#dinosaur expert

[orgasming-caterpillar]

Hey yall what the fuck does this mean

[digi-lov]

Agumon Expert EX4-023 and Fake Agumon Expert EX4-052 by Takase from EX-04 Theme Booster Alternative Being

[kevin--of-desert-bluffs]

Doing these rundowns is helping me actually catch up, I admit I was fairly behind and I'm always delighted when it's randomly mentioned that a character is queer.

Like oh Joel Eisenberg gay? Neat.

[krindor]

Send help im experiencing childlike wonder and an academic study-bug at the same time

[smidge-j]

Hello tumblr here is a photo of me next to a very large dinosaur skeleton.

This is the patigotitan, a 30m long fossil found in patagonia South Amerrica somewhere. Idk I didn't really read the information I just looked at the big boy. And boy was this boy big. Fucken Massive Lad.

Blown away by the absolute size on this thing.

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

where im taking the doctor for a date tbh

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Why are ankylosaurs the most perfect dinosaurs ever?

they are shaped like a Friend

also, they have the best sense of smell ever. ever. they would be amazing at detecting danger. like. holy hell.

[the-witchs-cafe]

Rex Owen from Dinosaur King would turn into a witch in Puella Magi Madoka Magica!

Cause of Witchification: Finding out that your birth parents have disappeared whilst time traveling thanks to a mutiny caused by two of their crew mates has got to be shocking enough. Being stuck in the future, where he and his parents technically "belong", with no way to reconnect with your friends is a whole other can of worms.

Requested by anon.

[orbpossum]

i'm sorry, but what THE FUCK IS A PENIS EXPERT? DO THEY JUST STARE AT DICKS ALL DAY??? WHY IS THAT A PROFESSION??

first class news paleontologists never disappoint

[weaselle]

i want to talk about real life villains

Not someone who mugs you, or kills someone while driving drunk, those are just criminals. I mean VILLAINS.

Not like trump or musk, who are... cartoonishly evil. And not sexy villains, not grandiose villains, not even satisfyingly two dimensional villains it is easy to hate unconditionally. The real villains.

I had a client who was a retired executive for one of the big oil companies, i think it was Shell or Chevron. Had a home just outside of San Francisco that was wall to wall floor to ceiling full of expensive art. Literally. I once accidentally knocked a painting off the wall because it was hanging at knee height at the corner of the stairs, and it had a little brass plaque on it, and i looked up the name of the artist and it was Monet's apprentice and son-in-law, who was apparently also a famous painter. He had an original Andy Warhol, which should have been a prize piece for anyone to showcase -- it was hanging in the bathroom. I swear to god this guy was using a Chihuly (famous glass sculptor) as a fruit bowl. And he was like, "idk my wife was the one who liked art"

I was intrigued by this guy, because in the circles i run this dude is The Enemy. right? Wealthy oil executive? But as my client, he was... like a sweet grandpa. A poor widower, a nice old man, anyone who knew him would have called him a sweetheart. He had a slightly bewildered air, a sort of gentle bumbling nature.

And the fact that he was both of these things, a Sweet Little Old Man and The Enemy, at the same time, seemed important and fascinating to me.

He reminded me of some antagonist from fiction, but i couldn't put my finger on who. And when i did it all made sense.

John Hammond.

probably one of the most realistic bad guys ever written.

If you've only ever seen the movie, this will need some explaining.

Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park in 1990, and i read it shortly thereafter. In the movie, the dinosaurs are the antagonists, which imo erases 50% of the point of the story.

book spoilers below.

In the book, John Hammond is the villain but it takes the reader like half the book to figure that out. Just like my client, John is a sweet old man who wants lovely things for people. He's a very sympathetic character. But as the book progresses, you start to see something about him.

He has an idea, and he's sure it's a good one. When someone else dies in pursuit of his dream, he doesn't think anything of it. When other people turn out to care about that, he brings in experts to evaluate the safety of his idea, and when they quickly tell him his idea is dangerous and needs to be put on hold, he ignores his own experts that he himself hired, because they are telling him that he is wrong, and he is sure he is right.

In his mind, he's a visionary, and nobody understands his vision. He is surrounded by naysayers. Several things have proven too difficult to do the best and safest way, so he has cut corners and taken shortcuts so he can keep moving forward with his plans, but he's sure it's fine. He refuses to hear any word of caution, because he believes he is being cautious enough, and he knows best, even though he has no background in any of the sciences or professions involved. He sends his own grandchildren out into a life-threatening situation because he is willfully ignorant of the danger he is creating.

THIS is like the real villains of the world. He doesn't want anyone to die. Far from it, he only wants good things for people! He's a sweet old man who loves his grandchildren. But he has money and power and refuses to hear that what he is doing is dangerous for everyone, even his own family.

I think he's possibly one of the most important villains ever written in popular fiction.

In the book, he is killed by a pack of the smallest, cutest, "least dangerous" dinosaurs, because a big part of why we read fiction is to see the villains face thematic justice. But like a cigarette CEO dying of lung cancer, his death does not stop his creation from spreading out into the world to continue to endanger everyone else.

I think it is really important to see and understand this kind of villainy in fiction, so you can recognize it in real life.

Sweetheart of a grandfather. Wanted the best for everyone. Right up until what was best for everyone inconvenienced the pursuit of his own interests.

And my client was like that too. His wife had died, and his dog was now the love of his life, and she was this little old dog with silky hair in a hair cut that left long wispy bits on her lower legs. Certain plant materials were easily entangled in this hair and impossible to get out without pulling her hair which clearly hurt her. When i suggested he ask his groomer to trim her lower leg hair short to avoid this, he refused, saying he really liked her usual hair cut.

I emphasized that she was in pain after every walk due to the plant debris getting caught in her leg hair, and a simple trim could put an end to her daily painful removal of it, and he just frowned like i'd recommended he take a bath in pig shit and said "But she'll be ugly" and refused to talk about it anymore.

Sweet old man though. Everyone loved him.

[remnants-of-forgotten-dreams]

So, I had a thought. You guys know Quetzalcoatl? Feathered serpent, ancient Aztec god, basically a giant snake with feathers...

What if it's based on dinosaurs?

No no, hear me out. Snake? Reptile. Dinosaur? Reptile. Dinosaurs are believed to have had feathers. Quetzalcoatl is literally called the feathered serpent. If whoever originally wrote the myths found a magically intact dinosaur corpse and decided it was a god, the very act of finding and unearthing it would have exposed it to the elements, meaning we wouldn't be able to find it, because it got wrecked by weather and stuff.

In summary... Quetzalcoatl is a dinosaur.

[tngpolycule]

Watching a documentary on dinosaurs rn and were at the Extinction asteroid™ part and I don't understand how the ppl im watchkng with dont feel like crying from that . All that we lost . All Was Lost . The World ENDED. they didnt know what was going on :(

[madamegemknight]

Except dinosaurs having feathers and Pluto being a planet or not are two wildly different categories that shouldn't be compared.

Dinosaurs having feathers is irrefutable - while there's still debate over whether all dinosaurs had feathers, paleontologists have found numerous dinosaur fossils with evidence of feathers or feather-like structures, such as Caihong in 2018, Dilong paradoxus in 2004, and most recently Daurlong wangi in 2022 (the linked article is mainly about the excellently preserved intestinal region of the specimen found but it does mention the feathers about halfway through). People that refuse to accept that dinosaurs had feathers are an excellent example of folk who's feelings get hurt when incorporating new findings into research; they are actively ignoring scientific fact in favor of inaccurate portrayals and outdated beliefs solely because they think the facts 'ruin' dinosaurs instead of giving us a deeper understanding of evolution and behavior.

On the other hand, the "is Pluto a planet or not" debate is one still actively being discussed by the astronomic community and is wildly controversial, to the point where the official Wikipedia page for "Definition of planet" has a section devoted exclusively to ongoing controversies regarding the IAU's decision. These controversies range from arguments over semantics to the fact that the decision was made by only 424 astronomers (less than 5% of world astronomers in 2006, according to New Horizons PI Alan Stern) to the existence and discovery of numerous stellar objects that complicate discussion of the definition of a planet even further, such as extrasolar planets, brown dwarfs, and planetary-mass stellar objects, one of which was found as recently as 2019. While there are certainly people who refuse to accept the IAU's decision because they're simply angry, there are just as many who refuse to accept it because of the vague wording of the decision, or the difficulty in properly defining solar objects, or the fact that depending on how you define "clearing the neighborhood" (one of the three criteria to be considered a planet), Earth might not count as a planet.

To act as if those who still consider Pluto a planet are on the same level as people who willingly ignore scientific evidence for the sake of dinosaurs 'looking cool' is to ignore a great deal of debate in the astronomical community, as well as the near-impossibility of creating a one size fits all definition for something as complicated as space. Again, there are definitely people who are willfully ignorant when it comes to the Pluto situation, but a large majority are not, and in the grand scheme of things a definition is by no means comparable to a fact, even if that definition is not debated upon.

Also, this is a Tumblr poll where both options are in full caps with 5+ exclamation points. It clearly wasn't meant to be taken as anything but lighthearted fun and insulting people over something that isn't even true for most of them (check the notes for a chorus of people explaining how they love feathered dinosaurs but are nostalgic for Pluto/have issues with the classification for the reasons listed above or more I didn't mention/consider Pluto a planet in their heart only) is just mean-spirited.

[qqweebird]

thinking about this tiktok i saw a little while ago that i thought was kind of funny, it was this person talking about one of their special interests being dinosaurs & i was thinking oh yeah same hat, i also love dinosaurs :) and they brought out some sort of dinosaur-patterned object like a backpack or whatever n then proceeded to say “i couldnt tell you a single fact about these guys, haha!” . They couldn’t tell us a single fact about their special interest. im not claiming to be the Autism Arbiter or anythang but WHAT !

[revolver115]

I only know one thing about the FATE series, and that one fact is it, somehow, has 15 versions of the same fucking dude, and one of them's a dinosaur.

[cobbleztone]

I have seen too many posts of Bruce being a tired old man who understands nothing his kids talk about, but im tired of that crap, Bruce is definitely autistic and he learns everything there is to know about what his kids enjoy so he can bond with them

Dick is into dinosaurs? Bruce now knows more than any paleontologist on earth.

Jay is really into a specific book series? Bruce has now read all the books, watched all film adaptations, and he has spent countless nights theorizing about it.

Tim is into skateboarding? Bruce is now a professional skateboarder and knows how to make a board at home.

Damien is into animals? Well, Bruce just got himself a PhD in zoology

Duke is into chess? Well Bruce is now an expert in chess

Cass is into dancing? Bruce has learned every form of dance in existence

And if you thought he only does this for his legal children, then you thought wrong

Bruce learns that Barbara is into fantasy rpgs? Well, Bruce just learned all about fantasy games

Stephanie is into cooking? Bruce now knows every recipe in existence

They all find it odd but weirdly endearing that he knows so much about what they all enjoy