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.
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.