Rethinking Dinosaurs

sibrenfetter

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Robert Rath said:
Games have been getting dinosaurs wrong pretty much forever.
An interesting article, but I missed one big controversy in the T-Rex field. There is a lot of evidence that the T-Rex was actually (mainly) a scavenger. Here is an interesting overview on the subject: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/t-rex-predator-or-scavenger.htm
 

loa

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"Feathered animals have never been as successfully scary as scaly animals, at least in western cultures," explains Mehling. "Feathering them not only lessens their dragon status but links them to living animals we rarely find terrifying."
Honestly, I can not come up with an example where they at least tried.
Is there a dinosaur themed horror movie that failed specifically because they feathered their raptors out there?
 

Kahani

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May 25, 2011
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Robert Rath said:
Games have been getting dinosaurs wrong pretty much forever.
Good article. One thing you didn't really mention that's always bugged me about most portrayals of dinosaurs is that, like so many movie monsters, they tend to be implausibly tough - you shoot them and they just keep coming because they're some kind of huge lizard-shaped tank. However, Tyrannosaurus Rex, for example, was about the size of an elephant (6.8 tons, 4m tall compared to 7 tons 4m tall for an elephant). We've done pretty well at killing elephants. And rhinos, lions, bears, whales (blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived), and so on. And we were managing this before we even invented guns. Godzilla might be a nuclear powered, bomb proof killing machine, but a dinosaur is just a regular animal that's not going to cope to well if you shoot it in the face with an elephant gun.
 

SiskoBlue

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Aug 11, 2010
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I always liked the stegosaurus, and diplodocus, although I'm not sure they're even called that anymore.

One thing I'd like to find out though. I was told, many, many years ago, that you couldn't have dinosaurs around now because there's not enough oxygen in the environment to support such large creatures. The same reason we no longer have 2-foot long dragonflies. The really big spiders you see have primitive lungs where as most insects just have trachea holes that extend to every cell in their body. They don't breath, the oxygen just gets in there. Dinosaurs had lungs but you need to have a bit more oxygen for the body to process enough energy to make bones larger.

I can't remember exactly the explanation, but something like that. But if that's true, you wouldn't be able to create clones of dinosaurs in this day and age, at least not the larger ones. Anyone know if this is true?

Here's a link showing Oxygen percentage of the atmosphere that confirms what I remember.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sauerstoffgehalt-1000mj2.png
 

Quaxar

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Sep 21, 2009
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SiskoBlue said:
I always liked the stegosaurus, and diplodocus, although I'm not sure they're even called that anymore.

One thing I'd like to find out though. I was told, many, many years ago, that you couldn't have dinosaurs around now because there's not enough oxygen in the environment to support such large creatures. The same reason we no longer have 2-foot long dragonflies. The really big spiders you see have primitive lungs where as most insects just have trachea holes that extend to every cell in their body. They don't breath, the oxygen just gets in there. Dinosaurs had lungs but you need to have a bit more oxygen for the body to process enough energy to make bones larger.

I can't remember exactly the explanation, but something like that. But if that's true, you wouldn't be able to create clones of dinosaurs in this day and age, at least not the larger ones. Anyone know if this is true?

Here's a link showing Oxygen percentage of the atmosphere that confirms what I remember.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sauerstoffgehalt-1000mj2.png
I remember reading an article about the pterosaur and how the +9% oxygen boost of its era could be a good explanation of why he would be able to fly despite being much worse built than today's proper birds. Not sure about general dependencies of higher oxygen though.

But related to that, a 30% atmospheric oxygen content plus a stronger greenhouse effect than even today meant that dinosaurs probably lived 80 million years in fear of constant wildfires. At this point I wish I had a Smokey the Stegosaur picture.
 

RedDeadFred

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May 13, 2009
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One of my big annoyances with the Jurassic Park movies is how they portray the velociraptors as these larger than man lizards. They really weren't much taller than the average man's knees and looked way more birdlike.
 
Apr 17, 2009
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sibrenfetter said:
An interesting article, but I missed one big controversy in the T-Rex field. There is a lot of evidence that the T-Rex was actually (mainly) a scavenger. Here is an interesting overview on the subject: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/t-rex-predator-or-scavenger.htm
Eh, I've never really bought the "T-rex was a scavenger" idea. I mean, the main argument seems to be 'it can smell good, therefore it must use that to track carrion' which seems to ignore all sense in an attempt to fit the theory. Wolves have great senses of small too, but they're hunters. Hell, goddam sharks have even better noses, they're apex predators.
And even assuming that rexes couldn't move to fast (which I'm inclined to agree with, as it happens, do to how their leg bones locked together) its main prey from the fossil record appears to be stuff like hadrosaurs and ceratopsids, neither of which look like they could move particularly fast either. Those things are built like tanks, they're not going to leap around like gazelles
The bit about broken teeth is knew but do you really expect anything else from something that lives on meat? Thats why sharks have an endless conveyer belt of teeth available, to instantly replace ones that get broken or lost, and why sabre tooth cats like smilodon are believed to be a bit inefficient-the need to preserve their huge fangs would have stopped them really digging into a carcass
 

Fdzzaigl

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Like most scientific theories, I don't think there's a 100% consensus on how much feathers they actually had. It's clear that they had some and eventually evolved into birds today, but there's still enough leeway to portray them the way we see them in games imo (as long as you get the correct species ofc).

I would love to have another good dino game that sort of simulates a "natural dino ecology" that humans then try to get into. Not necessarily with T-rexes chasing them across the entire map like they have some sort of grudge, but simply as humans now exposed to the dangers of that time and age.

One of the interesting things about "Jurassic park" for me, was that most of the humans never carried any guns and were so defenseless against the dinos. That's what made them sort of scary. Games like Turok don't scare me because you almost always have a huge gun on your side to kill everything with.

Scarce guns would be a requirement for a good "dino survival" game imo.
 

V da Mighty Taco

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Fdzzaigl said:
Like most scientific theories, I don't think there's a 100% consensus on how much feathers they actually had. It's clear that they had some and eventually evolved into birds today, but there's still enough leeway to portray them the way we see them in games imo (as long as you get the correct species ofc).

I would love to have another good dino game that sort of simulates a "natural dino ecology" that humans then try to get into. Not necessarily with T-rexes chasing them across the entire map like they have some sort of grudge, but simply as humans now exposed to the dangers of that time and age.

One of the interesting things about "Jurassic park" for me, was that most of the humans never carried any guns and were so defenseless against the dinos. That's what made them sort of scary. Games like Turok don't scare me because you almost always have a huge gun on your side to kill everything with.

Scarce guns would be a requirement for a good "dino survival" game imo.
Turok wasn't really a survival game though. It was a "blast everything into oblivion with kickass fantasy weaponry" arcade fps platformer. Which reminds me, I have Turok 1 and 2 here with my N64... :)
 

Afterglow

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Nov 2, 2009
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Think of the chances for subverting a player's point of view with these kinds of discoveries. We expect "raptors" to be human-sized, scaly and toothy... what we see in Jurassic Park, basically. But imagine walking through a dinosaur infested forest, seeing a cute little feathery creature in your path. You move up to it and it squawks at you before running away. Then a couple of minutes later a large group of the things tear you to pieces while working in concert. Only too late do you find out you've just met your first "raptor".
 

thesilentman

What this
Jun 14, 2012
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bdcjacko said:
This is just another example of Obama's America ruining my childhood. If Mitt Romney would have won, he would have yanked funding from childhood ruining dinosaur research and instead paid more to the global arms race or whatever. But no, we have this dinosaur hating president who not only made research possible to say we can never clone dinosaurs, but worse off that dinosaurs had fluffy cuddly feathers. Damn you Obama.
[/sarcasm]? If so, congratulate yourself for making my day.

OT- Yet another thing I've been trying to say for a while. Dinosaurs were cool, dammit! They were some of the most diverse things on the planet. For some reason, I'd like to see a (good) game portraying these guys like this. Why the industry can't stop making shooters is beyond me.

And thank you guys who posted in the thread before me; everything you guys said was quite interesting. Research time!
 
Feb 28, 2008
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However much paleantologists complain about inaccurate depictions of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and other works, they should at least give them credit for getting people interested in dinosaurs. Childen might grow up with a wrong impression, but then they might also be interested enough to pursue a career in the subject and then go on to help the field discover the reality.
 

Bara_no_Hime

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Sep 15, 2010
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Yawn.

This whole "oh god, feathers look bad!" thing just makes me shake my head. Really?

Two things.

1) Feathers can be sleek. Puffy feathers are only one way birds look. Many birds have sleek feathers that lie close to their bodies. Feathers like this wouldn't significantly change the way a T-Rex looked. Larger feathers are mostly there for flight, not warmth or coloration. Look, for example, at an ostrich. Fairly sleek, close to the body, not very fluffy. That's more what I imagine most dinosaurs had.

2) Eagles. Even with fluffy feathers, eagles and hawks look pretty bad-ass.

I don't know why everyone always jumps straight to chickens. Chickens are domesticated animals who've undergone centuries of selective breeding. They don't look like they would have in the wild. Chickens are not a good example of what dinosaur plumage would look like, so this comparison is idiotic. Please stop using it.