Titanosaurs were the biggest land animals Earth's ever seen
phys.org
phys.org
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/FMNH_Pat...
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!
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?
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.
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.
It's fine use either term: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/design
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.
Yet. Our current reality is the largest land animal is oversized by 30x by the blue whale.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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".
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmVa-cbCpkd5Cd9Fr_4tCWg
[original channel] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaCDmykyjVw_B983AQ2iG...
[spinosaurus] https://youtu.be/6oCqSqY7FiI (This was, I believe before they found or reported the tail)
I’m genuinely curious to learn true facts.
(Would this be like dinosaurs might have actually had feathers/fur, and not just look reptilian)
Dinosaurs were slow, lumbering beasts.
Dinsoaurs were cold-blooded.
Large dinosaurs, like Brontosaurus (huh!), could not have lived outside of water and spent all of their lives at least partially submerged.
Dinosaurs were stupid because their brains were so small.
Dinosaurs were an evolutionary dead-end.
Imagine if Pluto kept changing between planet and planetoid every few decades.
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.
Art is hard to separate from context and background, and knowing it's just a GPT as opposed to a human written dialogue seems a bit disappointing.
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...
On mobile, the first tap brought up a donation request instead, which might perhaps have dissuaded you from trying a second time.
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.
I saw an article not too long ago about creating chicken embrios with teeth. Doesn't seem that far
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird
I’m unaware of any lizards in that clade, so if you want to own dinosaurs, then the birds are a better option.
But there are many great (other) reptile pets as well, such as lizards.