>>5118655 I'm convinced if we ever found big foot or the yeti we'd stick a couple in zoos and then lose interest since they'd just be another great ape at that point.
>>5118655 >It's a shame no animals are as big >big >implying size is the only thing making dinosaurs cool
What about the extremely efficient respiratory system? The sheer diversity in body plans? The arms race between herbivores and carnivores, resulting in spiked tails, club tails, bone crushing teeth, literal armor? The current extant animals are simply lacklustre compared to DINOGODS
I also notice you completely skipped pterosaurs because you knew no living flyer could ever be as impressive or weird as the Azhdarchids
>>5118664 Giraffes for example are such a unique and cool animal yet we kinda take them for granted But if giraffes were extinct people would be fascinated by them and their unusual proportions
Old good new bad, unironically. They are just intrinsically scarier, cooler and more primal in a way modern animals can never match no matter their feats.
>>5118685 The dodo is only remembered for being the first recognised example of humans wiping out a species. Nobody cares about the rodrigues solitaire.
>>5118764 Modern elephants are boring, I want more Proboscidean variety. Deinotherians and Gomphotherians were cool as shit. Giraffes are perfect though.
>>5118655 >>The blue whale is bigger than the largest dinosaurs, though. Does nothing but swim around and suck in water >>Yellow bellied sea snakes can spend their whole lives at sea, though. It's just a snake
Because people are used to these animals. But really our animals are cooler. Dinosaurs got blown the fuck out and yet these still exist and all that remains of dinosaurs are birds. Dinosaurs and extinct animals are cool, but people severely underestimate and undervalue the dudes that actually won at life and are still here.
>>5121413 >Does nothing but swim around and suck in water Sauropods did nothing but walk around and eat plants. >It's just a snake Mosasaurs were just big monitor lizards.
>>5118655 >I fantasize about regular interaction with hypermegafauna >but the largest is in a remote section of the world that you will likely never see
>I fantasize about a diverse ecosystem including giant creatures like plesiosaurs >some snakes can swim!
>>5118896 If you look at a birds foot and then pretend the rest of the bird looks like a lizard that's kinda like looking at a dinosaur if you think about it.
elephants are already at the extreme limit of how big a land animal can be. if it was bigger no bones could support its weight, no heart could pump enough blood etc.
t-rex was an agile hunter bigger than elephants? fuck off. big herbivores the size of a building? many theories about how they only survived in shallow waters and never came out, unable to support their own weight on land, but specimens are found far from ancient waterways so it doesn't track. fliers like pterodactycls have wingspans that couldn't support their weight.
the only real explanation is that gravity was lower in the past.
>>5118655 I am always in awe that we have such luxury status to live with the biggest animal ever to grace our planet, unless there’s some truly enormous jellyfish or siphonophore in the primeval past or something idk.
Oh and it’s a gentle creature who will only hurt you if you swim right next to it like an idiot because it can’t help being a huge and strong motherfucker.
>>5118664 people do take the dinosaurs we have today for granted, which is especially insane considering how unique and specialized they are, and their extravagant variety.
>fliers like pterodactycls have wingspans that couldn't support their weight. nobody tell him about the big metal birds living in metal caves at the airport
>>5118655 Ever hear of the concept of spectacle? We have snakes on land, who cares about a swimming one. When people say marine reptiles they mean giant archosaurs/60-foot crocs with flippers, something alien. And blue whales are mogged by the biggest dinosaurs. Any time you find a femur of some titanosaur it’s just as big as the biggest blue whale of all time and there were objectively titanosaurs twice that big at least if some random one-off bone is already matching the whale. +filter feeding gentle giants are fucking boring they don’t do anything
>>5123812 Yeah, but I’m gonna bet that even if we had terror birds still running around, people would still mourn the loss of their Jurassic Park “Velociraptors” instead of appreciating their local phorusrhacids. Giraffes are tall as fuck, but people compare them to sauropod dinos. Current elephants are essentially hadrosaurs with a big fuck off trunk instead of a big fuck off tail.
>>5125815 >you have to travel to Galapagos if you want to see marine iguanas, blue-footed boobies, Galapagos fur seals and sea lions, flightless cormorants, lava lizards, and a host of other cool species
>>5125577 terror birds are birds, dinosaurs are an alien monster with jaws and arms and a tail, terror birds are literally just mean ostriches that ate meat
>>5118655 >It's a shame there are no marine reptiles alive today Im not sure if this is a made up strawman or if there are people this genuinely oblivious or retarded.
>>5128242 >dinosaurs were actually weak trannies that only ate fruits and nuts chud! they are smaller than their fossils actually! outlier titanosaurs were probably bigger than Godzilla
>>5126446 A stegosaurus tail is infinitely cooler than a prickly rat wtf are you even saying? Only thing porcufaggots ever did was make me uncomfortable for the portion of the movie Homeward Bound when chance had some quills stuck in his face.
>>5118655 >>It's a shame there are no marine reptiles alive today :( ?? who tf says that? I'm pretty sure the average person knows that sea turtles,iguanas and crocodiles are a thing. And no,a non biologist person doesn't think at all about the sea reptilians from the Mesozoic
>>5126448 >they'd have all been exterminated by cavemen. Early human hunter-gatherers are a major red herring for the extinctions and changes in the last glacial maximum. At most, they were a domino in a large set of events that were gonna happen anyways.
After the agricultural revolution though, anything is possible.
The problem with blue whales is theyre huge and insanely impressive but they live in the open ocean so no one ever sees them and its basically like they dont exist.
They're hard to even film and even when filmed never have anything near them as size reference so its really really hard to even tell how big they are. In most footage a blue whale and regular whale swimming around functionally look like the same size or whatever.