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What's your favourite dinosaur
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I think Ankylosaurus was also my sister’s favourite - given that it was my insistence that all family members had to have a ‘favourite dinosaur’ when I was seven years old. (My mother plumped for Archaeopteryx - which I had to allow - and my dad eventually gave in and selected Scelidosaurus just to get me off his back.)
There were a fair few herbivorous dinosaurs that were armed to the hilt, but Ankylosaurus had it all really: bony shell, spikes, massive club-tail. And now the hype to go with it.
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Originally posted by Sits View PostI imagine I’m about to be told it’s not a dinosaur, or wasn’t called that, or had feathers or something, but I’m channeling my 6-year-old self with the Pteranadon.
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Originally posted by Favourite Worst Nightmare View PostAs the remains of dinosaurs that have been found consist of bones and fossils, is it certain that they had the scaly, lizardy skin that is always shown in pictures? Is it possible that instead they may have had bright pink fluffy feathers?
Like I said, in school in the early 80s, we were told they were cold-blooded reptiles. I’m not sure that was even the scientific consensus at the time. All of my teachers went to school in the 70s and 60s.
The understanding that dinosaurs were birds and not reptiles emerged in the 60s and 70s. I suspect kids and elementary teachers these days are much more clued in to current science, but in my day, the teachers didn’t know much more than our books, many of which were from the 50s or earlier.
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Feeling a bit persecuted here. I'm only a weak anagram, lay off.
We like to claim New Zealand has a living dinosaur, but it's a stretch ...
https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/tuatar...-dinosaur-age/
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I read somewhere that velociraptors had iridescent black feathers like crows or ravens, which makes them utterly fucking terrifying imo.
I read the recent book by Steven Brusatte. It was alright. Could have done with more descriptions of dinosaurs and fewer descriptions of him going on the piss with paleontologists.
Despite reading a book for grown ups ankylosaurus is still my favourite. I imagine they were quite harmless, docile creatures that would make quite good guard pets.
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Originally posted by tee rex View PostFeeling a bit persecuted here. I'm only a weak anagram, lay off.
We like to claim New Zealand has a living dinosaur, but it's a stretch ...
https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/tuatar...-dinosaur-age/
http://www.valentiaisland.ie/explore...apod-trackway/
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Originally posted by Sits View PostYes, I’m working on the assumption that if it was in my Dad’s PG Tips card collection it’s allowed.
Originally posted by tee rex View PostFeeling a bit persecuted here. I'm only a weak anagram, lay off.
We like to claim New Zealand has a living dinosaur, but it's a stretch ...
https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/tuatar...-dinosaur-age/
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Originally posted by gavc23 View PostI can say my least favourite dinosaur is a Stigymoloch, because that doesn’t sound like a name for a dinosaur.
if I had to pick now it’d be Dimetrodon because they have a big solar panel sail on the back.
And Dimetrodon wasn't a dinosaur, it was a member of a separate group of ancient reptiles that lived before the time of the dinosaurs – as alluded to by JW already:
Originally posted by Jah Womble View Post(One could argue that Dimetrodon was a pelycosaur rather than dinosaur, but that would be fatuous.)
For some decades, it's been Deinonychus for me:
https://i.imgur.com/nqArgDq.jpg
(The raptors in Jurassic Park movies more closely resemble the classic Deinonychus than they do Velociraptor or similar (Oviraptor, Ornitholestes), if truth be told.)
Although since seeing its fossil remains in 1989, I've tended to favour the remarkable Mamenchisaurus, whose neck accounted for more than half its entire length:
https://www.newdinosaurs.com/401_mam...ey_krasovskiy/
Sauropods (the docile chaps with the long necks and tails) definitely have the best names, though: Gigantosaurus, Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus, Argentinosaurus and my personal favourite, Sauroposeidon (who I gather now holds the record for 'longest neck').
(VA to thread, obviously.)
Boring to say, but you still can't beat Tyrannosaurus, for me.
I've certainly got a soft spot for Deinonychus though since it was one of the most terrifying ones to me from reading dinosaur books as a kid, and I kind of resent/sympathise with how it's been booted out of its spot in the public consciousness in favour of its lesser cousin Velociraptor as a direct result of the success of Jurassic Park – all the more so since, as you say, the JP raptors were more like Deinonychus anyway.
An odd outlier, meanwhile. One truly frightening picture in one of my childhood dino books (which was of a fair vintage before I ever owned it, crucially) was of a beast, in its own words, like something out of a nightmare – Antrodemus. That's the dinosaur that everywhere else is infinitely more commonly and famously known as Allosaurus, the great Jurassic theropod carnosaur and stock 'top predator' in the age before the mighty Cretaceous tyrannosaurids. For half a century up to the 1970s, I believe, the two were synonymous and hence it was known by the older name.. but then some palaeontologist pointed out that the identification of the fossils bearing that name had been based on frankly indeterminate features. So the Allosaurus moniker returned, as it was only the bones identified as such that were actually definitely identifiable as this dinosaur. Still a great dinosaur under any name, but it'll never compare with the cooler-sounding and scarier-looking version I knew as a small boy.
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if Yoshi's here then I demand space for Wallace Shawn
https://twitter.com/b1g_damage/status/1300210161773092866?s=20
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I’d go with the former, FF. Brontosaurus - which ‘did’ apparently exist alongside Apatosaurus (with whom it for many years became synonymous) - was in most aspects far less impressive than the Diplodocus. The latter, whose name means ‘double beam’, was for a couple of twentieth-century decades considered the longest dinosaur.
Originally posted by Various Artist View PostStygimoloch is an awesome name if you translate it, though – it basically means 'horned demon from the river of death', as in Moloch and Styx, respectively. It's a 'dubious genus', though – the specimens named as such are more commonly though to be Pachycephalosaurus now.
And Dimetrodon wasn't a dinosaur, it was a member of a separate group of ancient reptiles that lived before the time of the dinosaurs – as alluded to by JW already:
I wish you'd @-ed me in at the time, Jah – it's taken me a full week to discover this thread, having not been on the boards much lately to spot it, and I only stumbled across it by catching up on its parent thread and seeing the link there!
Boring to say, but you still can't beat Tyrannosaurus, for me.
I've certainly got a soft spot for Deinonychus though since it was one of the most terrifying ones to me from reading dinosaur books as a kid, and I kind of resent/sympathise with how it's been booted out of its spot in the public consciousness in favour of its lesser cousin Velociraptor as a direct result of the success of Jurassic Park – all the more so since, as you say, the JP raptors were more like Deinonychus anyway.
An odd outlier, meanwhile. One truly frightening picture in one of my childhood dino books (which was of a fair vintage before I ever owned it, crucially) was of a beast, in its own words, like something out of a nightmare – Antrodemus. That's the dinosaur that everywhere else is infinitely more commonly and famously known as Allosaurus, the great Jurassic theropod carnosaur and stock 'top predator' in the age before the mighty Cretaceous tyrannosaurids. For half a century up to the 1970s, I believe, the two were synonymous and hence it was known by the older name.. but then some palaeontologist pointed out that the identification of the fossils bearing that name had been based on frankly indeterminate features. So the Allosaurus moniker returned, as it was only the bones identified as such that were actually definitely identifiable as this dinosaur. Still a great dinosaur under any name, but it'll never compare with the cooler-sounding and scarier-looking version I knew as a small boy.
But please tell me that the book to which you allude was Dinosaurs and More Dinosaurs (possibly since retitled)? My mother bought me that from the school paperback club when I was five (ie, when it was published - old ghet that I am) and the illustrations within it utterly captivated me, so vivid and terrifying were they - particularly that of Antrodemus. This was indeed the tome that cemented my dino-obsession. My original copy has long since fallen apart, but I found another edition via eBay about a decade ago. The years, they simply rolled back. (I’d embed it here if I could ever seem to do that successfully.)
This is your cue to say that it wasn’t that book at all, eh?
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Originally posted by Femme Folle View PostI can't decide between diplodocus or brontosaurus.
It's affectionately known as Dippy, which tends to give it pet-like qualities ? la Dino from the Flintstones, though the food bill would be somewhat extortionate, and the size of the pet bed doesn't bear thinking about.
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I'm not sure which particular species Dino would've been - possibly a Plateosaurus, an early bipedal prosauropod from the late Triassic Period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plateosaurus
This, of course, somehow makes the geological accuracy of The Flintstones even more unwieldy - entertaining though it was. (I love how homo sapiens' default position is to assume that 'all' prehistory happened simultaneously. After all, we established on a previous discussion that the length of time between the end of the Cretaceous Period and modern day is only around a third as long as the entire age of dinosaurs per se.)
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