#dinosaur expert

[orgasming-caterpillar]

Hey yall what the fuck does this mean

[thunderfledgeling]

Twisted my back in P.E today. Very sore.

Guess I gotta take a trip to see my local orthopaedic doctor (Gordon) at his clinic (The medicine cabinet in the kitchen)

[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

[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.

[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.

[raytorotitsenthusiast]

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 :(

[sufficientlylargen]

This post is really weird to me, because on the one hand I'm with OP on finding anti-science sentiment extremely disturbing, but on the other hand the staunch belief that every word has exactly one True Meaning, and that anyone who uses it differently is stupid or anti-intellectual, is itself a part of anti-science movements.

Maybe this will surprise some of my followers, since obviously I love stupid semantic arguments like 'if you cut a ravioli in half is it a sandwich?'¹, but one of the reasons I like them is because, despite their sillines, they point to the important truth that words are, fundamentally, made up. The "meaning" of a word is not determined by the inventor of the word, nor by some "higher authority" like a dictionary or a scientist, but by how people use it. That's what it means to ask "what does word X mean?" - you're asking "what do people mean when they say X?". And this is a vitally important thing to think about, because you can't communicate with someone unless you know what they mean by the words they choose.

The idea that colloquial definitions matter is NOT new, not at all, and to say it "has no basis in reality" is just false. It's false when it's about dinosaurs, it's false when it's about planets, it's false when it's about sandwiches, it's false when it's about genders; it's just false! Linguists call this approach "prescriptivism" - the idea that language is defined by a set of formal, rigid rules, and the only "good" or "correct" usage is to follow those rules. But the alternative, "descriptivism", is the actual evidence-based approach to language - to find out what a word means, you have to observe how people use it, because that's what determines the meaning.

Descriptivism isn't anti-science or anti-intellectual - if anything, the ones in denial about reality are the prescriptivists who say that 'dinosaur' CAN'T mean "giant extinct lizard" despite the fact that there exist people who use it that way and so that is in reality one of its meanings.

And obviously it's fine to dislike certain usages - I loathe the expression "I could care less" because it's a corruption of "I couldn't care less" and has the same meaning despite its literal meaning being the opposite.

But I still accept that "I could care less" means "I couldn't care less", even though I wish it didn't, because if someone says that to me I know that's what they mean.

In the same way, if your four-year-old niece asks for a dinosaur toy for her birthday you know that she's not asking for a stuffed penguin, and if your friend says "I just watched that dinosaur movie from 2000", you know they're not talking about Chicken Run².

tl;dr: the argument here isn't about the historical or biological relationship between avian and non-avian dinosaurs, it's about the real-world usage of the word 'dinosaur', and the reality is that one of that word's meanings is, in fact, 'large extinct lizard from millions of years ago'. It's not the definition paleontologists use, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

¹ It's still a ravioli if it's from the Ravenna province of Italy, otherwise it's a sparkling bread bowl full of thick soup.

² Unless they're a paleontologist or someone who loves playing with language. No generalization is ever completely accurate.

New Fear

I have been on tumblr a long time. A looooong time. Far longer than I should have been, really.

And I've been arguing with schmucks about birds being dinosaurs... pretty much that whole time. Folks tend to get angry when a dinosaur blog posts birds, after all. It happens.

And while the game of whack a mole is ancient, it's not unpredictable. Usually, it ends in one of two ways:

the person admits they were wrong, and they back down

the person stops arguing with me and blocks me

I'm okay with either one, really. the former is ideal, the latter at least brings me peace.

Never before this past weekend has someone insisted they were right no matter what I say

And this isn't a coincidence.

Over the past few decades, anti-science sentiment has risen worldwide. I mean you just have to look at the COVID19 pandemic, or general reactions to the problems of climate change.

While of course people who think their opinion matters more than evidence have always existed, they have never been quite this bold before.

The idea that the colloquial definition of dinosaur matters, at all, is a completely new idea and one that has no basis in reality.

And yet, multiple people this past weekend argued exactly that.

And it sounds exceptionally similar to the idea that people could pick and choose things about COVID19 to believe, or the general republican position on science (only things that back up their bigotry are true).

It really seems to reflect a general increase in anti science sentiment and public anti-intellectualism.

Reality isn't actually up for debate. Reality isn't actually subjective. And science is the measure of reality

This isn't the same as the biases of society impacting science and making it worse. Saying "what people think is more important than science" is not the same as saying "science forgot a very important variable / factor / to consider data gained by different cultures / to have a wide variety of perspectives/ etc."

And allowing people to continue to perpetuate and believe in delusions leads directly to the spread of misinformation, leading to more people not understanding reality, and so on

This matters because reality matters. Because the reality of our world is not something we can change or escape. And, in fact, us ignoring the reality of the world - like thinking we can have infinite growth on a finite planet - is directly leading to the destruction of that world (climate change).

I am terrified of the rise of anti-science sentiment. I am terrified of the rise of cherry picking, deciding reality is what you want it to be, ignoring evidence. We see this from purely scientific topics all the way to social justice (how much of racism is ignoring the evidence of a) race being a social construct and b) how much racism impacts people's lives? Almost all of it).

This is bigger than birds being dinosaurs or evolution or climate change. This is about our society going on a deeply disturbing and self-destructive path.

And I really don't know what to do about it.

[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 !