#they’re archosaurs

[plasticstrawsmuggler]

Did you know that birds are in the same class as reptiles? AND in the same subclass as crocodiles.

tumblr entertain me

[is-the-owl-video-cute]

is it possible to create an appropriate dodo enclosure or is there not enough info on their behavior/nutrition needs to make an educated guess?

Extinct birds are well out of my scope of knowledge I’m afraid.

[planariaareneat]

How The Nocturnal Bottleneck and Nipples Make Us Human

Almost every post here considers what humans do have, really. It’s a little tiring; realistically every world has its harsh environments and vicious species and a sophont to match. We probably wouldn’t be unique for our adaptability or our persistence or even adrenaline

But our evolution is fucked up as hell, to put it lightly.

Mammals went through what’s been dubbed the nocturnal bottleneck essentially since the start of the mesozoic right up until the Cretaceous ended the archosaur’s exclusive hold over the daylight. We lost a lot of things from every mammal spending most of its time in either a cramped, suffocating burrow or scrounging around in the faint hours of nighttime. Our blood cells lost their nuclei to hold more oxygen while we spent time deep underground, we lost protections against ultraviolet rays in our skin and eyes, we can’t even repair our own DNA using the light of the sun. Most aliens probably wouldn’t have such traits unless their evolution followed a very similar path to ours. They’d be able to see ultraviolet and wouldn’t have to worry about sunburn and all the wonderful privileges essentially all fish, birds, amphibians, and reptiles enjoy as we speak. 

There’s also what we gained from spending so much time in the dark.

Brown fat is only found in mammals, it’s a special type of fat which bear cells with several oil droplets and are utterly jammed with mitochondria. This lets it make heat, a lot of it, fast. We don’t even need to shiver to induce this heat generation from brown adipose tissue - factor in our downright hyperactive mitochondria, and we can warm up quickly. Sure, it doesn’t have too much use in adult humans, but it keeps our infants warm and still provides a little boost the whole run we have in this universe.

Unless aliens also went through a time where their small ancestors had to face cold nights, they’d have to produce heat the old fashioned way when chilled. Aliens might have to shiver the whole time they’re in a cold room while the human watches in confusion, quite literally unshaken, and wonders if the room is a lot colder than the thermostat set to 60 says. The aliens stare at their companion in confusion, it’s just a normal temperature to shiver at after all, how is the human sitting so still?

Our small ancestors spending all their time out foraging at night is also why we have such a good sense of touch, smell, and hearing. They were more important senses than vision (we’re lucky to have even redeveloped basic color vision, frankly) at the time and place and simply ended up continuing to serve us well. Birds and reptiles rarely have acute senses of smell and the latter especially are lucky to have acute hearing, and birds rarely have impeccable hearing themselves either. Our skin is free of scales and honed to sensitivity, and our external ears and complicated ear bones provide an immense range of hearing (from 20 all the way to 17,000 hertz!).

Aliens might not be able to pin down the chirp of a cricket or the light click of a lock being picked. The human might be the only one on board a ship that can pick out the finer sounds of the engine’s constant thrum and know the critical difference between when everything is fine and when something is wrong. The human could probably pick out the sounds of an approaching enemy’s careless footsteps - they’re only as light enough for *them* to stop hearing them, after all - and be the one to see the horrified expression (well, more on that later) on their face when we get the drop on them in spite of their perceived stealth. 

But perhaps the most versatile, convoluted, amazing, and utterly unique trait we have is right on your face this instant. Lips.

Lips in most animals are a simple seal to hold in the mouth’s moisture and protect the teeth, even if they’re supple they’re NEVER muscular except in mammals, and we have only one thing to thank for it; milk and nipples. Lips evolved exclusively to allow babies to suckle, it required a vacuum to be created in the mouth, and with no other animal having anything like a nipple it never happened in other animals. Many animals make milk, to be frank, but no other animal has nipples.

Your cheeks and lips are a marvel among tetrapods, no other animal can suck like mammals can. Aliens wouldn’t have straws or even be able to sip from the edge of a glass, they’d have to have a proboscis or simply tilt the whole thing back. Aliens likely won’t have woodwind instruments or balloons you can blow into. We take so much about our lips for granted. Hell, our muscular faces are vital for expressions, we’re probably absolute facial contortionists among a cast of creatures with mandibles and beaks and expressionless scaly maws. Aliens might find us ridiculously easy to read, if anything, compared to their own kind (all the better to deceive them) - or perhaps they’d find us hard to decipher anyways, with our lack of color-changing skin or erectable crests of bright feathers. Baring teeth might not be seen as a sign of aggression in most of the universe, smiling would be all too distinctly human. 

Perhaps with how infectious we are sometimes, that’s what we’d contribute to the universe; others might have to make do with opening their mouths just enough to show their teeth or splaying their innumerable mouthparts with just the right curve, but perhaps we’d teach the galaxy to smile, one ally at a time. 

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

[plaguedocboi]

Nobody does it like crocodilians. They're that big and have survived two mass extinctions. They look like That. They've got a somewhat weird global distribution. They can eat a big meal once and then sleep for a year. They're apex predators with frog eyes. I just- hngngngnhngngnhnnhnhngngn. You know what I mean?

They’re also one of only two branches of surviving archosaurs and the other one is birds! These guys are cousins.

[markscherz]

if you have time to explain like i'm five, why can birds not be meaningfully separated from reptiles? is it just to do with how they evolved, or are there cold-blooded scaly birds out there that i don't know about?

Imagine you’re a duck. It’s good, right? Here’s some noodles. Pretend they’re worms. Okay, no, stop trying to put the noodles up your nose. Attention here, look, papa’s trying to explain something. Can you listen? If you listen you’ll get more noodles. Okay? Okay.

So you’re a duck (*quack* yes good). But I’m a dinosaur. Yup. Waiiit. You have to be a duck for the story to make sense. Okay. I’m a dinosaur and you’re a duck. You’re descended from me. So you’re actually a dinosaur too! I know right‽ that’s because children (descendants) of one group are still members of that group. You never stop being a dinosaur, no matter how different you look, because you’re descended from dinosaurs. Even though you’re a duck (*quack* yes exactly)

You remember your aunty? Let’s say she’s a crocodile. Yeah, she looks like a crocodile sometimes, doesn’t she? Okay. If she’s a crocodile, and we’re dinosaurs, then what are your grandparents? That’s right, they’re a group that somehow gave rise to both dinosaurs and crocodilians. That group is called Archosauria. So your grandma is a great big archosaur (don’t tell her I said that).

Now, we call archosaurs reptiles. Crocodiles are reptiles, and dinosaurs are reptiles too. And if dinosaurs are reptiles, then birds are reptiles, because you can’t just cut the family tree. No it’s not a literal tree. You can’t cut it. No, not even with scissors. Like I just said, you never stop being what your forebears were. No, forebears, not four bears. Bears are not reptiles. Ducks are. Okay. You get it? Good talk. Here’s some more noodles.

[saritapaleo]

Archovember is here once again! Looooots of theropods this year. Also a lot more dinosaurs in general than other archosaurs. Sorry. There were just too many I wanted to add!

I also apologize that there are several redraws in this list… I included a couple animals I’ve drawn for past Archovembers that I wasn’t quite happy with (7 to be exact, oop). If you’ve been drawing along since the beginning and don’t feel like drawing a repeat, feel free to substitute a related species!

For new folks: this is my “Draw Dinovember” list that I expanded out to include other archosauriforms. I started doing this a few years ago to challenge myself to draw species I’ve never drawn before and/or ones that don’t get a lot of attention. Feel free to join in! You can do the whole list, just the dinosaurs (the names in green), just the pterosaurs (orange), just the pseudosuchians (blue), just the 3 oddballs (red), just your favorites, just ones you’ve never drawn before, pick one blindly, roll a D20 and a D10 and draw the sum of whichever numbers you get, etc. Just make sure they’re posted on or after their specific day! You can use #Archovember or #Archovember2024, as those are the tags I follow. Be as detailed or as sketchy as you’d like! I’ll be leaving the story highlights on my Instagram (also SaritaPaleo) from last year’s Archovember up until November 1st, if you’d like to see what people have done in the past! (This challenge usually gets a lot more traction on Instagram; so I would recommend checking it out there if you have one!)

As a disclaimer that I am obligated to give every year: when you are looking for refs for some of these species you will come across David Peters. This guy posts a lot of pseudoscientific images featuring lesser-known species, and his stuff can sometimes dominate search results. Do not trust anything from sites called “Reptile Evolution” or “The Pterosaur Heresies.” Peters’ constant outpouring of material has a habit of clogging up search results, misleading and tripping up people who may be trying to get into paleoart. He fooled me when I was first starting out! If you’re drawing along and are having trouble finding legit references, send me a message and I can send you what I’m using!

Anyway, here is the list in case the above graphic can’t be read:

1. Your Choice!

2. Other - Protorosaurus speneri

3. Dinosaur - Gorgosaurus libratus

4. Pterosaur - Preondactylus buffarinii

5. Dinosaur - Gargoyleosaurus parkpinorum

6. Pseudosuchian - Razanandrongobe sakalavae

7. Dinosaur - Vespersaurus paranaensis

8. Other - Euparkeria capensis

9. Dinosaur - Spiclypeus shipporum

10. Pterosaur - Arambourgiania philadelphiae

11. Dinosaur - Tsintaosaurus spinorhinus

12. Pseudosuchian - Armadillosuchus arrudai

13. Dinosaur - Shingopana songwensis

14. Pterosaur - Cuspicephalus scarfi

15. Dinosaur - Saturnalia tupiniquim

16. Pterosaur - Caelestiventus hanseni

17. Dinosaur - Koreaceratops hwaseongensis

18. Pseudosuchian - Lotosaurus adentus

19. Dinosaur - Pelagornis sandersi

20. Pterosaur - Anurognathus ammoni

21. Dinosaur - Jakapil kaniukura

22. Pseudosuchian - Purussaurus brasiliensis

23. Dinosaur - Ledumahadi mafube

24. Pseudosuchian - Sillosuchus longicervix

25. Pterosaur - Pteranodon longiceps

26. Dinosaur - Compsognathus longipes

27. Other - Tanystropheus longobardicus

28. Pseudosuchian - Eurycephalosuchus gannanensis

29. Pterosaur - Campylognathoides zitteli

30. Dinosaur - Iguanodon bernissartensis

[bestanimal]

Someone might have already asked I think but how are you handling the avian/reptilian phyletic issues (crocodilians closer to birds than lizards, birds being reptiles stuff)

I’ve already posted the Reptilia poll but I just included birds in it as that makes the most sense. They’re reptiles, and I wasn’t going to make separate polls for archosaurs and lepidosaurs at the risk of leaving anyone out or confusing people. Unfortunately this does mean for Round 3, which will be focusing on Orders, that there will be a lot of bird polls and not a lot of polls for the other reptiles. But that’s not my fault. >:( Make Aves an Order dangit.

The real problem children are turtles, which are anapsids, while all the other living reptiles are diapsids. Anapsida is paraphyletic and informal but still, we’re not quite sure where turtles go. I think most recent evidence points to them being closer related to archosaurs than lepidosaurs, but they’re kinda doing their own thing. Wild.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

I can kinda see where the whole "bats are 40% of mammals!" thing was coming from, because actually it is really interesting that this type of animal that we think of as niche and specific is actually so (relatively) successful. It makes you think about this group that typically gets sorted as either 'average small bat' or 'flying fox' as being incredibly diverse, and implies interesting things about the usefulness of flight.

It just doesnt stand up as all that impressive compared to the 99.9% of insects that are winged or are secondarily wingless (I only recently learned this and it blew my mind, because holy schist). Add in the fact that I'm not sure the average person could name more than a dozen 'types' of insects—butterflies, bees, flies, caterpillars, maybe toss in mosquitoes (a type of fly! Flies alone are so cool and diverse!) or even spiders if they're particularly apathetic about the massive amount of diversity all around them for their entire lives, holding up so many aspects of their existence.

There are at least 5 species of hoverfly that visit my chamomile plants, and I'm sure there's more that I haven't seen or can't differentiate from the others, and nobody seems to care! I want to grab people and shake them sometimes, because how can you not be awash with awe at the sheer scope of a square inch of soil.

Like look, I love bats. I do. Like for real. And in every other situation I will defend them to death because they are needlessly demonised. But when I say:

1 in 4 *animals* is a bug

And they counter with:

2 in 5 *mammals* is a bat

They’re just falling ass backwards into the damn point, right? The person significantly reduced the scale (from all animals to just mammals, an extremely small portion of animals <an extremely small portion of vertebrates, never mind when you scale up even further to all animals>) in order to make bats seem more important because they could not fathom animals outside of mammalia mattering

Like it was a level of bias that in many other situations would lead to hoards of tumblr people calling them out, and… bats still somehow won

Never mind the scores of people trying to defend bats beating insects and birds by… listing adaptations both insects and birds do a whole heck of a lot better (strisores include many birds doing the bat thing better, and well, Insect Diversity speaks for itself)

Like. Insects were the objectively correct answer. Any of the archosaurs would have been justified because I run an archosaur lover blog. And humans would have at least been funny and, yeah we’re polluting the planet to hell and back, but at least we’re clever I guess.

But *bats*? Hello mammal bias!!! Really really bad mammal bias!! Alarmingly bad mammal bias!!! IN MY OWN DAMN HOUSE. and blatant disrespect towards me, when all I try to do is educate and build community. Like, damn.

Just. Damn.

These folks are painfully - PAINFULLY - un-self-aware.

[tuttle-did-it]

420 am thoughts… If the M*A*S*H characters were dinosaurs, which one would they all be?

Hawk- I’m trying to think of the gayest dinosaur for Hawk, but also one that could pull of severe mood swings. I’m thinking something in the pterodactyl family because of his terrible posture and lanky body parts that are often thrown around in disgust. I know, I know. They’re not really dinosaurs but archosaurs, aka the ‘ruling reptile,’ which I think it’s suitable. And it’s 420 am and this is My game so I can break the rules I’d I want to.

Radar- Maybe the Aquilops? It’s just so cute I want to cuddle it. It only weighed 3 pounds!

I’m going to attempt to go to bed, so all I can hope crazy adorable dinosaur nerds (affectionate term) and M*A*S*H obsessive (affectionate term) can help me decide on the rest of the cast.

[saritawolff]

Hi I guess I should make a pinned post explaining my whole deal

I have like 5 different instagram accounts to separate the different flavors of my art but I refuse to do that here cause I don’t really have a Tumblr audience as is.

First off! Furry art! I am a furry, in that I have cartoon animal characters and I draw them, write about them, and rotate them in my head. They are my blorbos and I have been drawing some of them since the mid-2000s and I’m not about to stop yet. I’d like to make a webcomic about them someday.

On the left is Ozzy, he is my favorite son and he is a bearded vulture griffin. The skinny guy with the big ears is Snitley. This is basically the poster child of what my furry art is like. It’s mostly clean, good fun.

The only nsfw stuff tends to be violence centered around my vampire fly character, The Master:

(blood warning below the cut)

That’s as nasty as it gets around here. (and it will always be tagged accordingly)

My main art account on Instagram, SaritaWolff, has a lot more and I usually post there long before I post on Tumblr. Tumblr’s just kinda my dumping ground.

The other type of art you’ll see around here is paleoart! I started hosting “Archovember” (my take on “Draw Dinovember”) a few years ago so every November tends to be dedicated to drawing dinosaurs (and other archosaurs).

I’ll draw paleoart periodically throughout the year too, but November is when it kinda explodes. I also sell my paleo designs as stickers and other products on Redbubble!

https://www.redbubble.com/people/SaritaWolff/shop

If you like my paleoart but don’t want the furry nonsense, I recommend following SaritaPaleo on Instagram, as that’s all I post there.

Lastly, I’ve recently forayed into drawing educational zoology art for my new Instagram account SaritaZoo. These tend to be what explode on Tumblr. I really love how open and willing to be educated about animals the Tumblr community is!

So if you just want to learn about real animals and don’t want fantasy animal people on your feed, I recommend following SaritaZoo on Instagram.

(As for my credentials, I have a degree in Wildlife Conservation and over 14 years of experience working with animals, and put a lot of research into my educational art. The educational stuff is sincerely meant to be educational.)

(Also on IG I have a photography account and a personal account but I gave up on posting photos to Tumblr long ago as no one interacts with them. So they’re just on Instagram for now.)

So yeah! TLDR: Those are the three major criteria of art I post here (along with various psas and other things I reblog) and they are a bit different so I don’t want people following my account for one thing and then being shocked when they see the other.

I am a person, I have multiple interests. I love throwing all those interests in one place. If you want to see them seperated, that’s what I use Instagram for! If you want to see them in better resolution, that’s what I use Tumblr for!

Thanks for stopping by!

[probably-ace-ok]

Crocodilians are actually the closest modern relatives to birds, so it makes sense that they’d have some similar behaviours! They’re both archosaurs (along with the non-avian dinosaurs). This is the image used for the archosaur Wikipedia page:

no fucking way

[smoke-in-the-wind]

like the difference between fish weirdness and bird weirdness is the extant species of fish still lets you see a clear spectrum of features that explains how they’re taxonomically placed.

Archosaurs, though, look downright goofy since their two remaining clades are missing a huge gap of species that explains where and how they diverged.

[justgoji]

Two creatures I doodled on my geometry and chemistry packets. I nicknamed them swamp beast and fisher beast, and they’re crocodilians from an alternate timeline where instead of mammals, archosaurs such as birds and crocodylomorphs took over instead. The swamp and fisher beast both live in Louisiana, which is a lush coastal rainforest in this timeline, with the swamp beast living further inland, feeding on other megafauna in the region, while the fisher beast roams the shoreline, picking at sea life, sometimes swimming out to sea to forage. The swamp beast is inspired by the giant alligator in the Resident Evil 2 remake, while the fisher beast is inspired by dinosaur-like paracrocodylomorphs, such as Effigia okeeffeae.

[heedra]

one thing i think ppl dont always know when it comes to conceptualizing just how profoundly different a lot of ancient archosaurs (nonavian dinosaurs and pterosaurs in particular) are from modern-day terrestrial megafauna, and just how staggeringly big they were, is that they interacted completely differently with food chains and ecological niches than large mammals do. mammals and the vast majority of modern birds are typically born into the niche they will occupy as adults; even though they’re dependent on their parents for food initially, their parents are feeding them from the same sources they obtain food from, and those offspring will begin imitating adult behavior in these niches as soon as they can. meanwhile, there’s a lot of evidence, especially where large late-mesozoic pterosaurs and theropods are concerned, that juveniles occupied entirely different ecological niches than full-sized adults and were functionally, for the sake of understanding the food chain, different guys.

[serpentariusart]

Quick doodle I did of Kobolds. In this world dragons and wyverns are not very closely related beyond both being reptiles, with wyverns being an archosaur closely related to dinosaurs, and dragons being part of a group of 6-limbed lizards. Both dragons and wyvern have developed sophont species, the former being Dragonborn and the latter being Kobolds.

Kobolds are short, crafty and curious people. They are very intelligent and are fantastic inventors, excelling in crafts ranging from blacksmith to tinkering to engineering. However they have an unfortunate reputation throughout history as being unintelligent due to their grasp on language being rather different. They have a hard time understanding and using the grammar structure typically present in sophont languages, resulting in them sounding more “childish” to most. With a lot of dedication and training they can learn to speak “better”, however this is more down to memorizing how certain phrases sound than actually learning the grammar structure. This means they often struggle finding and holding a job that’s more than just an apprenticeship. Kobolds are responsible for some of the most pivotal inventions in history though, with recent breakthroughs such as the radio and photography. Some historians even suggest that it wasn’t humans that first used fire, but Kobolds.

Later on I want to draw a bunch of kobolds and show how diverse they can look! They’re typically scaled but there are some feathered kobolds too

[bunjywunjy]

Are birds reptiles or do they get their own classification? Been debating this with others for so long.

if you follow strict phylogeny, they’re both!

so the way it works is that any species of animal retains the classifications of its ancestors, no matter how long ago it was or how ridiculous it is to do that. 

this is why we can correctly say that whales are ungulates- whales evolved from an early ungulate, so they get to keep the label even though they don’t actually have hooves anymore! or legs, even.

so by this logic, we can say that a bird IS a Theropod AND a Saurischian AND a Dinosaur AND a Dinosauriform AND a Dinosaurimorph AND an Ornithodiran AND an Avemetatarsilian AND an Archosaur AND above that, a Reptile! try keeping all that straight.

however, a bird is NOT a Psuedosuchian, because that is a different reptile lineage that also sprang off the Archosaur branch but has no direct line of descendence to birds themselves.