Isn’t this a while thing? Where archeologists have drawn alternative interpretations of what dinosaurs could have looked like. I think there was a famous example, where red they got people to.draw a dinosaur from a hippo skeleton and the creature was really scary looking?
Hippos are also deceptively docile looking creatures
If anything on this Earth should look like a Jurassic Park dinosaur it’s hippos
Wouldn’t that mean T-Rex actually looked cuddly and friend shaped?
Damn! I was hoping they were friend-shaped this whole time. The babies look kinda cute at least.
i think its them being deceptively fast on land they can outrun humans, consider they technically cant swim under water, they just are capable “running” in the water because thier bone density allows them to sink.
Well it’s also that they’re highly aggressive animals that will attack (and kill) pretty much anything that gets just a little too close for their comfort, despite looking cute and cuddly.
they are very fast on land for looking like a cumbersome blimp for weighing 3000-7000lbs.
To be fair, hippos are one of the most dangerous animals for humans
Gotta be about third after humans and mosquitoes.
Chihuahuas are scary af. They could easily be on second or third.
Scary, but not a serious threat.
You can kick a Chihuahua pretty far, a hippo suffers from no such vulnerability.
Depends on the amount.
I’d rather fight against 1 hippo than the equivalent body weight in chihuahuas.
A hippo would definitely be preferable. A fast and brutal death is preferable to getting your ankles bit out from under you by a thousand Chihuahua.
I don’t think getting chewed to death is fast. I’d rather fight the chihuahuas 1000x
Now may or may not be a good time to remember that army ants exist.
New TV show ideas: how far can you punt this animal.
I can tell you from personal experience that I can punt an aggressive juvenile possum about 30ft(I think it was diseased?). Low bar, but any relevant data is useful.
The thing about chihuahuas is they get other dogs to do their dirty work
Caramena said a pack of three dogs dug under two six-inch chainlink fences to reach the communal animal enclosure on the night of Jan. 19. Happy Hollow staff members found the slaughtered equines covered in bite marks the following morning.
The third canine, a chihuahua, has not been caught but is "not considered a threat.
a response
I approve of friend-shaped T-Rex.
such a fluffy boi
Sure…“friend.” I think upon meeting one, you would find how friendly the worm finds the songbird.
I think even scientists from the 80’s and 90’s were able to tell where some connective tissue would have been. So while they got the skin wrong, the overall shape wouldn’t be TOO far off. Also, Jurassic Park is what Hollywood thought dinosaurs looked like, not necessarily palentologists.
To me, this article feels more like “We have an extremely limited idea of the amount of knowledge scientists have. Here’s what a bunch of animals would look like if they were drawn by an idiot like we believe palentologists to be.” Like, some of those are clearly trying to deliberately get it wrong, like the house cat.
Then again, it is BuzzFeed. It’s not like they base their “journalism” on anything except feels.
The original Jurassic Park had a lot of support from paleontologists, and then deviated a bit but not enough for changing how “dinosaur” look in general.
Interesting thought, but don’t penguins have feathers for insulation from cold weather so without the feathers they probably look less chunky.
Isn’t it primarily fat rather than feathers?
They probably have some fat as well, but penguins are mostly insulated by their special feathers, which are adapted to prevent the cold water from actually reaching the skin.
Nah, you can look at pics of penguins that lost their feathers. Their body shape is from the fat.
They definitely do but my point was that the actual volume is from the fat so they are very much fat chonkers. The feathers are laid on top of each other to be waterproof so they don’t really make up volume. You can check the pic below for reference (I am not sure how to add embed sorry).
I am not sure which would he primary insulator but fat definitely helps a lot and pretty commonly found in other animals for the same purpose. You can also see some featherless penguins in zoo are given cute little jackets lol.
their circulatory system is also pretty adapted for them, thier blood vessels usually can do countercurrent exchange of heat, rete mirabilis, this is common in cold adapted creatures. so they technically dont lose heat when it goes near the skin surface.
penguins do have one of the densest feathers per square centimeter of any bird.
SPACE LLAMAAA
Checking out some walrus skeletons… yeah, I don’t see why not.
Kind of hard to maintain that bulk on leaves and grass, bud. I guess it would help them with predators, though.
Hippos and rhinos get pretty big on that diet! If anything plants are a better diet for something really chunky because plants cannot run away
Also elephants.
As well as silverbacks, and giant pandas
People use the term “strong as an ox.” Oxen don’t eat meat.
plants cannot run away
Sure, you just need a lot of it.
The largest land animal today is an african elephant which is 14 feet tall. Brachiosaurus was 50 feet tall. They would need to eat an order of magnitude more because the cost of mobility increases with weight.
Penguins, seals, and whales (and to a lesser extent hippos) can maintain this ratio because it gives them bouyancy while travelling in water.
Plus, Hippos and Elephants are actually pretty big boned.
They would, but they also did. They were herbivores
To be clear I do not actually think that they were as stocky as that pic. Point is that for land animals, though, eating plants actually is often the way to being huge
Sauropods had hollow bones and air sacs all throughout for lightweight structural support. You can’t just compare sizes and assume similar density as elephants or other large mammals.
That lends to my notion that a fat Brachio would be unsustainable.
True, that’s why elephants hunt lions for protein.
Lion’s eat Wathogs, Gazelle, Zebra and sometimes birds.
Giraffe and Elephants are likely to kill a lion.
Also an elephant’s height is like 14 feet max. Brachiosaurus height was 50 feet.
What? Can you source that? I’m extremely curious if that’s a real thing.
They have a good idea how much the big sauropods might have weighed based on fossilized foot prints and bone structure. Still, if something is not preserved in the fossil record it will not be shown in reconstructions.
What if it was reaaaaally fluffy down?
there used to be a 6ft+ tall prehistoric penguin.
