Birds are considered to be dinosaurs. Birds exist now. We are finding dinosaur fossils now.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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That's what the XKCD that was posted says. Mostly.
There's always a relevant xkcd
The popup text on that one is quite funny.
Any idea how to access the pop-up text on a phone?
On my android, I just long press on the image, and it appears at the top of the popup menu
Which makes me ask, why were mammals able to evolve to produce an apex predator that relies on it's inventiveness (Humans) in quite a short time, but no similar "dinosaur" got to that point in a much longer period?
We're searching planets for signs of life as a pre-cursor to intelligent life, but there's no guarantee that life will evolve in the same direction as ours.
Corvids and psittacines display human child level intelligence. They use tools. They recognize other people. Hell the psittacines can mimic speech.
I personally suspect it's a matter of energy density. Birds have to use almost all of their available calories on flying. Doesn't leave a lot of energy left over for a massively hungry brain. No clue what's holding back penguins, emus, and cassowaries.
Birds have to use almost all of their available calories on flying.
But flying is quite energy efficient as a method of getting from point A to point B. That's why flying insects and birds have had such evolutionary success with that strategy.
Is it though? They have to eat an absolute ton relative to their own mass. At least all the birds I've ever interacted with were constantly eating, even when they mostly didn't bother flying. Chicken soccer is what I called feeding the chickens. No patience whatsoever.
My mother used to say that her sons eat like birds, a peck at a time, and twice our own body weight daily.
While we humans eat a lot, something like 50% of our calories are going to our brains. I'm not sure most birds could actually increase their caloric intake enough to be able to evolve bigger brains than they already have. Maybe if we designed them some super foods, but that seems to be cheating, to me.
While we humans eat a lot, something like 50% of our calories are going to our brains.
I don't think that's right.
This article says that about 20% of an adult human male's resting energy expenditure goes towards supporting the brain's metabolism. Obviously for more active people, the higher denominator of total energy expenditure will mean an even lower percentage of energy being used for the human brain.
Flying is energetically expensive to start doing, but pays off in efficiency once an animal moves a far enough distance. How many calories does a goose need to consume to fly 4000 km, and how does that compare to terrestrial species like deer or wolves?
...something like 50% of our calories are going to our brains.
Dang, I'll have to remember this next time my ADHD pushes me to hyperfocus and I risk skipping meals again. O.O
The difference is that they decided not to be parasitic narcissistic global suicide "apex" who gave no fucks, literally, about our will-no-longer-exist "children."
You're so narcissistic you will refuse to admit that they weren't stupid. The very way you will chose to be exactly that by denying the obvious as I lay it out so blatantly that your ego cries and denies ad infinitum.
Edit: Yeah and it's okay. Those downvotes will save anyone's life on this planet. Adiós!
Now you get it. :)
Also, water you are drinking has probably been peed by dinosaure. Several time. But probably not peed by a human.
guzzles water
There are fossilized humans. Fossilization really doesn't take that much time, geologically speaking; it just requires very specific conditions.
Also makes you wonder what fossils they mean, of the same species or then already extinct ones.
Because according to a quick Wikipedia search the oldest hominid fossils (?) are something like 7 millions years old
That's much much shorter than dinosaurs where around but hey " hominins are around long enough to unearth hominin fossils"!
About how much time are we talkin here?
Human species before H. Sapiens
Homer Sapiens?
Where are the bodies?
Where's Rachel!?
Where are the other drugs going?
I don’t know, swear to God
For some reason, I don't entirely believe you. Might be the whole God of Madness thing. You turning back into Jyggalag anytime soon? I'd like to know when to short the shit out of the entire market.
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It is more chronologically accurate to show a t-rex being hit by a car than it is to show a t-rex eating a stegosaurus
You made me scroll up to the picture again, looking for a T-Rex or a car
And people mocked me for my human-tyrannosaur slashfic on ao3. Well, who's laughing now?
I said I'm sorry. But if you're going to let your T-Rex out at night you should at least put a reflective collar on it.
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This meme made me gasp loud enough that my girlfriend was worried something was wrong.
Then I had to explain that I'm 41 years old and was just shocked by a dinosaur fact.
Forty-one?! You're practically a fossil!
To be fair, things can fossilise very quickly given ideal conditions. Still dinosaurs reigned for a lot more time than mammals and frankly nature is still feeling the loss in certain ways.
https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-miss-the-mammoths/
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This is only mind blowing because popular media likes to show every dinosaur at once. Like there's a lot of things depicting stegosaurus fighting T-Rex; but these animals never would have met. They're from entirely different periods.
We live closer to the time of T-Rex than T-Rex lived to the time of Stegosaurus.
67 million years separate us from T-Rex.
83 million years separate T-Rex from Stegosaurus. (150 million years between us and Stegosaurus)
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