Always bugged me as a little kid that black bears and brown bears aren't color swapped
Having been bitten both by spiny-tailed lizards and rodents, imagining a scaled combination of the two: yep, that sounds nasty
Full article: A bite to the throat: A probable Xiphactinus attack on a Polycotylus from the Cretaceous Mooreville Chalk of Alabama, U.S.A. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Congratulations! What we've seen so far is really promising!
Thank you so much to Tim Haines and Impossible Pictures for trusting me to be one of the talented artists who created the concept art for the series! It is a dream come true to be able to work in a project like this one!
I am so happy to share with you that we finally have a premiere date!
Surviving Earth will premiere Thursday June 4th on Peacock! NEW episodes will premiere every Thursday after the 4th!
#SurvivingEarth #paleoart #dinosaurs
Results from the Flocking #paleostream!
Megamastax, Ornitholestes, Tanyka and Eosteus
Result from the Wadi al Hitan #paleostream!
The "valley of the whales" as it is better known is a classic locality from the late Eocene of Egypt. Most famously it is place filled with the remains of early whales, Archaeoceti, but it's less straight forward as a piece than one...
Results from the #paleostream!
Arctognathus with Arctops, Tanyka, Nannippus (with giant puffer fish) and Caninosaurus.
Can't recall it, but it'd be a good showcase of how crunchable anky's skull is.
It's based on a good premise (abundance of juvenile prey in a "r-strategists" environment), but then proceeds to extrapolate wrong conclusions, ignoring/misunderstanding fossil evidence, known animal behavior/ecology, anatomy, metabolism etc...
Yes exactly, T. rex was used as the main example in one of the latest youtube videos on the subject, but it's a somewhat widespread claim about giant theropods in general.
Claims that giant theropods wouldn't go after large prey, preferring baby dinosaurs 1/10th their size or less, only occasionally going after sick/dying larger individuals.
Incredible, it's almost like smaller prey specialists don't need to become ridiculously overbuilt for the job, to the point where their mass is detrimental to their supposed ecology
The lack of a giant crocodilian in Hell Creek should be illegal.
I wonder if mosasaurs prevented giantism from re-appearing in competing species.
This side of the dinosaurian diversity is criminally underrated. We got a theropod converging with a *moth*, something that sounds too out there even for a spec evo project.
Yeah it's reasonable as "maybe they could've taken advantage of that when it helped"
I don't see why not!
I'm not excluding theropods headbutting their prey, but in all likelihood I'm seeing more as an occasional thing done in the right circumstances rather than a selected strategy
- a quadrupedal prey larger than its bipedal predator is going to be both more stable and robust
- biting in the right places seems way more efficient, less prone to self injury, more lethal and consistent with land predators behavior at large
It's a cool idea but I see several issues with it:
- you see ramming predators a whole lot in water, rarely (maybe never?) on land
- marine vertebrates tend to be way less skeletonized, so ramming tends to hurt prey more than predator
- giant theropods are way better equipped than orcas at biting
Admittedly I'm from my phone and I can't see it too well, but this looks more like a carcharodontosaur.
That said, as cool as it looks, I doubt it'd be a good strategy unless the sauropod is small enough, already limping or something like that.
Yeah although when the size difference is that massive, it's usually more about attitude than physical confrontation
I've known this factoid since a very long time, as it's even in a 1920s encyclopedia my grandfather had. I don't struggle to believe it though, as indigo snakes are very muscular and athletic, bite surprisingly hard, while rattlesnakes are proportionally bulkier, more explosive but less athletic.
The last one looks really good ngl
Which is my hunch on how mongooses eventually switched from defensive to hunting behavior, exactly because of rodents with communal nesting behavior.
Was going to say the same, especially less prey-happy species like ball pythons are at high risk of retaliation.
It's one of those "sure it makes sense in your head but try to touch grass before claiming it as a valid hypothesis" kinda moments
Yeah exactly, and it sucks. It reinforces a distorted view of nature. It's not like every documentary needs gore, but it should be representable.
The same is true with irl nature documentaries tbf
