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Birds are considered to be dinosaurs. Birds exist now. We are finding dinosaur fossils now.
That’s what the XKCD that was posted says. Mostly.
There’s always a relevant xkcd
The popup text on that one is quite funny.
Any idea how to access the pop-up text on a phone?
On my android, I just long press on the image, and it appears at the top of the popup menu
Which makes me ask, why were mammals able to evolve to produce an apex predator that relies on it’s inventiveness (Humans) in quite a short time, but no similar “dinosaur” got to that point in a much longer period?
We’re searching planets for signs of life as a pre-cursor to intelligent life, but there’s no guarantee that life will evolve in the same direction as ours.
Corvids and psittacines display human child level intelligence. They use tools. They recognize other people. Hell the psittacines can mimic speech.
I personally suspect it’s a matter of energy density. Birds have to use almost all of their available calories on flying. Doesn’t leave a lot of energy left over for a massively hungry brain. No clue what’s holding back penguins, emus, and cassowaries.
Most birds are extremely light and efficient. Their bones have evolved to be light weight to help with this. Some species even fly in a V formation to conserve energy.
Evolution doesn’t mean get better or smarter. It just means the species can survive and keep reproducing. Emperor Penguins in Antarctica for example, where they nest in a place where there are no predators. It seems insane the hardship and their silly walk which takes forever. But it works.
Birds have to use almost all of their available calories on flying.
But flying is quite energy efficient as a method of getting from point A to point B. That’s why flying insects and birds have had such evolutionary success with that strategy.
Is it though? They have to eat an absolute ton relative to their own mass. At least all the birds I’ve ever interacted with were constantly eating, even when they mostly didn’t bother flying. Chicken soccer is what I called feeding the chickens. No patience whatsoever.
My mother used to say that her sons eat like birds, a peck at a time, and twice our own body weight daily.
While we humans eat a lot, something like 50% of our calories are going to our brains. I’m not sure most birds could actually increase their caloric intake enough to be able to evolve bigger brains than they already have. Maybe if we designed them some super foods, but that seems to be cheating, to me.
While we humans eat a lot, something like 50% of our calories are going to our brains.
I don’t think that’s right.
This article says that about 20% of an adult human male’s resting energy expenditure goes towards supporting the brain’s metabolism. Obviously for more active people, the higher denominator of total energy expenditure will mean an even lower percentage of energy being used for the human brain.
Flying is energetically expensive to start doing, but pays off in efficiency once an animal moves a far enough distance. How many calories does a goose need to consume to fly 4000 km, and how does that compare to terrestrial species like deer or wolves?
Now you get it. :)
Also, water you are drinking has probably been peed by dinosaure. Several time. But probably not peed by a human.
Second relevant xkcd of the comments https://what-if.xkcd.com/74/
There are fossilized humans. Fossilization really doesn’t take that much time, geologically speaking; it just requires very specific conditions.
Also makes you wonder what fossils they mean, of the same species or then already extinct ones.
Because according to a quick Wikipedia search the oldest hominid fossils (?) are something like 7 millions years old
That’s much much shorter than dinosaurs where around but hey " hominins are around long enough to unearth hominin fossils"!
About how much time are we talkin here?
Human species before H. Sapiens
Homer Sapiens?
Where are the bodies?
Where’s Rachel!?
Where are the other drugs going?
I don’t know, swear to God
For some reason, I don’t entirely believe you. Might be the whole God of Madness thing. You turning back into Jyggalag anytime soon? I’d like to know when to short the shit out of the entire market.
I know there’s some animal fossils in New Zealand that date back to its colonization by the ancestors of the Maori, so about the 1400s. Though I don’t know if they are partially or fully fossilized.
Your teeth can fossilise while they’re still in your mouth. We call it tartar.
It is more chronologically accurate to show a t-rex being hit by a car than it is to show a t-rex eating a stegosaurus
I said I’m sorry. But if you’re going to let your T-Rex out at night you should at least put a reflective collar on it.
Hi, I was just calling because I live down the street from you, and your daughter come to my house today and she kick my t-rex.
Your daughter come to my house today, And she come on my property and then she kick my t-rex. And now my t-rex needs operation.
How cruel.
My T-Rex ist mostly armless
That would be a knee slapper if I could reach.
The only interaction I’ve seen between a T-Rex and a collar is that one scene from The Lost World. Based on what I saw there, I have to assume that collars wouldn’t really work for them.
You made me scroll up to the picture again, looking for a T-Rex or a car
And people mocked me for my human-tyrannosaur slashfic on ao3. Well, who’s laughing now?
This is the comparison I was looking for. It’s great to explain that media shows them together but untrue, it is a totally different idea to explain the staggering time difference between the two.
I don’t remember that episode of the Flintstones
Is it a self-driving car?
This meme made me gasp loud enough that my girlfriend was worried something was wrong.
Then I had to explain that I’m 41 years old and was just shocked by a dinosaur fact.
Forty-one?! You’re practically a fossil!
To be fair, things can fossilise very quickly given ideal conditions. Still dinosaurs reigned for a lot more time than mammals and frankly nature is still feeling the loss in certain ways.
https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-miss-the-mammoths/
Another fun fact (dino facts are the best facts): There are more “dinosaur” species alive today than there are mammal species.
11,000 bird species alive today (approx)
6,000 mammal species alive today (approx)And their all bats.
Also, my favourite fact is we know almost nothing about dinosaurs from jungles and mountains. Most of our knowledge comes from wetland and oceanic creatures because of the way fossils are formed.
Well, there are human fossiles aswell and we have been here for a pretty short time.
Does getting buried in pumice count as becoming a fossil? Because Pompeii was only a couple thousand years ago.
From wikipedia: A fossil (from Classical Latin fossilis, lit. ‘obtained by digging’)[1] is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age.
Answer: yes. It does count. Specifically carbonization.
Personal take: when I think of a “fossil”, I think of the stereotypical mineralized bones. Like the T-Rex in the museum of natural history that most people have seen from various movies and TV shows. Thinking of human and human predecessor bones as fossils is just weird to me.
Is Pompeii from a past geological age?
2000 years ago doesn’t seem important on geological time scales.
Okay so even though I read all this last night, I somehow missed the “2000 - (-2000) years” thus making the current geological age around 4000 years, and technically Pompeii would not count in the strictest definition. That said, had it happened 4,000 years ago, absolutely nothing would have changed. All the stuff would still be carbonized.
Also from Wikipedia in the (geological age) article: An age is the smallest hierarchical geochronologic unit. It is equivalent to a chronostratigraphic stage.[14][13] There are 96 formal and five informal ages.[2] The current age is the Meghalayan.So again the answer is “yes it counts” but my personal take is “it feels weird to consider 4,000-10,000 ago multiple different geologic ages”Reading through Geologic time scale, it defines an age as equivalent to a chronostratigraphic stage, which it says are normally millions of years. But you’re right, interestingly the current Meghalayan age only started 4,200 years ago.
It seems all the recent ages are only a few thousand years each (until 2018 the last 10,000 or so were one age, but this was split in three in 2018).
After all that reading I still didn’t really understand how they decided that this was a new age.
But anyway, I agree there isn’t going to be any difference between 2,000 and 4,000 years so we might as well consider Pompeii fossilised even if not strictly true under the definition. I’m just surprised we consider anything within human history to be a previous geological age, but it seems we do.
Well, there are plenty of hominid fossils and we humans are plentiful.
[off topic]
The Gryphon’s Skull is a fun read. Two Greek traders, circa 300 BC, discover a dinosaur fossil…
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-gryphon-s-skull-harry-turtledove/8156325?ean=9781612421421&next=t
If you like fun but also well-researched stories about people living in pre-modern times, you might also enjoy the weird medieval guys podcast :) They actually did an episode on fossils recently. Another funny story they mention is the one of Johann Beringer’s “Lying Stones”.
So, technically there could be a paleantology dinosaur?
Paleosaurus (that’s a real word)
Yes, just like there are archeologists digging human fossilized bones now.
