The biggest dinosaurs couldn't sit on their eggs | Hacker News Reader

The biggest dinosaurs couldn't sit on their eggs

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49 pointsBiraIgnacio16 comments

Related only topically, a 1hr YouTube talk I enjoyed a lot: "Hatchling T. rex and the Evolution of Vertebrate Parental Care" by Nick Longrich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd0dR2n9hLA

He's a paleontologist and the talk starts with some pretty interesting statistical analysis aiming to estimate T rex clutch sizes (66 eggs) and hatchling weights (1.5kg) as well as T rex parental care. It ends with looking at evolutionary history trends in increasing parental investment in radically different animals.

He talks a little slow, so a little playback speed bump won't go amiss.

I would love to know the day-to-day ins and outs of being a archaeologist in today's world. A glamorous edition is "the fly around the world to exotic places to find fossils", but I'd love any good books or blogs that talk about the nitty gritty details I wouldn't expect or even know to look for.

You mean paleontologist. Finding new fossils is a tiny part of their work. Mostly it's analysing existing fossils, general research and teaching.

Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week - https://svpow.com - is one that shows up on Hacker News from time to time. (There's much more to it than the title might suggest.)

Not a paleontologist but my 2 sons went through a dinosaur phase not long ago. It seems like the vast majority of known dinosaur samples come from the northern rockies.

Echoing sibling comments to add that I know for a fact that archaeologists get rather upset about being mistaken for palaeontologists.

There's a fair bit of overlap and people who work in both, but yes, they're distinct specialties. I wouldn't say upset though, except in the sense that grocery store clerks are upset by "if it doesn't scan it's free" jokes.

Archeologist: I am currently working at an archeological dig in Egypt.

Nobody: Were there a lot of dinosaurs in Egypt?

Consider that the bigger the egg, the smaller its surface-area-to-volume ratio, and so the easier it hangs on to heat, and so the smaller the temperature differential that is required to keep it heated.

Same technique as Australia's bush turkey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megapode#/media/File:Brushturk...

A more direct link than a crocodile, as birds came from dinosaurs.

Afaik, the modern view on birds is not that they came from dinosaurs, but they are dinosaurs, the only kind that survived.

That's probably a bit pedantic. Whether you draw a magic line with dinosaurs on one side and (avian) dinosaurs/birds on the other or just say that birds continued on from the avian dinosaur clade is pretty definitional.

As a complete layman, I wonder if it's not how adaptive life is and instead how infectious survival is.

Would we be able to tell if they had big swinging bellies like cats?

Very Sad.

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