These creatures seem unfeasible from an engineering perspective.
From the image, their substantial head (the weight of a man?) is on the end of a six meter horizontal length (6m is my estimate, from the image). Yes, the body is a big weight, and yes there is the counterbalance of a (relatively small) tail. If I were to hold a small broom, with the brush end away from me, I am only able to do this for a short while - and yet, these creatures spent all their days like this, swaying their heads around as they go!
It seems to me that the tension and pain these creatures must have been in because of their design and the effect of gravity would be too great to bear. If we look at something comparable that we know exists, we see a giraffe - these are slightly unfeasible too, but they are far smaller (3m neck?) but the angle of the neck is almost upright, hence there have nothing like the force dinosaurs would have had to bear.
It would be good to have a structural engineer go over the numbers for this dinosaur. I would expect a breaking point would be reached, and that there is no way the long neck could support such a heavy head over such a length without failure. We are talking about flesh and bone (which is surely incredible in its way, but holding huge weight up - the head - is not what meat and bone are good for; these are not lengths of metal.
PS, apparently a giraffe neck is only 2m, not 3 as I guessed.
> If I were to hold a small broom, with the brush end away from me, I am only able to do this for a short while
I can do that for hours, do you mean you hold the broom in only a hand with no other support? Instead consider holding a broom by supporting it with your arm like people held spears, humans held spears that way for hours no problem.
This dinosaur was built with the body to optimally support that neck and head, it doesn't have the same issues you have with that broom at all. And it can be that long the same skyscrapers can be so high, by having a big base and being smaller and smaller the further away it gets.
I'm getting at the fact that the head and neck are nearer to horizontal, not vertical. If you have your arm extended, and are then holding a broom out (or any weight really, or even no weight at all) you cannot hold it in that position for hours. (To me, it sounds like a stress position, a form of torture!)
But that was these dinosaurs' design, purportedly.
Re spears, the shape has no bearing if you are holding it at its balancing point.
Alternatively, imagine building this sort of shape with something like Lego.. its unfeasible to have a 6m horizontal length, then a heavy head, and expect the Lego to not break.
If you look at the skeleton you can see the neck starts out extremely massive with super thick bones and becomes very thin at the end. The skull is much smaller than the root of the neck.
This works like a human neck, the edge of that dinosaur neck looks similar like a human neck. Then you just scale up that human neck to support the last neck, and then again to support the last neck etc, iterate and you get this dinosaur. Human necks doesn't weigh that much, so you can reach quite far with that style, this dinosaur shows you can get 6 meters with it.
Also note that it has those long bones underneath along the neck, that neck wasn't very flexible, rather it shows it was extremely stiff to make that weight easier to support so it maintains that position while being relaxed, that isn't exactly a flexible snake.
I'm pretty sure that the plaster cast skeleton in the image will be supported by thin cables or wires from the ceiling. Which would be supportive of my point.
In the same picture you posted, you see a bit of an elephant and its trunk. I know the trunk is pure muscle (no bones) but you can still see the engineering elements - it is tapered (thinner at the end), and when it is at rest it hangs low - only engaged at height occasionally.
There was no rest for the dinosaurs though - head the size of a small car, at the end of a very long projection... Unfeasible, I say!
> I'm pretty sure that the plaster cast skeleton in the image will be supported by thin cables or wires from the ceiling. Which would be supportive of my point.
so would a human skeleton? it has no connective tissue, it needs external support. when you add muscles, ligaments, cartilage, all that fleshy stuff, suddenly you have an arm that holds together and can move around without falling apart yknow?
It’s impossible for me to dunk a basketball on an NBA hoop, therefore it must be impossible for any human to do. How could a human possibly jump high enough and reach while holding the basketball? I’ve tried it, I couldn’t even get close. It’s impossible.
You keep saying “design” like this dinosaur would have been architected a certain way by some form of intelligence, rather than evolved over millions of years through dumb luck.
Your earlier comment about the pain of muscular stress implies that the dinosaurs joints, muscular and nervous system would be identical to that of human limbs. Which is unlikely if such a neck were to evolve.
Also your comparison to Lego is weird. Lego, which is something that was designed, was purposely designed with the goal of being easy to disassemble. So it’s not going to have the same structural integrity as stone, metal, nor bone.
> You keep saying “design” like this dinosaur would have been architected a certain way by some form of intelligence, rather than evolved over millions of years through dumb luck.
Yes, I do. Because we are several million years away from being able to personally verify the ideas we are presented with, when it comes to dinosaurs. We are dealing with a hypothesis based on the deductions from a small handful of bones, not reality.
Eg, when I was younger dinosaurs were never feathered. Pretty much all are now. It's that the ideas evolve, not the dinosaurs.
Nobody is going to claim that these theories are bulletproof but that’s an entirely different discussion to the point I was making about using the term “designed”
The thing you can also say about design, is even if there is no designer, a thing is the way it is for rational reasons. A tree wouldn't function as it does if it weren't for its form. I guess, you could I use the synonym "form" instead of "design".
I remember one day many years ago just snapping wondering what had been the the biggest animal to ever exist on earth, and after a few searches it seems like the consensus was *NOT* a dinosaur but the Blue Whale which still exists today, still think about it from time to time. The article only discusses land animals but I wonder if the blue whale still reigns after more modern discoveries.
We can't say with certainty that the blue whale is the largest animal ever, but to our knowledge at most there were several other species approximately the same size. And even those are based on estimates with rather huge ranges.
I read a book to my kid regularly that says that fact about blue whales too and I always kind of think it seems odd that it would be the biggest given the whole dinosaur thing in the past.
The ice age made water animals grow a lot since ice helps concentrate plankton. Earth is cooler today than at almost any other point in history, so makes sense we see bigger water animals today than historically. The ice age did the opposite for land animals, so we have smaller land animals than in history as well.
It’s vastly easier to be big in water than on the ground as a result of the square–cube law. Indeed it kind of boggles the mind how these gigantic dinosaurs were even able to stand, much less move around.
Sauropods were light for their size, the air sacs definitely did a lot of work, though so did much of the size being neck and tail.
Argentinosaurus is estimated to have reached 35 metres and 80 tonnes at the upper range, for comparison blue whales top out at 30 meters and 200 tonnes.
You can see something similar with giraffes, though without the benefit of tail (or air sacs). Male giraffes average above 5m tall (tallest known was 5.8m — 19ft) compared to a bush elephant's 3.2 (4 at the absolute limit), but the average male giraffe is just 1200kg versus 6000 for elephants.
Obviously Sauropods were still bonkers heavy, to a ridiculous degree for land animals.
Yes, I’m surprised that in a time those creatures existed on land something much larger didn’t existed at sea. My rudimentary knowledge of the past was that dinosaurs weren’t some anomaly, everything was large back then.
Yet. Our current reality is the largest land animal is oversized by 30x by the blue whale.
I wonder how much algae and plankton a blue whale ends up eating accidentally, and how much of its caloric intake that would represent. It has to be non-zero… but how non-zero I’m unsure.
I've been following dinosaurs for 45 years and learned a lot about science. Too much that ended up in 70s dinosaur children books was wrong, but was presented as scientific facts.
I don't think children's books are a good source of facts.
Probably a bunch of reasons for this... They necessarily have to be greatly simplified. There may be a bit of an urge to jazz it up to better capture the imaginations of children, which may lead to include and overemphasizing some of the more fanciful ideas... It would take a lot of effort to rewrite these books as the science evolves... it's possibly seen as unnecessary to be all that scientifically rigorous for an audience that, e.g., largely believes in the tooth fairy and easter bunny.
We all have to be willing to let go of the BS we were taught as children (and in high-school and as an undergraduate, and in our careers, and on through to today for that matter).
I was an intern at a large museum in NYC in 2017. When I visited the gift shop, I found a book which was published when Pluto was still a planet. It was the same book I was given when I was little, ~15 years ago!
But Pluto being demoted is/was a great injustice and a big mistake.
It was thought that we would find a huge number of dwarf planets shortly which would make list of planets untenable.
However, in the years following, we really haven’t expanded the list significantly.
It probably would have just been better to have added these “dwarf” planets to the list of planets rather than come up with a convoluted reasoning about clearing their environments, which isn’t even technically true for Earth.
There was a very well-established orthodoxy that you even see in a lot of dinosaur names; they were "lizards." It's hard to step back from that sort of orthodoxy and look at things in a fresh light. It's also professionally difficult to go basically "Umm. I think everyone's been largely wrong for the last 100 years."
Arguably relatively and quantum did this in physics but they were arguably refinements on existing knowledge that worked perfectly well to explain and predict most things in everyday life.
T-Rex with feathers looks just like a giant chicken. Chickens aren't exactly awe inspiring so I think that is part of it.
Chickens do ruthlessly hunt mice and other small things so a giant chicken would be really scary, just that our minds don't see them that way. But I can easily see raptors and t-rexes being just giant versions of our chickens with similar feathers, they are so similar in all other aspects.
Although there were larger raptors, velociraptor was about the size of a turkey--which is indeed one of its closest modern relatives. It got super-sized for Jurassic Park. And I know dinosaur in the general public's eyes conjures up T-Rex and Brontosaurus. But scientists were well aware that the majority of dinosaurs were a lot smaller.
But I don't disagree in general that there were a lot of factors that set the orthodoxy in place. Including that there were large (and flying) reptiles.
And I think they haven’t used the largest known dromaeosaurid, the Utahraptor, in any Jurassic Park/World movie, have they? A 7 meter long “velociraptor” sounds terryfing, but I guess at that point they rather go with the larger theropods.
Honestly if you've ever been in the middle of a group of wild Tom turkeys in the spring, I don't think that's any less scary.
Turkeys are dumb as hell. So they're not really a threat. But they're super aggressive (or can be) and if they had teeth and larger claws and especially if they were pack hunters, it wouldn't be great
The most recent consensus is that T. Rex probably wasn’t covered in feathers.
Based on an analysis of skin impressions and the likelihood that feathers would have caused such a large animal to overheat in the climate they lived in.
Scientific knowledge is contingent, things should be presented as our best theories to fit to the known evidence.
When the evidence changes, so should the theories.
I am only ever critical of the process when the above does not happen, or when people refuse to look for new evidence when it's reasonable for them to do so.
That's certainly true. In the case of dinosaurs though, there was probably a lot of evidence going back a long way that might have led someone to reasonably conclude "This is a fossil of a turkey, not a lizard." (Obviously a lot more than just looking at a fossil but, as I understand it, the rethinking of dinosaurs wasn't driven solely by new evidence.)
I also read the original comment more in the vein of: "Just because something thee the scientific consensus today, doesn't make it necessarily correct." (Though of course some things are more unlikely than others to radically change.)
Even today you'll have detailed descriptions and explanations of some dinosaur, and it turns out we have half of one bone and part of a head, and that's basically it.
Without spending years studying the stuff, it's really hard to figure out what is "this is absolutely known" (as in, we have a full fossil found in one location and in one piece) and what is "this is our current educated best guess".
I really recommend the youtuber "Your Dinosaurs are Wrong". It's an amateur team going through paleontology history/literature as sources to criticize classic children's toys of dinosaurs. It's really cool and you learn a lot.
still pretty based tho. featherless little armed bright orange and purple spotted raptors eating Triceratops the size of double decker buses running around recking stuff
I worked at a museum years ago, and one of the projects there was an AI chatbot for a titanosaur: https://www.fieldmuseum.org/exhibitions/maximo-titanosaur (near the bottom, the "Message Máximo" section; the web chat seems discontinued, but you can still text him).
From a marketing angle, it was interesting enough: a way to bring a fossil to life, giving him a name and a personality, with signage around the exhibition encouraging visitors to text him to ask questions about his past life, diet, tail, etc.
From a technical angle, it was a simple system built on Google Dialogflow (https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow?hl=en), a natural language parsing and no-code response tree system. This was all before GPTs really came in vogue, so the responses were all human-curated: parsed Dialogflow intent tokens in, highest matching response variants out, all edited in Dialogflow's nice GUI.
But what I really liked about it was the scientific angle. There were some serious behind-the-scenes efforts to make his responses scientifically accurate yet easily digestible. That museum was a research institution as well, and had a ton of PhD paleontologists actually researching titanosaurs and other sauropods. This was a way to collect popular questions from the public, filter it through their professional expertise, and then distill that knowledge back down into bite-size chunks suitable for families and kids, all while maintaining scientific integrity. Every week or so, the team would collect the latest questions, points of confusion, etc., and then it run it by the scientists again to update the dialog tree accordingly.
If the project were launched today instead, I wonder if it'd be possible to do something similar with a very tightly scoped GPT that could be trained only on the scientific data (published papers, etc.), eliminating or vastly reducing hallucinations, while still giving the GPT limited room to express a personality and not be limited by scripted responses. But there would still have to be a human in the loop to vet those responses for scientific accuracy. Not sure how to best build something like that, but it would be awesome for understaffed museum exhibitions (which is most of them!), a way for the public to be able to ask the exhibition itself questions, instead of hoping a knowledgeable PhD happened to be available right then.
Sorry, I'm not sure about that. I think traditional NLPs going the way of the, well, titanosaur, and all the companies I could find that used to do something similar seem to have pivoted to GPTs. Even Dialogflow itself has been tied into Google's generative models.
Both Google search and ChatGPT suggested Rasa and Botpress, for example, but both seem to have pivoted to GPTs these days.
I believe Dialogflow was specifically chosen because it was user-friendly and didn't need local dev/admin. It provided a cloud GUI that anyone could use to compose conversation flows out of intents and responses. Now, it's probably just a relic of a simpler time...
The half-life of DNA is about 500 years; the odds of finding any preserved sequences of dinosaur DNA longer than a few base pairs is pretty much nil. Even with very large samples, it simply would not be possible to recover any information from such fragments any more than you could reconstruct a book from a list of the syllables contained in a few million shredded copies.
You'd have an easier time modifying the genomes of modern-day birds and reptiles to produce something that looked like dinosaurs, but even this is far beyond the reach of current technology.
There are some birds even now that are "obviously" theropod dinosaurs (all birds are dinosaurs, but some are phenotypically closer to their ancestors than others). The sauropod lineage is truly dead though – birds are still their closest extant relatives, but the lineages diverged already in the late Triassic, ~230M years ago.
With the benefit of hindsight, it's a bit surprising that the link between ostriches and raptors (first fossil 1923 I think) in particular wasn't more noted which, of course, would have implied some link between theropods and modern birds more generally. There was some evidence like feathers on some dinosaurs but thinking about dinosaurs didn't really start changing en-masse until the late 1980s.
Yes, we have many sequences of avian dinosaurs (birds) and presumably future genome engineering methods will allow us to take those avian dinosaurs and give them the phenotype of titanosaurs and other extinct dinosaurs. But we will never be able to tell what DNA they had. It's gone. The best we can do is metabolomics.
Can we really know the phenotype of extinct dinosaurs, without their DNA? Whatever is left of these dinosaurs (fossils, prints…) probably doesn’t allow to know everything about the phenotype. We can guess, but we can’t know?
It was that picture in the article showing the size of that beast in relation to man that triggered this fantasy. Think Skinner’s ping pong playing pigeons - but scaled up to Godzilla size. Click & treat! :)
From the image, their substantial head (the weight of a man?) is on the end of a six meter horizontal length (6m is my estimate, from the image). Yes, the body is a big weight, and yes there is the counterbalance of a (relatively small) tail. If I were to hold a small broom, with the brush end away from me, I am only able to do this for a short while - and yet, these creatures spent all their days like this, swaying their heads around as they go!
It seems to me that the tension and pain these creatures must have been in because of their design and the effect of gravity would be too great to bear. If we look at something comparable that we know exists, we see a giraffe - these are slightly unfeasible too, but they are far smaller (3m neck?) but the angle of the neck is almost upright, hence there have nothing like the force dinosaurs would have had to bear.
It would be good to have a structural engineer go over the numbers for this dinosaur. I would expect a breaking point would be reached, and that there is no way the long neck could support such a heavy head over such a length without failure. We are talking about flesh and bone (which is surely incredible in its way, but holding huge weight up - the head - is not what meat and bone are good for; these are not lengths of metal.
PS, apparently a giraffe neck is only 2m, not 3 as I guessed.