Sadly, my second favorite dinosaur was Joan Rivers.
Always glad to meet another Aklyosaurophile.
I’d love for science to figure out how something so damn big could exist. As far as I know the three problems of bone strength, muscle strength, and pumping blood are still unsolved… there’s just a bunch of unsatisfying theories.
What do you call a dinosaur who’s retaining water? Cankylosaurus.
Wow, those Fremen get around. You don’t even see the harness.
Can I interest you in a sweet sweet Triceratops?
How unexpected - to see the word “new” together with the word “dinosaur.”
Agreed. Read an article years ago explaining how the existence of giant humanoids was impossible due to these issues. It went on to explain how a free standing land based animal could not get much bigger than a modern elephant.
I think you mean "land mammal." We have certain built-in structural limitations that the dinosaurs didn’t share, which is also the reason why (for example) a giraffe could never evolve a neck as long as a sauropod’s.
On the other hand, dinosaurs probably couldn’t digest ice cream. So net win for the furry critters.
Can you imagine something that size with a bad case of lactose intolerance and the mother of all ice-cream headaches…
Key evidence in the case for the Ankylosaurus
It would be akin to a whole sewage treatment plant uprooting from its foundation and forging a path of destruction on the scale of an EF-5 Tornado.
Dinosaurs may have had a different “structure,” but that doesn’t grant anything the ability to ignore the laws of physics, an in some ways it appears dinosaurs did manage to ignore physics.
Or scientists just haven’t figured it out yet. I hope they do because it’s probably fascinating.
Is that why they died out - they weren’t able to digest ice cream? That’s so sad…
The feathers are missing. Somebody has to start putting the feathers on these illustrations. Getting the color of the skin right isn’t the big issue. Getting the feathers right is. Some still have T. rex standing upright. An impossible position that early archaeologists broke the vertebrae of T. rex’s back and tail to get it into. Others have T. rex being terrible threatening from his actual prone posture. Give it up! Truth is stranger than fiction so scientists tell a fiction for believablility and to avoid arguing with the uneducated. Lets get real.
I suspect that the largest dinosaurs were still mostly devoid of feathers, just as the largest mammals (elephants, hippos, rhinos, whales, etc.) are mostly devoid of fur.
Many theropod dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus should have feathers, but it is not yet clear how widespread they are in others. At least some definitely did have scaly skin, and a 2009 commentary I found here (pdf) includes sauropods like this and many other plant eaters among those groups.
In fact you will notice it wasn’t clear there were feathers in any dinosaurs besides theropods, it depends on whether you interpret the bristles in Tianyulong and Psittacosaurus as related. That’s still largely true. Just this July there was another find, Kulindadromeus, interpreted as better evidence the dinosaurs shared ancestral proto-feathers; it will be interesting to see how well that holds up.
All in all, though, I expect the artist knew what they were doing in leaving them out here.
A new dinosaur?
I just want Brontosaurus back.
Also, phooey on your ankylosaurus. Give me a styracosaurus any day.
Ankylosaurus is clearly the best, but I´d say that Triceratops doesn´t have to worry about this upstart contesting his #2 position. Any dinosaur without spikes or horns will have a hard time even scratching the top 5 if you ask me.
