Rethinking Dinosaurs
Games have been getting dinosaurs wrong pretty much forever.
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Games have been getting dinosaurs wrong pretty much forever.
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There were both woolly mammoth and woolly rhinocerous, mind.coheedswicked said:Much in the same way that you don't find fur on large mammals ( elephants, rhinos etc), you would not find a thick coat of feathers on larger dinosaurs. The insulation would cause the animal to overheat much too easily. Thus feathers (or at least thick coats) were likely only found on the smaller dinosaurs.
While this was the prevailing theory as of early 2012, apparently some recent discoveries in China have called it into question. As I understand it, the question now is to what extent tyrannosaurids had feathers rather than if they had them at all (i.e. were the feathers all over their bodies? Did they lose the feathers as the grew? What?) I'd encourage you to click the link on that info, it's pretty interesting.coheedswicked said:Much in the same way that you don't find fur on large mammals ( elephants, rhinos etc), you would not find a thick coat of feathers on larger dinosaurs. The insulation would cause the animal to overheat much too easily. Thus feathers (or at least thick coats) were likely only found on the smaller dinosaurs.
thaluikhain said:There were both woolly mammoth and woolly rhinocerous, mind.coheedswicked said:Much in the same way that you don't find fur on large mammals ( elephants, rhinos etc), you would not find a thick coat of feathers on larger dinosaurs. The insulation would cause the animal to overheat much too easily. Thus feathers (or at least thick coats) were likely only found on the smaller dinosaurs.
For that matter, there were 3m tall half ton kangaroos and predatory birds that lived in Australia until shortly after humans arrived. Now, maybe not "large" by dinosaur standards, but still pretty big.
Same.Demon Slayer X said:Honestly because of Jurassic Park showing off dinosaurs eating people, it really fascinated me to learn about these creatures and how they lived. And I've learned a lot about dinosaurs too. Hell I noticed some bird like behavior in Jurassic Park's Velociraptor too.
To further add to that fact, playing dinosaurs in Tokyo Jungle actually kinda sucks. Not because the dinosaurs aren't badass and it's not satisfying to maul any animal without any effort. It's also not because other animals are out for your blood (well, there are, but only lions, tigers, panthers, sabretooths, bears, robots, and Dilophosaurus if you're a Deinonychus). It's because their hunger bars are so tiny. A Pomeranian's hunger bar is around 30 or something. A lot of the larger herbivores are close to 100. Wanna know what it is for a Deinonychus and sabretooth? 10. Bloody 10! That's NOTHING! It goes down so fast too and if you're in a territory without food or water, you're dead in less than 3 minutes. Dilophosaurus is even worse at 5! My first attempt I killed a few animals in Shibuya Station (even carried the carcasses as I went along to have a nibble to fill my bar) and moved down to the shopping district. Not a lot of territories had food in it (unusual for a first generation) and everything was outrunning me or hiding. I died by the time I reached Shibuya Suburbs. Took less than a minute for my bar to plummet and my life bar to end.Not only does the Dilophosaurus appear sans frill and toxic sputum, but with no humans in sight something becomes increasingly apparent: Apart from being larger and tougher, playing as dinosaurs is really no different than playing as a lion or hyena. You still have to find food, avoid predators, mark territory, find a mate, and try to pass on your genes to your offspring. In other words, removing humans from the game let dinosaurs exist in a more or less natural state - as animals trying to survive in an ecological system. When they kill, it's not out of malice but out of biological necessity. If prey eludes them, they don't go crashing through buildings to go after it, they just find slower prey. Playing as dinosaurs teaches a fundamentally different lesson than playing against dinosaurs.
In an earlier version of the article I pointed out that while dinosaurs would absolutely kill and eat the average human, and many were much larger than us, we would probably destroy them fairly quickly given our technological superiority. For example: The largest known creature in the history of Earth was not the sauropods, but the 100 foot-long 150 ton Blue Whale, a creature we hunted to near extinction with nothing but wooden boats and hand-held harpoons.The Rogue Wolf said:I think this obsession with portraying (carnivorous) dinosaurs as hyperaggressive, man-hunting monsters comes from the same reason we like to imagine alien invasions, robot uprisings and zombie apocalypses- apex-predator boredom. What's the greatest external threat humankind faces today? Absolutely nothing. We've driven out all our competitors from a vast majority of our territory, and the few times we ever come in contact with another animal that could potentially kill us, they've probably wandered in from whatever few forested areas we haven't paved over yet (or we've foolishly gone and blundered into them). Your average first-world citizen has a higher chance of dying from a lightning strike than a predator.
So we, in our boredom, imagine up a competitor. A "safe" one, of course- one that will kill the weak of mind or body, but that can be defeated with enough brains, guts and weapons. Dinosaurs are a great theoretical competitor; they're often smart (for animals), deadly, and usually faster, stronger or bigger than us... but even an exceptionally bright pack of Utahraptors wouldn't do well against a military team armed with the latest in weaponry and technology.
Beyond that, though, the general mindset is "who cares, they were just dumb animals".
Well, yeah, but the goat it had eaten right before attacking he humans would've kept it happy and sated for at least a day.Pallindromemordnillap said:While some movies did have dinos chasing humans as though we were the most delicious thing on earth (Peter Jackson's King Kong comes to mind), I didn't think Jurassic Park itself comes under this. The T-rex attacks the humans a grad total of once, probably because its hungry and they're right there. After that its going after Gallimimus or spontaneously appearing to eat raptors.
I'm really not seeing what the big deal about the feathers is.RJ Dalton said:Same.Demon Slayer X said:Honestly because of Jurassic Park showing off dinosaurs eating people, it really fascinated me to learn about these creatures and how they lived. And I've learned a lot about dinosaurs too. Hell I noticed some bird like behavior in Jurassic Park's Velociraptor too.
And it really didn't take long for me to adjust to the idea of the raptors having feathers. And it got even more awesome when I read about how they used them. XKCD did a comic on it, actually: the raptors would hop on top of their pray, using their wings to keep balance while they hooked their claws into their next meal and pulled it apart. That's fucking awesome.
Although, a couple of friends of mine reacted so violently against it that they one of them actually went so far as to say how scientists get things wrong all the time, so they're probably wrong about this.
*sigh* Some people just have no respect for the hard work that goes into studying extinct species.