• rirus@feddit.org
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    6 hours ago

    Its easier for the penguin to support the extra weight, but the dinosaur couldn’t lift their head.

    • Ŝan@piefed.zip
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      4 hours ago

      It was all muscle. A little known fact is þat Argentinosaurus had such a massively muscled Schwarzenegger neck, it could strike like a Black Mamba.

  • shalafi@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    Bones and tendon attachment points give us a clue as to their weight. Plus, no escaping the square cube law, they could only be so massive.

    Earth seems to have topped out with the Blue Whale. Guessing the fatty pictured would mass more and not have the benefit of being suspended in water. :)

    • psycho_driver@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Maybe the asteroid impact actually changed the rotational speed of the planet and increased gravity. There, I just created a new theory.

      What a shitty way to go that would have been for the dinosaurs and any other giant species. Imagine some ELE hitting humankind but sparing all the little people.

      • gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        2 hours ago

        The Galápagos penguin, which lives in the Northern Hemisphere, is the only species that do

        But also, they’re barely in the Northern Hemisphere, literally only a few degrees above the equator

  • lectricleopard@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    There are almost certainly errors like this in current artists’ depictions. The penguin isnt the only skeleton that doesn’t look like the animal while alive.

    • stray@pawb.social
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      9 hours ago

      In more recent decades we’ve learned to better interpret muscle structure from the bone structures the muscles would attach to, and how they’d move together. Then we can couple that with not only physics, but historical differences in things like atmospheric pressure and oxygen concentration. (For example: How does it move air down that whole long neck to its lungs?)

      A lot of updates have been made, but outdated info is still extremely prevalent. It’s also difficult to search for accurate depictions because there’s not a good way to distinguish between a science-based depiction and an artistic drawing.

        • stray@pawb.social
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          7 hours ago

          If elephants weren’t around anymore to look at, we could potentially notice similarities with the tapir and extrapolate a trunk based on the shape of and connective area on the elephant’s skull. We’d have to guess at the specific properties of the trunk, but at least we’d know it was there and be able to support arguments for things like its size without them being pure guesswork.

          Without a similar animal I don’t know how close we’d get. Maybe it would be a mystery that inspires wild speculation.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        10 hours ago

        Also elephants, the trunk has no bones in it so it’s just a hole in the skull, I’m sure future generations will portray it but the single giant eye.

        But honestly pretty much no animal looks the same as its skeleton because every animal has a lot of fat and connective tissue which just doesn’t get preserved. Really the only animal that looks the same as a skeleton as it does when it’s alive is the frog.

        • gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          2 hours ago

          There’s theories that the Cyclops myth came about from ancient people’s finding fossil elephant skulls from the period where European Elephants were a species

          (They went extinct in Europe 50,000-10,000 years ago)

        • Annoyed_🦀 @lemmy.zip
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          9 hours ago

          Iirc it’s really where cyclops myth came from, they found a mammoth skull and thought that hole is the eye socket. There’s also same thing for dragon as well, people just don’t know what the skull looks like when alive so they made stuff up

      • stray@pawb.social
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        8 hours ago

        A hippo skull is a great example of how soft tissue structure can be seen in bone structure. Check out that enormous jaw bone and compare it to a human skull. It’s easy to see how it must have massive jaw muscles and an incredible bite force.

        For another strong jaw you can look at the orca, but notice also how flat its skull is where you’d expect it to be round. On top is where it keeps its echolocation melon.

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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    12 hours ago

    Dinosaurs were pretty big already … but if this possible … they would have been honkin big!!!