Zegh's Dinosaur Thread
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Triceratops and Stegosaurus are probably the first dinosaurs a kid really notices, for their absolutely spectacular appearances, untill Tyrannosaurus and such take over.
There's something special about the intensity of these herbivorous tank-o-saurs
Apparantly million of years ago Centipedes could reach the size of cars.
makes you kinda happy to exist today.
makes you kinda happy to exist today.
I would have preferred riding giant centipedes than riding cars, to be honest.
eissa
Artanis "Altáriel" Nerwen Nos Finwe
Some herbivore dinos make good robotic architecture design, like Stegosaurus freaking boney fins on the back. Looks like freaking solar sails. I wish that dino transformers could be done better/
That was one of the leading hypotheses - that the plates were for thermoregulation. Since then, the plates have been found to have been covered in keratin, not skin or blood. Some have suggested two similar species in North America represent one and the same, just male and female variants (if so, the shape of the plates differ, not much else) but these species are separated not only by shape, but also by some significant stratigraphy (at least a couple million years, which isn't much geologically speaking, but not nothing either) - at the same time, other types long considered separate species (based on plate shape) are now considered the same, with plate shape either representing gender, age or just individual variation.
In the end, they could simply be a display of energy wasteage - armor or sexual display, that just evolved "out of control" for as long as the animals were able to sustain their physiques - sort of like the huge-antlered irish elk.
Sn1p3r187
Carolinian Shaolin Monk
So if Theropod dinoaaurs are seen as being more or less the ancestors of modern birds. Then by all means, does it means Ceratopsians or Sauropods or even Hadrosaurids have a modern descendent? And it could it even be said that those families had something in common with birds?
We have to be very specific, and look at it this way:
All of Dinosauria (Theropods + Sauropods + Ornithischians etc) died out at the end of the cretaceous, and all of their "bloodlines" ended *except for* one - which is a clade we call Neornithes.
Neornithes are simply one of many specific branches within Theropoda. All birds in the world belong to Neornithes, and they represent *the only* surviving dinosaurs (sadly)
For a breakdown - all birds are Neornithes, and Neornithes belong to Ornithurae, which include Hesperornis and Ichthyornis, that you will often see as examples of "modern birds" existing alongside dinosaurs, these two specifically oceanic birds from the Western Interior Sea (aka, "Ocean of Kansas" "Niobrara Sea")
Ornithurae belong to Ornithothoraces ("bird-chests") that also include the so called Enantiornithes ("opposite birds") an entire biome of small sparrow-like birds, perching, flocking, bug-eating, ALL died out and were supplanted by Neornithe descendants from ocean birds.
Ornithothoraces belong to Avialae, which include long-tailed birds such as Archaeopteryx and Anchiornis, and...
Avialae is the sister group to all of the famous "raptors", meaning they have a common ancestor placed somewhere to the mid-Jurassic, where they fork into two branches. Together, they form Paraves.
Paraves + Oviraptorosauria form the clade Pennaraptora, which belong to Maniraptora (includes Therizinosaurs and Alvarezsaurs)
These all belong to Coelurosauria, which includes Ornithomimids and Tyrannosaurs - and as we climb further down the stem of this classification-tree, you'll notice we include more and more Theropods, untill we reach Theropoda itself - which is a sister-group to Sauropoda, and those together are grouped next to Ornithischia (which include Hadrosaurs, Ceratopsians etc)
Hopefully, I didn't complicate this too much - but imagine Dinosauria as a stem, forking into two, then three - ONE of those branches equal Theropoda, and in the mess of branches - ONE stick is named Neornithes (the rest of the tree dies!
) and from THAT lone branch, sprouts all the new branches and twigs and leafs that are todays sparrows, ducks, albatroses, ostriches, colibris, parrots etc.So, all non-avian dinosaurs would have some connection to todays birds, in that they would have been more or less related to them, depending on taxonomic position, I guess - but only the direct descendants lend their DNA to modern birds (which would include early-mid Jurassic maniraptorans)
(This also means, Tyrannosaurus never evolves into a bird, neither does Velociraptor, but a very very close relative OF Velociraptor become todays birds. It also means "the chicken" is *not* special, as mass-media sometimes portray
ALL birds are equally Neornithes - a branch of Theropoda)
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Wait, aren't Crocodilians also from that Dino family or something? Or are their ancestors also Neornithes?
Crocodiles are Archosaurs. Dinosaurs are also Archosaurs.
Archosaurs are a huge, huge group of reptiles (including all birds) that have as of today only left 2 sole surviving groups: Crocodiles and birds.
This is the reason you often see Crocodiles and Dinosaurs in the same sentence, since Crocodiles are the closest living relatives to BIRDS (;D) and as such, dinosaurs.
Beyond being "the closest living relative", they are not particularily closely related, I'd say you're closer to a cangaroo, than a dinosaur to a crocodile.
Todays find at the beach.
Are those fossilized nautiloid shells?
I'm not sure. I belive they're fossilized Belemnitida. Or Vættelys as he we call them in Danish.
Belemnite, that was the word I was looking for! And awesome you got a common name for them!
Again, we have mostly pre-mesozoic rock here in Norway - and what little I can find puts most of Denmark under fairly young geology, Cenozoic and up, but you got some Cretaceous in the far north, as well as following the direction of Sweden, towards the east, as well as - much more famously - in Bornholm (possibly more famous since it definitely includes land-mass, and therefore land fossils, while the other deposits, I assume are oceanic?)
Bornholm, is the place in Scandinavia (as far as I'am aware.) that has been above water for the longest. The Mesozoic of Bornholm spans late triassic to late creatacous. With deposits from the early Jurassic to early creatacous being continental or marginalt marine.
Edit: found a link that does a better job at explaining it than I do. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631068303000095
I'm still a newbie to all this. So I'm still in the process of learning.
Edit: found a link that does a better job at explaining it than I do. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631068303000095
I'm still a newbie to all this. So I'm still in the process of learning.
My sister found this. Could this possibly be a nautiloid shell?
Yeah, looks like it!
Dunno much about specifics, but I do know that during all of the Mesozoic, most of Fennoscania+Baltics (Balto-Scandia I think is sometimes used, iirc) is a large island-continent, sort of like Australia
The Norwegian mountain range would at the time be tall, sharp and alpine - but even *then* in the process of erosion, since they are extremely old. Denmark would pop in and out of this landmass, while also partaking in the more general European archipelago. I often struggled to determine wether Dromaeosauroides of Bornholm would have been an inhabitant of this larger Scandinavian landmass to the north, or the archipelago to the south
Maybe a good compromise is imagining this northern continent crumbling into an archipelago toward the south, sort of like south-east Asia, and Dromaeosauroides like an analog to the tiger, able to exist both on a mainland as well as islands, due to sea-levels rising and sinking across milennia. Now I'm obv just playing with hypotheticals (which is fun!)
Dunno much about specifics, but I do know that during all of the Mesozoic, most of Fennoscania+Baltics (Balto-Scandia I think is sometimes used, iirc) is a large island-continent, sort of like Australia
The Norwegian mountain range would at the time be tall, sharp and alpine - but even *then* in the process of erosion, since they are extremely old. Denmark would pop in and out of this landmass, while also partaking in the more general European archipelago. I often struggled to determine wether Dromaeosauroides of Bornholm would have been an inhabitant of this larger Scandinavian landmass to the north, or the archipelago to the south
Maybe a good compromise is imagining this northern continent crumbling into an archipelago toward the south, sort of like south-east Asia, and Dromaeosauroides like an analog to the tiger, able to exist both on a mainland as well as islands, due to sea-levels rising and sinking across milennia. Now I'm obv just playing with hypotheticals (which is fun!)
Sn1p3r187
Carolinian Shaolin Monk
speaking of Dinosaurs. i watched Godzilla vs Kong yesterday. was bloody awesome. If he is dinosaur in a lot of ways. does that mean godzilla has much in common with birds in order Theropoda?
He's a giant Lizard.