News:

Welcome to our site!

Main Menu

The thing about T-Rex

Started by Cassia, April 27, 2021, 07:51:16 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

PopeyesPappy

Quote from: Gawdzilla Sama on April 28, 2021, 11:45:05 AM
And others show that it ran like a bunny. You pays your quarter and takes your choice.

There was nothing in the story I read about the new study that said T-Rex could not run faster. Just that it's natural walking speed was probably slower than previous estimates.
Save a life. Adopt a Greyhound.

Hydra009

Quote from: Blackleaf on April 28, 2021, 12:53:16 AM
If I'm not mistaken, they were around when the meteor knocked out most life on Earth at the end of the Cretaceous Period, so I wonder how different things would have been if that meteor had missed us. Would something like the T-Rex still be around today, or were they going to go extinct anyway? It's interesting that life in general got smaller since then.
Yes, T-Rex was around then.

I love these sorts of hypotheticals.  For starters, dinosaurs would undoubtedly still be at the top of the food chain, possibly many would be heavily feathered.  Mammals would still be around, though not nearly as diverse and large as today - but they'd fare well in cold climates.

And speaking of cold climates, the Earth would be headed towards another Ice Age without humans burning hydrocarbons like crazy.  Without humans, many species - especially megafauna - would be doing just fine, though these large critters would be more reptilian or bird-like than the mostly mammal species that our ancestors wiped out.  You'd possibly also see more ferns and less flowering plants.

In the sea - a biome that gets less attention than it deserves - you'd see gigantic plesiosaurs, marine reptiles called mosasaurs (which bear live young and live in shallow seas), ammonites (shelled mollusks closely related to today's cephalopods) and belemnoids (cephalopods very similar to modern squid/cuttlefish).  Also, planktons would be more diverse.


Hydra009

#18
A blast of roughly 100 million megatons (for comparison, Tsar Bomba was 50 megatons)
The equivalent of a magnitude 12 earthquake at the blast site, shockwaves which may have destabilized volcanoes across the world and led to unexpected eruptions
Several rounds of megatsunami anywhere near the coast
Ejected material from the impact would have rained down on the Earth at around 2700°F (1482°C), creating widespread fires
And last but not least, ocean acidification, which triggered ecological collapse and hampered recovery

drunkenshoe

Spinosaurus is pretty mysterious. They keep coming up with new stuff all the time. It was wading. No it is not. It is! (Probbaly it did.) LOL

But raptors... I'm thinking Utahraptor. Now, that's a wild animal. None of the big bad ones give that vibe. If I had to choose to live with one of them as a threat, I'd pick rex or spino rather than something like utahraptor.

Birds, man. Just watching sparrows is enough to give the idea. They are incredible. If we fight a fantasy species war, dibs on sparrows and army ants. Also I'm declaring Cuban snail as the most tasteful animal on the planet. For the record.
"science is not about building a body of known 'facts'. ıt is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good." - tp

SGOS

Quote from: PopeyesPappy on April 28, 2021, 11:44:14 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZkTh_T75QY
I always like this song.  I never knew the title, who did it, or had seen the acrobatics of the video.  It would come on the radio without visuals when I was driving, and all I could do was settle back and groove.  How could anything that simple be so satisfying?  It was like some neurological researcher just kept activating my brain's reward center for 4 minutes.