We Have Probably Been Imagining Pterosaurs Wrongly | Hacker News Reader

We Have Probably Been Imagining Pterosaurs Wrongly

atlasobscura.com

39 pointsBerislavLopac17 comments

This article has two images of the old way people picture the Pterosaurs, but only shows a close up of the hips, and not the whole animal, in the newly hypothesized position. Highly unsatisfactory.

Yeah, a simple "Before and After" shot would tell the whole story at a glance—which makes me wonder if these writers are incentivized to not summarize their work visually.

That's not a closeup of the hips, that's the entire body of it. I think you're being thrown off by the weird angle of the shot - the hips are in the top right, not the bottom left. This shows the legs tucked forward with the knees against the rib cage.

All of its appendages extend off the edge of the picture, so it's pretty hard to mentally reconstruct the whole animal.

The page shows a modal popup with two options: consent to personalised ads, or visit the privacy policy to withdraw consent. I visited the privacy policy and withdrew consent (by clicking the link at the end of the page's text, obstructively labelled “here”), but I was still unable to read the article.

(…until I deleted a few page elements using the page inspector, and removed a class from the body element. This is beyond most users.)

I thought this was illegal now, in the new world of the GDPR, because consent must be actually consensual.

They don't want to give you their content unless you agree to their terms. "Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots."

The GPDR still doesn't allow for sites to gate access based on a user allowing their data to be harvested. It was done like this explicitly because of the way every site turned the cookie notice into a click to continue box

The article is not accessible to EU citizens that want to exert their rights to privacy

"Special Note to International Users

The Website is hosted in the United States and is intended for and directed to users in the United States. If you are accessing the Website from the European Union, Asia, or any other region with laws or regulations governing personal data collection, use, and disclosure, that differ from United States laws, please be advised that through your continued use of the Website, which is governed by U.S. law, this Privacy Policy, and our Terms of Use, you are transferring your personal information to the United States and you consent to that transfer."

Interesting. Anybody competent with the matter who could pitch in and discuss whether this is a viable / advisable solution for a service with lack of business / information ambitions involving EU users?

I don't have to be "competent with the matter" to see that there's merit to this strategy.

If the costs of dealing with European users are higher (or simply perceived to be higher) than the benefits, why bother?

Normal pose is difficult to infer from a pile of bones. So this sort of rethinking goes on quite a bit.

I remember this discussion about rethinking the correct pose of the archeopteryx. Less splayed out, similar to this article.

And the t-rex used to be posed more upright, now it is posed more horizontally. In the Carnegie Museum the old t-rex was very upright in a fairly static pose, now they have two in rather dynamic pose horzontally with their tails off the ground.

I believe some of the earliest dinosaur models were posed in assumed ways that were later drastically changed.

"Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs!" [1] is a great book that I love to read to my children. I hope it helps them understand that scientific knowledge changes all the time.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27579.Boy_Were_We_Wrong_...

Probably all of them. I don't buy the main color we assign to dinosaurs. They were clearly rainbow color.

If only the makers of Jurassic had acknowledged that obvious fact, the movie would have been a lot more entertaining.

(You just made may day! ;-)

RIP Brontosaurus.

Brontosaurus has been revived. Recent research suggests that it is in fact a different genus than Apatosaurus. This is like getting Pluto back as a planet.

That would be a tremendous band name.

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