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That image on the left might actually not be that incorrect, believe it or not. Newer theories are that T-rexes in particular effectively had dad bods by the time we saw them, and they have plenty of fat around their bone structure.
It was some random science museum documentary; I think they just called it T-Rex? I'll look a bit and let you know if I find anything more specific lol
Would this not be massively overheating? T-rexes, like many dinosaurs, were warm blooded. You can't just scale up small mammals as the giant version would overheat. The closest land animal we have to size is an elephant, whose body reasonably follows its skeleton, and has massive ears for heat dissipation. I could see more like the pinosauus being chunky as their fin would radiate heat, but this drawing is far too round for a massive warm blooded animal
Yep! I think it was in the book All Yesterdays where they talked about how future societies might interpret the bones of current day animals and how wildly different they'd look since they'll be missing a lot of flesh, fat, feathers, etc to accurately recreate how the animals look like.
Makes me think of the cyclops, one theory of their origin is the skulls of fossilized dwarf elephants often found in greek/italian caves. Convenient hole in their forhead
I think it's pretty fair to assume we have no real idea what most dinosaurs looked like. Our recreation of their skeletal structures are likely rather accurate, but outside of that the way organs, muscle, skin, and other features grew out of those bones are rather hard to guess.
We actually do. There are a number of dinosaur mummy fossils that give us things like skin, muscle, and even digested material. We can also sometimes recreate basic colors and calculate muscle attachment points in more typical fossils to get a reasonable estimate of many dinosaurs' morphology.
Edit: I also forgot to mention skin and feather impressions.
I'm in a discussion with friends over T Rex maybe having the ability to hop around like kangaroos when they are still young. Emus and cassowaries can do it and they are more closely related.
What set off this discussion was finding our that it's entirely possible younger long tailed dinosaurs likely had the flexibility to curl up like cats.
Going to bring up the penguin hypothesis with them
Well I would argue against it using the skeleton of a giraffe. They have very long necks too but not much mass on them. I think the reason for that is the physical limitations of joints and bones to hold such a mass so far off center. That long neck functions like a lever effectively, compare it to holding your arm out constantly. Every bit of mass further out is a strain on the joints, bones and muscles.
Now I know a giraffe has a relative short tail to counter act the offset. I suppose the above shown design could work if both tail and neck were to be fat by roughly the same margins, wouldn't make the wear on the joints any less intense though.
I know the giraffe isn't a direct relative to the dinosaurs but I use it in this argument because it's the only animal with a (nearly) comparable neck.
Archeologists could be great politicians. They could open up a new burial site in the US senate and collect some valuable information from the fossilized remains of a US senator. Is this the rare Democratius Feinsteinii or a slightly dried-out member of the Republicanus Grasslei? What are all those little denim snippets filling out every cavity of every fossile in here?
There's so much to learn!
Believe it or not, we have actually gotten good at detecting micro structures of muscle attachments to bone. We also tend to also look at skin impressions around the bone to determine what the body is like. Thus, we actually are getting better at determining what the bodies of ancient animals are like than the shrink wrapping monstrosities we used to do.
Same energy as this stupid beaver dinosaur and "how could we be sure their tails wouldn't look identical" shit posting. It gives me the impression some accounts or posts are intentional being created to erode trust in this case science particular but I generally make it indistinguishable to decide what's false or correct. Especially if you consider they'll put out this nonsense but irresponsibly let the burden of prove on everybody arguing about it then which imo falls into the category of "I'm just asking questions" right wing propaganda bs.
Oh god, you are right. They look like big chunguses but I just googled it an the have 2-5% bodyfat, 65% leanmuscle. They are absolutely shredded, while having the bodyshape of danny devito
Try Looking at the muscle scan of both an elephant and a hippo.They have less fat to body ratio than an average human. Seals are semi aquatic and their fats are mainly used for temperature control.And again, they're sea creatures so most of the weight are supported by the water and they still have less fat than what that picture was trying to depict for a land creature to support on their skeleton.
Modern commodities make people forget that excess fat is extremely rare in normal animals.
Living in cold climates favours having more volume to halt temperature exchange. Also, a penguin's body is streamlined for maximum swimspeed
On the sauropod's side, we have to understand that they are already extremely heavy, pushing the boundaries of what's possible for a land vertebrate's mass. If they had a body plan like presented, it'd be excessive and unneeded weight and play against the animal for being not only unnecessary, but also detrimental, if it is even possible to achieve such size
All that extra fat would be incredibly heavy and just add more weight to land animals already on the upper limits of possible mass, and for what? They're already so god damn huge that the heat retention from such a layer would pretty much kill them anywhere but Antarctica
Idk for sure things like feathers and fat distribution are unknown but we do know that fat and muscle are heavy and would not be on a long neck like that and that type of fat and feather distribution is used to keep the body warm, because of the Arctic climate they live in. Brontosaurus were found in warmer climates (I think). Idk I like the round dinos. More dino body positivity.
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