#DINOSAURS HAD FEATHERS!!

[spencerslover-blog]

you know that although the word dinosaur means 'terrible lizard', the name is a bit misleading, since dinosaurs are not lizards, haha weird.

[aceelytra]

Sinosauropteryx (the feathered compsognathid with a striped tail) versus hubris (featuring a special appearance by a chonky rat)

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Errors, “Errors,” and Sci Fi

@strawberry-crocodile

tvtropes calls stuff like the wolf example "science matches on" which I think is a pretty fair shake

This.  This is what’s got me thinking so much about errors.  There’s a certain danger, here.  A certain way that this particular effect — delicious dramatic irony — tempts the mind when reading old stories, even true ones.

What do you know about R.M.S. Titanic? I ask my class every year, and the first hand rises.  “It was unsinkable,” the student inevitably says, and everyone is nodding, “or so they thought.”  I write the word UNSINKABLE on the board, underneath my crude drawing of a ship with four smokestacks.  It will be crossed out before the end of the hour, but not for the reason they expect.

“I find no evidence,” Walter Lord, preeminent biographer of the ship’s survivors, wrote, “that Titanic was ever advertised as unsinkable. This detail seems to have entered the collective mind so as to create a more perfect irony.”  Indeed, historians’ examinations of White Star Line documents show the shipbuilders themselves worried it would be so large as to risk collision; they stocked several more lifeboats than 1910s regulations required.

The War to End All Wars (deep breath, satisfied exhale), also known as World War ONE. Chuckle.  Shake of the head.  What if I told you that this phrase, used primarily in American newspapers after the fact, wasn’t meant to be literal? Nowadays we’d say The Mother of All Wars, or One Hell of a Fucking War, but we wouldn’t mean literal motherhood, literal intercourse.  What if I said the armistice and the Lost Generation and the Roaring 20s were all braced for another outbreak of European conflict, and yet we still failed to prevent it?

Did you know they were so confident in the safety of the S.S. Challenger that they put a civilian schoolteacher onboard? I do, because I’ve heard that one repeated many times.  Only, see, it’s got the cause and effect reversed.  Challenger launched on a day the shuttle’s engineers knew to be dangerously cold, because the first civilian in space was on board. And NASA knew its shuttle project would be cancelled entirely, if they couldn’t get that civilian’s much-delayed entry into space in the next two weeks.  So they launched on a cold day, and killed her instead.

These are all what cognitive science calls Hindsight Bias on the personal level, what sociology calls Presentism on the cultural level.  Social psychology’s a little of both, is primarily interested in why you’re sitting on your couch in a Colonize Mars shirt watching PBS and chuckling at the fools who believed in El Dorado.  It wants to know why the mind flees straight from “marijuana will kill you” to “marijuana will cure cancer” without so much as a pause on the middle ground of its real benefits and drawbacks, its real (mild) risks and rewards.

And they can paralyze the sci-fi writer, if you think too much about them. Jetsons is futurist one decade, retro the next.  “There are no bathrooms on the Enterprise,” the creators of Serenity say smugly, as if Gene Roddenberry should’ve simply known that decades later it’d be acceptable to show a man peeing in full view of the camera, nothing but the curve of the actor’s hand to protect his modesty.  “No sound in space,” the Fandom Menace says, “No explosions in space,” and “A space station can’t collapse in zero-G.”  Only then NASA burns a paper napkin outside of atmosphere, transmits music using only the ghost of nearby planets’ gravities, and logs onto Reddit long enough to point out the Death Star would implode in its own gravity field.  And now we’re the ones pointing, the ones laughing, at those earlier point-and-laughers.  Self-satisfied, smug in superiority.  As if we did the work to find out ourselves, instead of just happening to be born a little later than George Lucas.

[ppaleoartistgallery]

Velociraptor Sketch

little sketch of a Velociraptor

[bookrat]

Got a pair of little Sinosauropteryx available for $200 each. Never mind they're gone. Thanks!

[thecrowsartnest]

Day 1: On the Road Again Day 2: Greener Pastures Day 3: Break Away from the Herd

[cathalbravecog]

Archie Archaeopteryx ref I've made in preparation for art fight!!

[elijah-loyal]

i think the craziest thing about getting back into dinosaurs after close to 10 years is the fact that science has helped us predict more accurately what they looked like, and they are SO DIFFERENT from when i was a kid

like when i was a kid, compsognathus was my favorite because it was a fast little fucker, and it looked like this:

standard old dino design, right?

but now, one of the most common depictions of compsognathus is THIS:

like ur kidding! my favorite guy turns out to probably have looked like a little lemur?!!!?!! thats insane and so cool!!

[merupasse]

jurassic park is trending (omg no fuckibg way????) and it got me thinkin about my undying love for the franchise, as well as my general love for those 90s universal movies. the ride at hollywood, the merch, and it’s general affect on pop culture.

and I have to say.

The franchise lost the moment it realized it could be a big movie monster franchise.

with a couple of exceptions, there was so much reverence in the way jurassic 1 handled the behavior and the nature of the dinosaurs, treating them as amoral creatures locked in turmoil as the park falls apart, and we are simply caught in the midst of the chaos.

jp2 doesn’t do too much disservice to the way the dinosaurs are treated, still being forces of nature. sure they don’t do much new or give a different perspective on the nature of theropods instead of instantly antagonizing them, but the hatchling plot was cool. also, we got that iconic scene at the end. you know the one.

it starts to get muddled with jp 3, with the entire climax hinging on the big battle between mama rex and the spinosaurus, with added elements of humor that serves to further demystify the dinosaurs, entering campier territory.

then came Jurassic world.

while Jurassic World no doubt reinvigorated interest, it was the nail in the coffin for the opportunity for Jurassic Park truly to come back the way it did. it was almost wwa, the way that dinosaurs were simply setup to showdown at the very end, teaching the audience since the third one that this was what you are to look forward to, along with your classic escape the dinosaurs plot. it truly sealed its fate as a blockbuster, answering genuinely interesting questions (ethics of cloning, whether they really are dinosaurs or simply monsters, etc.) and addressing interesting concepts (indominous, Feathered DINOSAURS DOMINION!!!!!!!) with such a juvenile attitude, merely meant to appeal to a “general majority” who (they assume [wrongly]) that simply want to see dinosaurs on the big screen. if you cater to a supposed audience, all you will be looking at is simply confirmation bias. Movies like Barbie prove that people are still interested in political, social and cultural rhetoric and systems being addressed and talked about in franchised media, and yet…

jurassic park can’t seem to take itself seriously anymore. they don’t even animate the dinosaurs very convincingly anymore.

but hey. atleast the new ride at universal Hollywood is good. little bit of pacing issues but, hey. better than the sorry state it was before

[stalkiwi]

I feel like this one is a given due to Bird but fluffy dragons, feathered dragons, or scaled dragons?

have you considered the three at once maybe. dont you want a fluffy, scaled and feathered dragon. because i do

[ohstarsandsticks]

Gehwufurhnakdn just finished a Lego dinosaur skull my girlfriend bought me and I love her so much I held back on yapping about Tyrannosaurus Rexes after I had finished it because she was falling asleep lol

[ghostwaffleheimer]

I found this feathered T. Rex at Michaels today and absolutely lost my mind. I had to get it. She's gorgeous. And when I got home and stood her up on a flat surface SHE STOOD ON HER OWN, PERFECTLY BALANCED!!

Her name is Hamburger Meat and this is her next to some of my other, much older T. Rexes (the bright green one is actually an older toy from the same company)

LOOK HOW MUCH PROGRESS WE'VE MADE IN TERMS OF DINOSAUR TOYS (not counting Jurassic Park/World bc some of their new stuff is somehow worse)

she is shy, back to hiding behind the toaster

[lynxxfield]

the forbidden hjonk

[docholligay]

"...but people's lives don't get preserved like fossils. The best you can hope for is that time will have hardened around someone's memory, preserving a void in their shape"

--Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

[bookrat]

Little guy is sold, thanks~

[magneticdeclination]

The jurassic world's would've been so much better if they weren't just soul sucking sequal cash grabs and actually cared about using up to date scientific research to show what our current understandings of dinosaurs are