#mososaur

[cauldron-burn-and-fire-bubble]

you know the funny thing about snayer is that i did deliberately take inspiration from quite a few animals for its design but not one of them was a snake

[arcanehackist]

yes they are

TSA agents are always like sir you have to take off your belt before you go through the machine. Shoes as well. Yeah and now the pants... slower... mmm yeah like that... now get those balls jiggling...

[rainbow-femme]

Watching Prehistoric Planet

David Attenborough: And now, one of the greatest terrors the ocean has never seen.

Me: Ooh I wonder what it is.

David Attenborough: The Mosasaur!

Me: Ooh!

David Attenborough: Here we see one of the greatest predators of the deep.

Me: Ooh I wonder what it’ll be now.

David Attenborough: The Mosasaur!

Me: Oh ok, again.

David Attenborough: The herd moves through the open water, making their way to the breeding grounds.

Me: Aw.

David Attenborough: But what they don’t know, is they’re being stalked by a fearsome creature.

Me: … Is it the Mos-

David Attenborough: The Mososaur!

[home-and-having-tea]

I'm trying toget myself back into horror bc it helps rationalize my anxiety, but I started this one about like... reemerging prehistoric marine animals and they chose. THE MOSOSAUR. THE DUNKLEOSTEOUS. AND THE MEGLADON. THOSE ARE FROM LIKE. MILLIONS OF YEARS APART THEY WOULDN'T HAVE ALL BEEN EXISTING IN ONE PLACE SINCE THE FUCKING MIOCENE AT THE EARLIEST. THE DUNKLE IS FROM THE DEVONIAN YOU FUCKS, THE DEVONIAN

[spuddragon]

A mosasaur/pike hybrid this time. Although it really just looks mostly like a mososaur since they're both aquatic, haha!

[finding-flight]

Went to the antique mall. I discovered:

A somewhat distressing amount of uranium glass

An extremely distressing tricycle

A deer skull that I badly wanted but could not afford

Someone was apparently proud enough of bagging a two-point buck that they turned it into a trophy

Wexter

MOSOSAUR JAWS

And finally

Mine

Prehistoric wormy guys

And

Bunny

Inside of which is

Smaller bunny

[depressedwetnapkin]

Nidhwal?

You mean a Mososaur?

[dindjarindiaries]

Ngl, a giant mososaur crocodile monster thing trying to eat the Mandalorians strikes me as something that I would've expected to happen at Din's ceremony. That man is a trouble magnet. 🤣

RIGHT??????

[phantom-of-the-501st]

Chapter 17 Thoughts

Spoilers for The Mandalorian Season 3

I AM SO HAPPY THIS SHOW IS BACK OMG!

I was a smiling a lot through this whole episode. It was exactly the campy, fun introduction back into the show that I needed.

Now, like I'm doing with TBB, here are my bullet point thoughts on the episode!

Did not expect to open with The Armourer.

Love the close-up shot of the metal being bent and the following far-out shot where it's flat. Little continuity error I immediately noticed, but it doesn't ruin anything. It just makes me laugh. 😂

Ooooh, the helmet that was circulating as a leak.

Loving the little ceremony.

Is this Din?

It doesn't really look like Din.

So the ceremony doesn't happen in Mando'a then? 🤔

WHAT IN THE MOSOSAUR CROCODILE IS THAT THING?!

Ngl, this is exactly the type of thing I would've expected to happen during Din's creed ceremony. 🤣

This is absolutely not how I was anticipating this season to start but I am not mad about it.

Okay it wasn't Din because N-1 inbound!

Grogu popping up in the back. 🤣

Honestly, I feel like the Jawas could uncover every secret in the Star Wars galaxy.

Grogu giving The Armourer puppy dog eyes. 🥺

PURRGIL?!

I did not expect that WTF.

Little nod to the fact that we're getting live action Rebels? 😉 I wonder if they'll actually be relevant to this show.

Grogu snuggling up against Din. 🥺

Also, I love how he can just come and go from the cockpit as he pleases.

Grogu is so relatable because if I was Force sensitive, I too would use it to spin around in office chairs and steal M&Ms.

And Greef being High Magistrate? Fancy.

Not quite as cool as Lord Mand'alor but still impressive.

We love a duel. 🩶

So they are gonna address the Cara Dune problem! 🤣

The IG statue is made out of bits of IG???

Din trying to reconstruct droids to help him? Character growth. I love it. 🥰

OKAY WELL THAT WAS KINDA HORRIFYING

Also did Din just throw Grogu??? 😭🤣

I love the Anzellans omg.

DIN HUNCHED UP IN THE SHOP I'M CRYING 😭🤣

It's even funnier thinking about the fact that he would've had to have crawled in there. 🤣

Hahahaha Din having to stop Grogu from messing with the Anzellans! 🤣

The dad vibes are strong.

"NO SQUEEZIE"

Grogu's little wave!

Din teaching Grogu things will be the death of me.

I can't deal with this adorableness!

I knew a lot of the trailer footage had to be from the first few episodes but there was a lot of stuff that I did not expect to see in the same episode!

Din pushing Grogu back into place. 🥰

Also the fact that Grogu knew to get under Din's bandolier means that he totally knew what was gonna happen next. 🤣

FORGET KEVIN'S CRYPTIC HEMLOCK HEAD TWEET BEING ABOUT THE BAD BATCH

GORIAN SHARD LOOKS LIKE POND WEED HELP

This is amazing. ���

That Mandalorian castle looks like it's owned by Stark Industries.

Ngl, this last bit felt a little bit out of place with the rest of the episode but I get it's importantance!

I just think the vibe of this scene doesn't match the fun campiness of the rest of it.

But it sets up some interesting stuff so I'm excited to see where it goes!

Not the end of the episode already! 😭

Back to waiting a week. 🥲

I loved this episode so much! It's not a new favourite or anything but it's exactly the fun, quirky episode that I needed to get back into this show (it was also a nice break from the spooky vibes in TBB).

There were definitely a lot of surprises that kept me on my toes, so I love that! But the adorableness of Din and Grogu is what I really missed. 🥰 Din teaching Grogu what it means to be a Mandalorian has my heart melting. Also appreciate the fact that Grogu is still being a little terror. 🤣

Strong start and I am very excited to see where this season is going!

[tysonfurybattlepass]

incredibly shook to learn that every mesozoic marine reptile group except for thalattosuchians and mososaurs may have come from the same, likely already aquatic, ancestor

[hiimtracher]

So la lullah is a pirate and her ship is mounted on a mososaurous because her crew tame dinosaurs from the Jurassic island which is on the second half of the planet rasvin, dinosaurs are also in the water and that's why no one goes on adventures on the seas

So the ship looks like this

[mackmontgomery]

🔪 screamer: plan your own horror movie death!

"I want a big death. I want the kind of death scene that makes people talk about how out of pocket my death was was even for a horror movie. You know how they killed that assistant in Jurassic World? Where she wasn't just dino lunch she was flown off by one pterodactyl, thrown into the water, swooped by another pterodactyl and then they were both eaten by that huge mososaur? I want the horror movie equivalent of that."

"Like, even if it's one of them scaled back A24 horrors were it's mainly psychological, I want to be that character that got merc'd then chopped up then airfried then blended in a way that inspires 150 articles about violence in movies. Cult status, way worth it."

[wagahai-da]

and of course there's mososaurs and plesiosaurs which are like, what if a lizard was a whale

[draconesmundi]

SURE!

The first one I did was 'Rostral neurovasculature indicates sensory trade-offs in Mesozoic pelagic crocodylomorphs' (link here), the second one was 'Evidence for a novel cranial thermoregulatory pathway in thalattosuchian crocodylomorphs' (link here).

So, quick background about my research under the cut:

WHAT I STUDIED:

You know how birds are the last surviving members of a big group of animals called dinosaurs? There is a similar things going on with crocodylians being the last surviving pseudosuchians - there is a huge diversity of extinct animals related to crocodiles. Crocodylia (crocs, gators, gharials, caimans) is nested inside Crocodylomorpha. Some crocodylmorphs ran on land, some were huge, some were tiny, some were vegetarian etc.

There was a group of extinct crocodylomorphs called Thalattosuchia, which included Metriorhynchids - these were crocodylomorphs which evolved into 'sea monster' type animals. Less giant and badass than plesiosaurs, mososaurs or ichthyosaurs, but still vital predators in the ecosystem. Imagine, if you will, a crocodile but with flippers and a cool shark tail. That's a little what a metiorhynchid looks like.

HOW I STUDIED IT:

There are many ways to study a fossil - all my studies are based on CT scans. CT stands for 'computerized tomography', and it means slice-by-slice studies of something. Normal, non-computerised tomography is done by slicing a specimen up and looking at each slice, usually on microscope slides. This was how they used to do it historically, but it means destroying the fossil just to look at it. Now with SCIENCE (MRI machines) you can look at every micrometer of a fossil inside and out!

There are many benefits to a fossil scan: you can see INSIDE a fossil (brain case, canals for blood vessels, sinuses), and you can fit MANY fossils on a computer hardrive. You can EMAIL a fossil to someone. You can amass a group of fossils from allover the world - for example, some of my scans came from America. Also meant I could work on the scans from home during 2020 covid lockdown.

There are softwares you can use to draw and annotate each slide of a fossil, and you can collate these slices into 3D models - this is called 'segmentation' as you 'segment' the interesting bits. So, if I highlighted each slice of a blood vessel canal, I could export a 3D image of the shape of the blood vessel canal. I could compare canals between metriorhynchoids and modern crocodylians. I could compare them to ancient protosuchians.

ROSTRAL NEUROVASCULATURE INDICATES SENSORY TRADEOFFS?

My first paper was 'Rostral neurovasculature indicates sensory trade-offs in Mesozoic pelagic crocodylomorphs' (link here). This compared nerve and blood canals (neurovascular canals) in the snout (rostrum) of metriorhynchoids vs crocodylians.

Extant crocodylians have little black 'freckles' on their faces - these are actually sensory organs. Their skulls are full of tiny nerve channels in the snout to supply each tiny black dot with blood and nerves. Metriorhynchoids did not have these tiny channels, but they likely relied more on sight than the snout-sensory-organs, so there is a tradeoff between using tactile sensation (useful in murky river water for crocodiles) and eyesight (useful in open ocean for metriorhynchids).

NOVEL CRANIAL THERMOREGULATORY PATHWAY?

The second paper was 'Evidence for a novel cranial thermoregulatory pathway in thalattosuchian crocodylomorphs' (link here). Metriorhynchids had strange canals in the roof of their mouths (the palate). We theorized that maybe this was used as some sort of cooling system, as some whales use soft tissue in their mouths to cool down (by shunting hot blood into it, keeping the hot blood AWAY from the brain and eyes to stop them overheating).

Disclaimer

btw I'm not a mythology expert, I haven't studied anthropology or folklore I just think dragons are neat!

My actual science degrees are an undergrad in zoology and a masters in palaeontology (plus 2 published papers on fossil crocodylomorphs!)

[scalestails]

FOSSILS

[doorbloggr]

Sunday 6/6/21 - Your Dinosaurs Are Not Dinosaurs

Links to previous posts in this series:

Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong

Your Pterosaurs Are Wrong

Dimetrodon, Mark Witton

You know how when you're really into something, like a fandom or maybe a hobby, and you're like "I know outsiders to this thing won't know everything, but there's surely some information on my thing that's common knowledge", and then you're wrong? That's me after every time I make a Dinosaur post.

In the previous two blogposts I made about extinct giant reptiles, I explained the inconsistencies between scientific knowledge and common knowledge on how Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs actually looked. But it seems there's also a gap in the public's knowledge of what actually constitutes a Dinosaur.

The Mesozoic Period was an age between 252-66 million years ago, often called the Age of the Reptiles, and although Dinosaurs were definitely the dominant clade of animals on land then, other reptiles and reptile-adjacent animals were successful too. Today I'll enlighten readers on what non-dinosaur animal groups were successful during that age, and what they were actually related to.

Pterosaurs

Cladogram of the evolutionary relationship of Archosaurs. Crocodilians diverged first, then Pterosaurs, before Dinosaurs.

I covered a lot about pterosaurs in a previous post, but just so it's covered in this post, let's talk about them again. Since writing that last post, I heard a good way to describe the relationship between Pterosaurs and Dinosaurs. With a lot of the animal groups covered in this post, it's like "No this is definitely not a dinosaur", but with Pterosaurs, it's more like "They're technically not a dinosaur", in the same way a rabbit is technically not a rodent. They're closely related sister groups, but they diverged long enough ago that scientists agree they're separate.

Pterodactylus antiquus, Mark Witton

As an aside, something I wanted to discuss in the Pterosaur post, is that a lot of people mistakenly use the name "Pterodactyl" to refer to all pterosaurs. There was no such animal named that. There was a species called Pterodactylus, but it is probably a smaller and less impressive Pterosaur than what you have in your head.

Synapsids

Top: Gorgonopsid, Jonathan Kuo

Bottom Left: Dicynodont, Gabriel Ugueto

Bottom Right: Dimetrodon, Gabriel Ugueto

In the early Mesozoic, when dinosaur's ancestors were all tiny and had yet to take over the world, a group of animals called Synapsids were the dominant force. Mammals eventually branched off from this group, so they're sometimes called stem-mammals or mammal-like reptiles. Dimetrodon, arguably the most commonly dinosaur-labelled non-dinosaur, was in this group. Others include the beak faced Dicynodonts, and the sabre toothed Gorgonopsids, which all look almost dinosaurian but they're not.

Pseudosuchia

A collection of Pseudosuchians, ColinM_Art on twitter

People often refer to Crocodilians as living dinosaurs (even though birds are the closest living relatives). Although it is true that the crocodile/alligator shape has persisted for millions of years, ancient relatives (collectively referred to as Pseudosuchia) experimented with lots of different forms. The very ferocious Postosuchus was an apex predator in the Triassic, and the suspiciously dinosaur-looking Desmatosuchus was an armoured herbivore, and many other Triassic relatives became bipedal predators like Poposaurus. Later in the Mesozoic, a lot of these more specialised crocodile relatives were replaced by more successful dinosaur counterparts, but the big aquatic ambush predator type still persists to this day.

Plesiosaurs

Top: Thalassiodracon, Mark Witton

Bottom: Liopleurodon, Kuzim Art

I sometimes see books or publications discuss "Aquatic Dinosaurs" or "Sea Dinosaurs", and most often they are talking about Plesiosaurs. Plesiosaurs were a member of flippered, streamline shaped reptiles with necks of varying length that specialised in hunting sea life. Scientists aren't certain of their origins, but most refer to them as Pantestudines, sharing a common ancestor with turtles and tortoises. Elasmosaurus and Liopleurodon are some of the more popular members of the group.

Icthyosaurs

Top: Ichthyosaurus larkini

Bottom Left: Shonisaurus

Bottom Right: Cartorhynchus

(All 3 Arts done by Juilo Larceda)

Although less resembling a dinosaur shape, and therefore less often mistaken for one, Ichthyosaurs were another marine reptiles group that lived alongside them. Although early relatives were more reptile shaped, later ichthyosaurs developed a shark/dolphin body plan, and were the most aquatically agile marine reptiles. They could range in size from the dolphin sized Ophthalmosaurus to the whale sized Shonisaurus. They diverged from other reptiles groups very early, but some scientists think they share a common ancestor with lizards.

Mososaurs

Top: Mososaurus, Mark Witton

Bottom Left: Tylosaurus, Gabriel Ugueto

Bottom Right: Xenodens, Andrey Atuchin

Mososaurs evolved much later than most of these other non-dinosaurs. They superficially resembled short-necked Plesiosaurs, but would have likely used their tail more than their flippers for propulsion. Mososaurs evolved from aquatic monitor lizards in the late Cretaceous, and quickly reached sizes bigger than any other lizard would ever reach. Mososaurus, which featured (much bigger than it was in life) in Jurassic World, is one of the best known species.

Thanks for Reading

Tumblr only allows so many pictures in one post, but I've covered most of the main groups of animals people mistakenly call dinosaurs. Just as a final titbit, someone recently told me that they thought the "-saur" or "-saurus" ending on many ancient animals automatically means dinosaur, but it is just Greek for reptile, and scientists slap it on the end of many scientific names, many of which aren't even reptiles, just may look like them.

As an example, Basilosaurus was actually found to be a Whale after its fossils were better studied. But it kept its name.

Source: The7thSea, DeviantArt

If there's more you'd like me to cover on the topic of dinosaurs, any of the other cool animals I've discussed here, or maybe other animals you're unsure are dinosaurs or not, leave a comment or send us a message.

Cheers for reading, and hope you learned something today.