#bird and dinosaurs is the same

[1dinodaily]

11/30/22 California Condor

[the-slow-unravel-of-stars]

[fur-sure-suits]

RRAAARRRRGGGGHHH!!!!!!

(I did it!!!!)

Toony - to - realistic interchangeable eyes!!!!!!

The realistic ones are not finished yet but!!!!!! I’m so proud of these!!!!

There’s a con coming up and it’s gotten my is IN GEAR

[biomecharnotaurus]

Today on random prehistoric animals:

Crocodilians with long legs that could run like fucking dogs

[oasisofgalaxies]

Every so often I’m filled with an incredibly wide and heavy grief as I remember that I will never be able to see a dinosaur alive

[best-bird-bash]

uh

do dragons count as birds

I would have to say over all no, unfortunately because dragons are amazing. However if the dragon is more bird like i do believe they could count.

[hal-o-ween]

Regularly scheduled reminder that I love humans, we are so wonderful and full of kindness and good

[famderfries]

i did not just go type "100 cool dinosaur facts" into google to impress u just now🧍

BDJAVDIWVNBSBS,,,, 💕💕💕💕

[academiccockroach]

The fact that the closest thing we have to a dinosaur can’t fucking cough and WILL die from a bit of gunk in its windpipe is just

millions of years of evolution and this is what you get

a chicken

[vickysaurus]

Dimetrodon, the most famous of all extinct synapsids! It's a shame most of that fame seems to include it getting called a dinosaur. It's both closer to us and much older than the dinosaurs! They lived about 290 million years ago during the early Permian in the southwestern United States, which was a swampy river delta area at the time. It was a carnivore about the size of a crocodile and, of course, had a rather impressive sail on its back that only a glimpse of made it into this portrait. I decided to restore it with the scaly skin that Varanopsids, an even earlier more rootward branch of the the synpasid family tree, are known to have, although bare skin with neither scales nor fur as Estemmosuchus had is also a possibility.

Drawn while listening to Dimetrodon by The Doubleclicks.

[theofficialpeanutgallery]

I’m laughing at the difference in length between most of my potential essay question answers and the last one. Because you can really tell which topic is my special interest.

Most of them are about a third of a page long or slightly shorter.

And then the one about the origin of birds is about 3/4 of a page.

[brbremaking]

not me laughing at buck for being scared of the animals and then absolutely shitting myself when I saw that goddamn bird

[rrover]

they’re technically fish because they descended from them. bc classification

[urgothgfsbeltchain]

“uncover the mystery,

tell everyone what you see.

it’s not what it seems,

vulgar when brought to light.”

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

New Fear

I have been on tumblr a long time. A looooong time. Far longer than I should have been, really.

And I've been arguing with schmucks about birds being dinosaurs... pretty much that whole time. Folks tend to get angry when a dinosaur blog posts birds, after all. It happens.

And while the game of whack a mole is ancient, it's not unpredictable. Usually, it ends in one of two ways:

the person admits they were wrong, and they back down

the person stops arguing with me and blocks me

I'm okay with either one, really. the former is ideal, the latter at least brings me peace.

Never before this past weekend has someone insisted they were right no matter what I say

And this isn't a coincidence.

Over the past few decades, anti-science sentiment has risen worldwide. I mean you just have to look at the COVID19 pandemic, or general reactions to the problems of climate change.

While of course people who think their opinion matters more than evidence have always existed, they have never been quite this bold before.

The idea that the colloquial definition of dinosaur matters, at all, is a completely new idea and one that has no basis in reality.

And yet, multiple people this past weekend argued exactly that.

And it sounds exceptionally similar to the idea that people could pick and choose things about COVID19 to believe, or the general republican position on science (only things that back up their bigotry are true).

It really seems to reflect a general increase in anti science sentiment and public anti-intellectualism.

Reality isn't actually up for debate. Reality isn't actually subjective. And science is the measure of reality

This isn't the same as the biases of society impacting science and making it worse. Saying "what people think is more important than science" is not the same as saying "science forgot a very important variable / factor / to consider data gained by different cultures / to have a wide variety of perspectives/ etc."

And allowing people to continue to perpetuate and believe in delusions leads directly to the spread of misinformation, leading to more people not understanding reality, and so on

This matters because reality matters. Because the reality of our world is not something we can change or escape. And, in fact, us ignoring the reality of the world - like thinking we can have infinite growth on a finite planet - is directly leading to the destruction of that world (climate change).

I am terrified of the rise of anti-science sentiment. I am terrified of the rise of cherry picking, deciding reality is what you want it to be, ignoring evidence. We see this from purely scientific topics all the way to social justice (how much of racism is ignoring the evidence of a) race being a social construct and b) how much racism impacts people's lives? Almost all of it).

This is bigger than birds being dinosaurs or evolution or climate change. This is about our society going on a deeply disturbing and self-destructive path.

And I really don't know what to do about it.

[dinodorks]

[ Argentinosaurus, a giant sauropod, illustrated by Chase Stone. ]

"Of all the animals ever to have roamed the planet, the iconic long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as sauropods stand unrivaled. No other terrestrial creatures have come close to attaining their colossal sizes. They overshadowed all other dinosaurs, from the duck-billed hadrosaurs and the horned ceratopsians to the armored ankylosaurs and predatory tyrannosaurs. Even the mightiest land mammals—mammoths and rhinoceroslike beasts that were up to twice as heavy as the largest elephants alive today—were featherweights compared with the biggest sauropods. From an evolutionary perspective, this singularity makes sauropods an intriguing anomaly. Evolution is rampant with examples of convergence, in which the same feature evolves more than once independently in different groups of organisms. A classic example of convergence is powered flight—flapping wings evolved in birds, bats, pterosaurs and insects, but the particular bones or other structures making up the wings differ among the groups, attesting to their independent evolutionary origins. Convergence in evolution is very common even when it comes to complicated features: warm-bloodedness, eyes that can move and focus, bipedal locomotion, the loss of limbs, the use of tools, and live birth all evolved multiple times in different animal groups. Convergence is widespread in the plant kingdom as well: carnivorous plants evolved at least a dozen times, roots evolved more than once, and even arborescence—plants taking the form of trees—evolved more than once. With convergence so common in nature, sauropods' uniqueness in size is special in itself. No other land animal has approached even a third of the largest sauropods' weight. What makes sauropods stand out from the crowd, both literally and figuratively?"

Read more: "How Sauropod Dinosaurs Became the Biggest Land Animals Again and Again" by Michael D. D'Emic.