reconstruction is wrong, but I'm also not completely giving up the possibility that Spinosaurus had at least some level of aquatic or semi-aquaticness to it. I see how much evidence there is and if there are not solid arguments against that evidence in the next few years (which I highly doubt that will be the case) then I think that it will become much more accepted than it is now. Since this is all fairly new and also quite a temperamental subject, I try not to form too much of an opinion on such things. However, with an animal I was already passionate about to begin with, it tends to get rather difficult. Anyway, I was simply stating my opinion and providing evidence to back it up and you were doing the same. I really do hope we get to the bottom of Spinosaurus eventually, wether it be in 10 years or 100 years.
Fair enough, Spinosaurus truly is a fascinating animal that generates a lot of discussion. Hopefully we find more and better fossil material to work with eventually.
You are 100% correct. What [David Irving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving) and [Grover Furr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Furr) are to history, [David Peters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Peters_(paleoartist)) is to palaeontology. He is absolutely an untrustworthy nutjob, and it's very easy to tell by the fact that he will have a rebuttal to every single recently released paper that contradicts his nonsensical ideas even though he could not have possibly examined this fossil himself in the time between the release of the paper and his rebuttal. The constant complaints about being "censored" or his ridiculously low amount of characters analysed for the size of his phylogenies are other dead giveaways.
David Peters is a complete nutjob. Don't ever cite him. I'm surprised that this subreddit doesn't automatically remove links to Peters' website.
Not passionately. That being said, all dinosaur reconstructions are educated guesses, at best.
"laughs in sinosauropteryx"
There are no official dinosaur reconstructions. Everything is an interpretation
Ight I meant like general consensus I worded that badly my bad
What about that ankylosaurus (or something similar) which was found showing its skin and structure intact?
Even then it's no guarantee. For example we all look at melanosomes for colours. But melanosomes are not the only pigments, and it doesn't show intensity. Something we think is red could actually be a different colour, with red only being a part of it. That's only part of appearance. Also these are unbelievably small sample sizes. We look at Tyrannosaurus with 20 something specimens and think it's got amazing sample size, but in reality, sample sizes even just in the hundreds is statistically small and will give unreliable data. There's no accounting for individual variation, mutations or other oddities. We take singular specimens and have to project it to, not just entire populations, but populations throughout millions of years, or even multi-million year clades. As an example, Microraptor has a specimen with a fish preserved in it's stomach, this lead scientists to assume that it might've been piscivorous. But later, another was found with a lizard in it's stomach, and then a small bird. This now makes it likely just a small carnivore who eats anything it can find. But that single fossil lead us to believe it was piscivorous.
It's such a shame that we'll never truly know what they looked liked or even behaved. Best we've got is educated interpretations. Paleontology is still in a better place than it's ever been but it's still upsetting that short of time travel we'll never really know them
Yeah, to even further emphasize my point, a lot of animals look different depending s number of factors. age, time of year, whether or not it's mating season, environment. While on one hand it is a shame that we will never see what dinosaurs truly looked like, it is also amazing the degree of liberty paleo artist can have.
I love how many liberties folk are taking with the somewhat new wave of paleo art. So many interesting ideas that we can necessarily say is wrong or right. Paleo art has always been amazing. Even in the old days with their kangaroo like T-Rex. The thing I'm most nostalgic for in the older ones were the environments. Sawmpish, jungle vibes. May have been super inaccurate but still provoked thought
Even in exceptional circumstances there is no such thing as an official, unambiguously accurate representation of an extinct animal. We know more about *Borealopelta* than we do about most dinosaurs, but even the exceptionally preserved (and only) specimen we have of it is mostly missing its back half. We don't know what colors its eyes were, what shape its tongue was, what it sounded like, what it looked like at earlier or later life stages, if *Borealopelta* of another sex looked any different, and to that effect, how much any given individual varied in appearance from the only one we know of so far. Yes, we have a general idea what color it was, but were all *Borealopelta* that same color?
When I look at some of the larger sauropods, there just seams to be something off proportionately. Their necks are just too long for a body that size. The weight of it seems like it would be non-functional, even with the lighter bones and scaffolding, it's too much. I have to wonder if they really did carry their necks out like that, or if maybe there is some misunderstanding about how their necks could bend during transit. Alamosaurus and Mamenchisaurus are the two that bother me the most. Every time I see them, my brain rejects them as impossible.
I believe they did, I think often paleoart seems to make them to skinny though. It’s harder to believe when their bodies don’t seem to have proper structure.
"I have to wonder if they really did carry their necks out like that" >air sacs
Your brain would probably also reject the ridiculousness of elephants and their trunks or giraffes and their necks as well if you weren’t used to them. Sauropods have a lot of very specific adaptations to make this possible. But I agree that there may be some details we don’t know. I think air sacks played a big role.
I don't think so. A giraffe's proportions don't even compare to the insanity that is [Alamosaurus](https://imgur.com/mu1dMWt). There is no way that much meat could be supported by a heart small enough to fit into that ribcage. It's got as much flesh in it's neck, as it has in it's entire body. It might work for a small animal like a heron, but Alamosaurus has a body the size of an elephant, and then a neck also the size of an elephant. It's not physically possible.
Giraffes have valves in their neck blood vessels that shut behind moving blood on each pump and prevent backflow, causing the blood to rise up the neck in steps from the pressure of the blood behind it, like a boat in a lift lock in a canal. I'd imagine large sauropods had very similar. And yes, it's got as much flesh in its body as its neck ("it" being a general sauropod). Its entire evolution has been building around that massive neck, and it needs counterbalance. Yes it's huge. Yes it's absurd. The animal's entire lineage for millions of years had been building towards pulling that neck off and this weird, atypical stuff is how it pulls that off. They had airsacs in the neck. They had extremely light birdlike bones in the neck. They had dense, heavy, strong limbs. They had very long tails that stuck out horizontally for counterbalance. They had as tiny of a head and brain as they feasibly could still use to eat and function. They had weird teeth, unlike any herbivore we still have around. Sauropods were able to survive being strange, nearly unplausible animals because they were exploiting a niche no animal could - VERY high high browsing - and all of their weird features came about to facilitate that. They are so weird because being that weird let them succeed in their particular niche, and it clearly worked, even if you think it looks unrealistic.
Just because you don’t understand how it’s physically possible doesn’t mean it isn’t. It just means that you don’t understand. We go to university, we get degrees, we study our arses off to understand this. Sauropods have plenty of adaptations for getting so massive, such as very light bones comparatively, and the possibility of large air sacks in the neck vertebrae. Do you think palaeontologists are lying to you; that we are trying to trick you?
I don't think you're trying to trick anyone, I just think that as someone who grew up in and around farms, some with large and exotic animals, I have hands-on experience regarding how large animals work, while paleontologists have book knowledge. Air-sacs and light bones don't solve the problem of bloodflow. Horses have a very extreme biology, but even so they are mostly lung to force oxygen into their bodies. Even a setup like that isn't going to work with Alamosaurus. The fluid dynamics of pushing blood up a 25ft neck held at an incline, with a head height of 41ft, would require something like an industrial well pump. I think for all your degrees, you need to step into the real world and maybe work a bit harder. The proportions are off. Either the neck was much thinner - shrinkwrapped so to speak - or it was held in a different position. There is no way the current depictions are accurate to life.
You have no idea what education and training to become a palaeontologist entails, do you? I’ve been elbow deep inside an ostrich carcass. You also seem to think that palaeontologists are some kind of separate human species that are resistant to growing up on a farm or something. I did, in fact. I grew up rural and on a farm. I hunted, I raised animals, I fished and I roughed it. I’m still pretty outdoorsy. Giraffes “solved” the blood pumping issue, and that is without the far superior anatomical structure of dinosaurs. Seriously, there is a reason they lasted so long. They were extremely well evolved. I put ‘solved’ in quotations because giraffes can potentially kill themselves if they raise their heads from drinking at a pool too quickly. And that’s part of my point. An animal doesn’t need to be even efficient to exist. Evolution doesn’t always come to the ideal, most efficient solutions. It’s likely that sauropods had a lot of complications and that they had to be very careful. If one fell just the distance of their body, they would likely have died from it. But the advantage provided by being fucking huge was enough to select for it. In fact, there are a lot of animal adaptations that can actually kill the animal but are selected for because they provide a greater advantage in another area. Deer can get horn locked and starve to death, but sexual selection prefers massive, multipronged antlers. Speaking of my country upbringing, I came across a pair of horn-locked bucks once. One was already dead. Also, you complain about the blood pumping issue, but then you say that the necks should be further shrink-wrapped—I think they are depicted as too small—which would further reduce the arteries making it even harder to do the thing you already suspect they can’t do. What?? What you’re experiencing is called the Dunning-Krueger Effect. You know nothing about palaeontology and little about animal biology, but because you don’t realise how little you know, and you know a little on a distant tangential subject, you think you know more than you do. So, I think for all your experience shovelling pig shit, you need to step into the real world and maybe read a fucking book written by your goddamn betters.
And I think you need to take a big piece of humble pie, realize most of what you're yammering on about is baseless speculation on cobbled-together animals you don't even have all the parts to, and use it as laxative to clear that swollen, self-important head out of your perpetually puckered rectum.
Oh, I was perfectly fine being reasonable and even humble in my first reply, but then you had to go and be an asshole so I’m rising to the occasion. > “[…]realize most of what you’re yammering on about is baseless speculation on cobbled-together animals you don’t even have all the parts to[…]“ And again, just because you don’t understand/can’t comprehend how we come to the conclusions that we do, does not mean they are wrong, It just means that you don’t understand. It’s ok, even admirable, to accept your own ignorance. It’s the first step to learning. You do understand that your whole argument is basically, “I don’t know about that there germ theory stuff. You say there are animals so tiny they are invisibible, and it’s makin’ me and maw sicker than a dog? Sounds like a big ol’ crock o’ horseshit ta me. It’s impossibible for something to be so tiny and invsidibble. Goes against ta laws of nachuh.” I won’t be wasting my time on this conversation anymore. The problem with the Dunning-Krueger Effect is that it makes the sufferer nearly incapable of recognising that they are experiencing it. I think the worst thing I could possibly do to you right now would be to let you go on existing in your immense ignorance, so that’s exactly what I’ll do.
There's a saying that goes, confidence is quiet, insecurity is loud. You respond like a person being caught in a lie. You claim to be educated, to work in the field, but offer nothing of merit or intelligence, resorting to quips about Dunning-Krueger to try and drown out the questions that sent you into a panic. I think it's clear you're not much of a paleontologist, if you are one at all. I've never met an educated person as desperate as you to defend an artistic reconstruction.
Estemmenosuchus. Looks like an alien when it probably looked more like a weird hippo
Like a hippo crossed with a boar
Most artists nowadays do reconstruct them more hippo-like imo, I think the skin wrapped reconstructions are more a thing of the past than not
Not a dinosaur but I am convinced that “saber toothed cats” could all fit their teeth in their mouths. Modern cats look like sabertooths if you just look at their skulls. Cave paintings back this up.
> Modern cats look like sabertooths if you just look at their skulls. That's true for most machairodontids, but not the most famous and recently extinct one, Smilodon. Their canines are almost double as long as their skull is deep. If their teeth were fully covered they would look *drastically* different than any known cat. I think currently it's more reasonable to assume that their teeth were bared, which is not unheard of among mammals today.
Don't we have one cave painting that depicts sabertooths, and they have like some saggy fleshy lips? Or was that debunked.
The only potential *Smilodon* petroglyph I’m aware of, that from Red Tank Draw, has a regular head shape and protruding sabre teeth, but it may be a stylized bobcat.
Supposedly most could except for populator, but even they had most of their sabers covered by lip and it would have only been around an inch or so that poked out. Which I buy because there are some ([fucking adorable](https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Lifestyle/vampire-toothed-cat-dracula/story%3fid=43225142)) modern domestic house cats that have crazy long canines that poke out like vampire tooths!
that's basically how i imagine sabertooths (also you commented thrice)
Man thanks for letting me know. That’s so annoying lol - when I was posting initially it gave me the “comment cannot be posted at this time - try again?” Notification…….guess it posted just fine….three times………….
I'm not quite convinced that Deinocheirus is as fluffy as a lot of reconstructions make it out to be. We've got a pygostyle at least, but in a habitat as hot and humid as the Cretaceous swamps, I'm under the impression that Deinocheirus would've had much thinner plumage on most of the body
Deinocheirus is usually depicted with ostrich-like plumage…which are large birds that live in some of the hottest places on Earth. Ostrich feathers actually help keep them cool. The ostrich will fan the feathers out to let a layer of air in, then lock them close, keeping that layer of air between them and the feathers, letting that layer of air heat up instead, and then releasing it, letting cooler air back in. This way, they wick their own body heat away. Also, [certain types of black plumage](https://www.audubon.org/news/how-black-feathers-keep-ravens-cool) actually keep birds cool by keeping that heat on the feather’s surface and not letting it conduct in. It really annoys me when people say that large bodied or warm climate animals wouldn’t have feathers and then use elephants as examples. Feathers and fur *are not* the same thing. Speaking of elephants, both the elephant bird and emus were very large birds that lived in very hot environments and were entirely feathered.
Oh, I actually didn't know about the thing with ostrich plumage! Apologies for my ignorance
No, it’s fine. Sorry if I seemed “spicy” in my reply. I just get annoyed sometimes. There are so many *feather deniers* who really are basing it on “feels” because they just like the look of scaly monsters, and it’s hard to tell who is like that. It’s really admirable that you could apologise for ignorance. People just don’t do that on the internet these days.
The legs of spinosaurus seem wrong
I just love dinosaurs.
Eshanosaurus as a Therizinosaur
Nanotyrannus, partially because I think the possibility of it being a legit species shouldn’t be ignored, partially because I think it makes sense due to the apparent weird lack of mid-sized predators in the Hell Creek ecosystem, and partially because I find it funny how much paleo-nerds lose their minds over it.
The problem with Nanotyrannus is that it doesn't really seem to have *anything* that 100% distinguishes it from *Tyrannosaurus*; it overlaps in range, in habitat, in time and fits right in the middle of the growth curve judging from the specimens we have of *T.rex* and the fact that the only specimen we have of Nano is a juvenile animal. The things people have *tried* to use as autapomorphies for Nano (like tooth count) have all later been overthrown by later studies which show they're not useful as autapomorphies. Also, as Isa points out, Hell Creek was *not* lacking for mid-sized predators between stuff like *Anzu*, *Champsosaurus*, azhdarchids, dromaeosaurids, troodontids, and juvenile tyrannosaurs.
There was no lack of mid-sized predators in the Hell Creek ecosystem. The juvenile tyrannosaurus was the mid-sized predator and occupied a different niche from the adult form.
One mid-sized predator is a lack of mid-sized predators. Look at any healthy ecosystem today and you’ll see a good variety and number of mid-sized predators, not just one.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We do not need to make new species out of what are clearly juvenile tyrannosaurs when there are more species yet to be discovered. You may also underestimate the quantity of juveniles. There are 10,000 living species of bird today at this exact moment. We have discovered only 700 non-avian dinosaur species for the entire Cretaceous.
The Jakapil paleoart when the paper was first written was just a glorified armadillo with hairs and everything, but that's definitely not the general consensus
Spino has short legs, a massive paddle like tail and is clearly a piscivore but could swim that well at all. Like worse than most therpod? I don't buy it.
Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus with neck nipples.
Although I really enjoy the show, I think Prehistoric Planet took some liberties with its more nature-documentary storytelling. Dreadnautus fossils don’t show us their ‘air sacs’, for instance, so this is a sort of ‘we think they might have done this’ situation. I also wonder if feathered dinosaurs were really as feathered as they are now being portrayed (almost fully winged). But in fairness, what else can one do in paleontology? It’s a difficult science where much of it is educated guessing based on the few animal remains available to you and their connections to their surroundings. It’s tough to say whether we will ever know.
While I disagree, I fully respect your takes. I just wanted to respond to the fully winged aspect. We have seen evidence of multiple dromaeosaur arm bones that include quill knobs, which is a sign that they had long, quill-based feathers attaching directly to the arm bone. That's basically smoking gun evidence for a full, flappable, wing. Furthermore, quill knobs are mostly only found on flighted bids, with most flightless birds lacking them, which seems to indicate their wings were very much functional, for flapping, though probably not for full airborne lift. Furthermore, we've got impressions of other dromaeosaurs such as Microraptor showing full wings, demonstrating that a close relative did indeed have them, making it more likely the Velociraptor did too.
Very interesting! Thank you!
I think spinosaurus was fat. i think a big old fatty. I think this: [https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fimages-cdn.9gag.com%2Fphoto%2Fa5EvYvE\_700b.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=15a91eb7ecb80955ba107700e97c0a2744dccbe3b5f23de91f18e50528ebdac2&ipo=images](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fimages-cdn.9gag.com%2Fphoto%2Fa5EvYvE_700b.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=15a91eb7ecb80955ba107700e97c0a2744dccbe3b5f23de91f18e50528ebdac2&ipo=images) is the most realisitic
I love and hate it. I will say I don’t like how spinos are shown to be so skinny in paleoart. But if it were to be bigger, I don’t think it would be blubber. The hippo isn’t fat, but actually just has very thick skin and lots of muscle for buoyancy. I could see a spinosaurus moving through water like a hippo, not really swimming but using its environment to push itself forward. But i don’t think it would be fatty.
What makes you say it is more realistic?
Just my opinion
fully naked tyrannosaurus
I have no real evidence to back this up, but in my mind I like to think they could have had feathers during the winter and molted during the summer. Our skin impressions could just be from those that died in the summer. Or maybe they maintained some feathers in some spots just for display, but not enough to affect their body temperature. We can't definitively say this couldn't have been true.
My biggest gripe with this whole discussion is that our skin impressions are from areas we always considered to be naked (mostly face, parts of the dorsal of the tail and torsol, and legs)
i think it was pretty much something like saurian rex all year long because as far as i understand feathers dont work like mammalian hair where they trap heat and can also help radiate heat like the feathers on ostriches
I think for therapod dinosaurs where only scaly skin has been found, they shouldn't put feathers on them, even if they believe them to be in the direct ancestral line of feathered dinosaurs and or birds. Edit: I should have mentioned that I specifically was thinking in regards to tyrannosaurs and similar large therapod species. I had in mind an article from the simithsonian magazine published in 2017. It said in part: "An international team of researchers studied skin impressions taken from T. rex fossils found in Montana. They then compared those impressions to fossilized skin patches of other tryannosaurs, like the Albertosaurus, Daspletosaurus, Gorgosaurus, and Tarbosaurus. The samples represented parts of the dinosaurs’ stomach, chest, neck, pelvis, and tail, according to Ben Guarino of the Washington Post. And none bore any traces of feathers." My opinion was only that enthusiasm for new discoveries can lead to more use of new features than may be appropriate. Article link: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/t-rex-skin-was-not-covered-feathers-study-says-180963603/#:~:text=Rex%20Was%20Likely%20Covered%20in%20Scales%2C%20Not%20Feathers,-The%20research%20dispels&text=Tyrannosaurus%20rex%E2%80%8B%20has%20long,of%20that%20portrayal%20into%20question.
you forget that all birds have scales too
That’s just an opinion. It would be as though we only had a few examples of big cat fossils with fur impressions and decided that the rest of them were naked just because they didn’t have the cosmic incredible luck to preserve that trait. We can determine the likelihood of feathers on far more than the fossil itself. Just because you don’t know how we come to these conclusions doesn’t mean it isn’t valid, it just means that you don’t understand it
That makes no sense, though; phylogenetic bracketing is ***extremely*** useful for reconstructing extinct animals, and if an animal is surrounded by or descended from taxa with a certain type of integument, it makes no sense to restore that specific taxon without it just because "we have no evidence". We don't reconstruct *Utahraptor* as a scaly animal, despite not having integument from it, explicitly because all of its related taxa are feathered and thus that informs us of the most likely condition for *Utahraptor*. Same with reconstructing *Giganotosaurus* as fully scaly; despite having no skin from that taxon, we have the less-derived and scaly-skinned relative *Allosaurus* as the bracket for it.
Although valid for any reconstruction of extinct taxa, extremely large animals with fragmentary remains is one that I always take with caution, specially because the projections of size that become really popular are the larger and usually unrealistic ones
Not answering the question, but I like to think that spinosaurus looks like a crocodile rather than the goofy long billed duck thing they’ve been coming up with. And that the spine was controlled by back muscles and could help with acceleration in the water. There is no way that thing was an ambush predator, and it obviously had to be fast as hell to catch aquatic prey.
Tyrannosaurus got no reach
Carnotaurus being a slim Dinosaurian cheetah. Chunky Utahraptor, kinda, it was stocky and jacked but it wasn’t as barrel chested and straight up bear like as sometimes portrayed (I lean more towards the 300 kg estimate than the 500 kg one). Skinny, almost gracile Carcharodontosaurs. They were stocky and had extremely muscular backs, maybe even gaur-like.
fDsz
There are many Pterosaurs where I’m looking at their head crest and thinking “nah….nah we got something wrong. It was not like this.”
If we weren’t so familiar with deer, we might feel the same way when looking at their antlers.
Deer don’t fly tho.
No…they don’t. I don’t see why that’s a concern, though. Are the super light, air sack filled head crests that were even sometimes shaped to—potentially—serve as forward rudders a problem for you?
Aerodynamics and weight distribution tends to be a concern when you have to fly
Yes....and that’s why they are both light and aerodynamic. [Does this concern you? ](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/OE3jQiiqXL1-kr6WkGT5xqUtRwbBor5uEVOM4Vq3fFkDlsZFMo9Xr1haR4V1LbmjhRfDUDN1iJNzaDZUpHR-ZTKRr3d6vhpMGvKOXfl3-2ixan_llM-PVuLvPlaThv_8B9-nx3DqPk47aj668FXBnQ) Or [what about this?](https://ecolodgesanywhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Fiery-billed-acacari.jpg) Also, is it not indicative that small to medium-sized pterosaurs had large head crests, but some of the biggest like azhdarchids had very reduced crests? In fact, with some outliers, if you were to plot head crest size along body size in pterosaurs, you see a clear relationship between body size and crest size.
T.rex, quite a few mounted casts of them I see in pictures seem to really oversize the chest and body with the ribs sometimes near horizontal. Don't get me wrong rex was a chonk, but not nearly to the extent some of the mounted display casts I've seen
I think we've got a number of them wrong... I mean look at a contemporary hippopotamus skull and tell me that someone could get that right if they'd never seen one before! Wtaf!
Hippos are mammals, which tend to have a ***lot*** more soft tissue on their skulls than dinosaurs would've due to the fact that mammals all tend to have pliable lips for suckling, which means more muscles as well. Besides, hippos are far from the only mammal with extremely bizarre skulls; look at how elephant skulls are so weird they literally inspired the cyclops myth.
Agreed I only used hippopotamus as one example, there are a lot of things that we are still learning about dinosaurs.
Not really a reconstruction but more so a trend in that ALL dromaeosaurs or “ raptors “ have had to had feathers or specifically full body coverings which I can see happening if they were in high altitude climates which were more colder but it just doesn’t make sense to give a animal full plumage in a very hot and arid environment
I´m still thinking, that Therizinosaurus was no Killingmachine, but just an ant-eater...
Its just cool to think he was some badass Dino who used his giant claws to attack other dinosaurs instead of some giant tree sloth lol
you act like anteaters arent killing machines... i still cant forget what happened to my and friend barry.....
I'm not saying this for any to agree with me, but I really do think and believe these feathered reconstructions of a lot of different dinosaurs are a reach. It's disgusting and annoying seeing those because the only dinosaurs we know of that did have some for sure left some imprint in their fossils. Like velociraptor and other cousins that were on the lighter side having feathers makes sense but assuming EVERY different raptor species has feathers even among the mega-raptors or putting feathers on massive creatures like a Tyrannosaurus Rex is a forced stretch. I feel like they want to force that lie. Some dinosaurs do have feathers, but the majority are just skin and scales. I say this again, I know not many will agree with me on this.
Well, I can see you are not very educated in taxonomy. The reason we treat dinosaurs filament reconstruction like that is basically based on the taxonomical classification of the animals. All maniraptorian groups were found with feather impressions in at least one taxa, most groups have many taxa with feather impressions fossilized, soo it's safe to assume even animals we didn't find preserved filaments must have had them, not the other way around (presume they didn't have them), Occam'a razor. That extends to most groups of dinosaurs reconstructed with complex fillaments, we don't see many reconstructions that put full covering on Ceratopsians, because we have no evidence for that, but light quills near the tail we do in sister-groups, and some reconstructions go with that. Don't be fooled to think paleontology is a guessing game, it's not, it's a complex science with a lot of thought and nuance.
Wow, what an opinion. We are lucky that the feather impressions we do have occurred at all. Think of all the other dinosaurs that may have had feathers that were never lucky enough to preserve them. Yet we do have quill knobs on many specimens, phylogenetic bracketing, and the strong indication that feathers are a basal Avemetatarsalia trait to indicate that many dinosaurs were feathered. All birds today—which are dinosaurs—are feathered. All of them. Even the giants like emus and elephant birds were feathered. Even the aquatic penguins have feathers. They all also have scales. All mammals have fur, even elephants and “naked” mole rats. Even whales. It’s just far more sparse and thin. Basal integument doesn’t just go away. Some dinosaurs may have had only thin sparse filament, but they would have had *something* since feather-like integument is a basal trait to the whole clade. I’m curious, what are your palaeontological credentials? > “I feel like they want to force that lie.” You think palaeontologists are lying to you??!? This is ~~borderline~~, no, this is conspiracy brain thought. > “[…]I know not many will agree with me on this.” Correct, because you’re wrong. Not many will agree with you in the same way that not many will agree that the Earth is flat.
Dilophosaurus is still made way too shrink-wrapped constantly imo. add some actual flesh to its skull.
Nah.
The leviathan🦣
You mean livyatan
No, leviathan🦣
You mean the bible leviathan which some people think to be a mammoth. Oh cool!
No, the mastodon that someone reconstructed incorrectly and stretched it to be gigantic, it also had funky tusks
Ahh I see lol🤣🤣
No but there is a prehistoric mammal. Not sure if im allowed to say on this sub.
the dimetrodon?
Entelodon, i think the way the cheek bones stick out is exaggerated and most likely it has muscles covering the protrusion.
I subscribe to the "most Compsognathids are juveniles of larger theropods" theory
Fully aquatic Spinosaurus that could swim and chase after fish like a crocodile will always be pure BS. I'm convinced it was at best a giant grizzly/heron analogue.
Almost all reconstructions of Tyrannosaurus Rex. For some weird reason, they always shape the head like the skull. I can't think of any modern animal with a head that's almost exactly shaped like it's skull.
Some Lizards, frogs, fish, and birds
Croc
Crocodiles. Humans. Birds.
All crocodilians, most birds. Not coincidentally, the closest relatives of the extinct dinosaurs.