Prehistoric beasties.

[Poobum]

I was wondering if anyone had interest in dead things that are far more awesome than any of the shit that's alive now. The azhdarchids are a favourite of mine, because seriously, if you made them up people would tell you you were being daft.



The idea of ol' Quetzalcoatlus there darkening the sky amazes me. Look at it, the big daft bastard, all that head. It's great now that the can do a lot of detailed bio-mechanical simulations, and really get into how these things moved. Turns out most pterosaurs like the Quetzal were quite comfortable on the ground.

A genuine personal highlight for me was when they finally found the majority of a Deinocheirus skeleton. For ages all they had were these arms.


For ages everyone was wondering what the hell is this thing? Then they found out that most of the skeleton had been poached and was for sale on the black market, something that goes on a lot. I think Nicholas Cage ending up buying a poached tyrannosaurid skull because of course he did. Anyway, the actual animal ended up being absolutely bizarre, and I love it because it shows of that dinosaurs were diverse and bonkers.



Hump backed, horse headed, stocky and ponderous, its an all around delight. Deinocheirus, they will bitch slap any Tarbosaurus getting too close.

The amount of fossils we have now is amazing, and the level of scrutiny scientists can put them through is astounding. Feathers on dinosaurs can be so well preserved that fossilized pigmant can be put under a microscope and the general colour can be made out. They found a speciman of a Brachylophosaurus preserved so well that they could make out its skin, its internal organs and even the brain tumour that probably killed it. But there's the flip side that there's so much we might never, dinosaurs that lived in jungles and mountains would be really unlikely to fossilize.

So I guess my general attempt at a topic is, what dead thing you think cool?

[kittens]

already one of the greatest threads of all time. love these old fuckers. i'm too pissed now but i was reading about I've of these lads I'd never even heard of earlier today. wicked boys

[Twit 2]

Dale Wintonosaurus.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Love this thread, but have nothing to add

Wasn't there a fuck on big penguin?

[bgmnts]

I used to love Dinosaurs as a nipper. I used to love the Steg and there was a weird dino with a ball on the end of its tail, imagine getting clubbed with that? Wrecked.

[jobotic]

Ankylosaurus.

Loved em. Pre-historic mammls are cool too. Sabre-toothed tigers, hairy ass giant elephants, enormous horses.

[gib]

[José]

big fuckin' gannet: gies yer chips ya fat cunt.

tourist in newquay: yes sir, sorry sir.

[Absorb the anus burn]

Jurassic Tommy Cooper has let himself go.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Mike D_inosaur

[kittens]

Ankylosaurus.

Loved em.

wrong. bgmnts, the dinosaur you are looking for is clobbersaurus.

[Tombola]

It's only the creatures Jurassic World could have depicted.

[Bennett Brauer]

big fuckin' gannet: gies yer chips ya fat cunt.

tourist in newquay: yes sir, sorry sir.

You're thinking of Ungenerous Seagulls. You won't see gannets anywhere near the Seaview Chippery.



The best dinosaur is Toblerosaurus.

[kittens]

.

[bgmnts]

Look at this cunt, the heavy artillery of the dino world.

Everyone cums over Velociraptors and T-Rexes but look at that beast.

[drummersaredeaf]

Glue butt plugs on a tortoise.

[José]

You won't see gannets anywhere near the Seaview Chippery.

IT'S NOT A GANNET THOUGH IS IT? IT'S A BIG FUCKIN' DINOSAUR YOU ABSOLUTE SPANNER.

[Bennett Brauer]

IT'S NOT A GANNET THOUGH IS IT? IT'S A BIG FUCKIN' DINOSAUR YOU ABSOLUTE SPANNER.

David Attenborough said the same thing to me but I'm not backing down.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

That looks like one able bodied dinosaur is getting a piggy back from another dinosaur that doesn't have a head.

[Inspector Norse]

Yeah dinosaurs and their friends are amazing. I read a good book on them recently by Steve Brusatte, a fascinating overview of their story and also the history of DINOSCIENCE, though Brusatte himself comes across a bit annoyingly. I guess it's hard not to behave like a gushing fanboy, though, when you get to muck around with dinosaurs for a living.

I did have a big dinophase as a kid, and palaeontologist is the first thing I remember wanting to do when I grew up. But now I've been getting interested in some of the other krazy kritters that hung out in the olden days. We all know about the pterosaurs but there were some great things going on underwater. Have you seen all the old-school whales? Like massive fat swimming weasels.



I find the whole convergent evolution thing fascinating, the way similar features appear in completely unrelated species. There's a group of animals called the Brontotheres, for example, and just to look at one you would think ah, that's a prehistoric rhinoceros. But they're not: they're more closely related to horses.

[Pdine]

Posturally identical to Tommy Cooper.

[drummersaredeaf]

That looks like one able bodied dinosaur is getting a piggy back from another dinosaur that doesn't have a head.

That's the job that was found for it after it was declared fit for work.

[ZoyzaSorris]

Love it all. Was mad on it as a kid and haven't stopped, recently got quite into fossil hunting, stayed at a welsh cottage with its own Ordovician quarry on site, grubbed up a load of trilobites. Digging around and realising you are basically exploring a 450 million year old sea floor is pretty intoxicating.

It's been a great thing to follow intermittently over my forty years of life because so much of our understanding of prehistoric life has changed and developed in that time, it's still a real frontier of knowledge.

And yes, things like convergent evolution is fascinating, and little capricious quirks of fate like how the mammal related lineages were kind of dominating the earth before the Permian mass extinction and then had to wait nearly two hundred million years to get back in the saddle until the dinos had had their turn (though of course even today there are many more dinosaur-descended species alive than mammal species).

Or the fact that the (non-bird) dinosaurs were around for three times longer than the time the time that has passed since they became extinct. Just love these great epic sweeps of time and evolution.

[ZoyzaSorris]

The slightly more piquant side is the sheer amount of amazing massive stuff that has gone extinct since humans have been around, with the finger of suspicion firmly aimed at humans for most of it.

The fact that every continent except antarctica and Australia would have been home to multiple species of elephant, all but two gone, America had its ground sloths and ankylosaur like glyptodonts, all warm places would have giant tortoises wandering about, elephant birds, marsupial lions and rhino sized wombats and lizards the size of dinosaurs in Australia, all gone like tears in rain. What an amazing time it must have been to be alive.

[hedgehog90]

Dinosaurs are such a crowd pleaser, they should make a film about them.
They could call it Dinosaur Land, about a land full of dianosaurs.
If they made that I'd definitely see that.

[hedgehog90]

Excited about a film about dinosaurs, I decided to make my own



what should we call this horrific creature?

[Avril Lavigne]

what should we call this horrific creature?

real.dinosaur

[Prison Biscuits]

Does anyone think that monsters arms look a bit like Thomas Cooper

[hedgehog90]

real.dinosaur

I see what you did there. However this dinosaur doesn't really exist. I made it up, believe it or not.

[Captain Z]

I mean, sure, there's some tenuous evidence that these creatures existed, but there's also a lot of evidence that they didn't exist.