DINOSAURS

Welcome to the twelfth installment of Axioms with Barry! Today we will be discussing dinosaurs. They appeared on earth 250 million years ago and died out 185 million years later. The earth was a different place back then. It was a simpler time. It was a more dangerous time, yet simpler.

Dinosaurs are awesome, but largely misunderstood. Despite the inordinate amount of dinosaur fossils found, there is still a considerable amount of debate within the scientific community about dinosaurs. Many paleontologists believe that birds are descendants of dinosaurs, but new theories indicate that dinosaurs may in fact have descended from birds, or at least they both have a common ancestor and evolved separately. Be wary of that crow outside your window, it may still have dinosaur instincts! In fact, many dinosaurs had feathers, including the Velociraptor.

As much as I love Jurassic Park, the size of the Velociraptors was inaccurate in the movie. The design of the raptors in the movie was based on the much more intimidating Deinonychus. Velociraptors were actually only about two to three feet tall. I still wouldn’t want to encounter one, but they were much smaller than their portrayal. They were more like chickens. Giant deadly chickens with razor sharp claws who wouldn’t hesitate to kill if they were hungry or threatened. The greatest trick the raptor ever pulled was convincing the world it was a chicken. Clever girl.

Unfortunately, neither Velociraptors nor Deinonychus were nearly as fast in real life as their combined depiction in Jurassic Park. There is also no evidence that they hunted in packs. That doesn’t take away from how amazing they were, however.

What sounds did dinosaurs make? No one knows! One thing I am sure of, is that they certainly didn’t roar after they killed their prey. I’ve never understood movies where the dinosaur kills something and then roars about it to let every other dinosaur for miles know where it is. Are there any animals in the world that roar like that after they kill something? I understand roaring to protect themselves, but not just because they killed something. It just doesn’t make sense. Okay, I feel better having said that. Considering the common ancestry with birds, perhaps dinosaurs didn’t roar at all, but rather chirped. I would love to see a movie where a Tyrannosaurus chirped.

Chirping would have been a great hunting tactic to lure in its prey too. You hear “tweet tweet tweet” and think there are baby birds through the trees. You walk over to investigate and BAM!! You get T-Rexed! That, or Emeril Lagasse just threw seasoning at you. I’d normally say that I would prefer the seasoning to the Tyrannosaurus, but that would just make me taste better to predators and what the heck is Emeril doing cooking in the middle of a forest during the Cretaceous Period?

I don’t mean to pick solely on the Tyrannosaurus, as there were larger and more deadly dinosaurs, but it is one of the most iconic and well known. It did have a big head and little arms, but those arms were anything but weak. They could lift 440 pounds. Even proportionate to humans, their arms were much stronger. It has been posited that the Tyrannosaurus was merely a scavenger, as no evidence had been found that they hunted for prey. However, new research has revealed that they did hunt, if even only part of the time.

There is a famous painting in the Louvre and/or online drawings that represents a Tyrannosaurus in an epic battle with a Stegosaurus. For those who believe that this could have occurred, you should refer to my friend (I use that term loosely, as we have already established that the life of a trivia truth seeker is a lonely one) Elise Andrew from I Fuck*ng Love Science (is that where the asterisk is supposed to go?). Naturally, not all dinosaurs existed at the same time, and there is more time between when Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus lived (~83 million years) than the time difference between Tyrannosaurus and you (~65 million years). Let’s all close our eyes and meditate on what this fact means in the history of our world.

That is all the time we have today. I blame you for meditating too long because I had much more to write about. Unfortunately we only grazed the surface of dinosaur facts, but to be honest, we did cover the coolest dinosaurs! Thank you for tuning in and as always, stay knowledgeable!