dinosaurs

"What gave archosaurs the edge as large predators at this time, and therapsids the edge as smaller ones? Frankly, I am not sure. Both seem to have had heightened metabolic rates and fur or feather insulation... Perhaps the chief advantage enjoyed by thecodonts centered around their big, slashing attack jaws. These may have made them better big-game hunters, while the more precise cutting teeth of therapsids were more suitable for smaller prey."

"Although some dinosaurs may have spent some time feeding in the water like moose or fishing cats, at most a few became strongly amphibious in the manner of hippos, much less marine as per seals and whales. The only strongly aquatic dinosaurs are some birds. The occasional statement that there were marine dinosaurs is therefore incorrect - these creatures of Mesozoic seas were various forms of reptiles that had evolved over the eons."

"Imagine, if you will, a world filled with billions of dinosaurs. A world where they can be found in thousands of shapes, sizes, colours and classes in every habitable pocket of the planet. Imagine them from the desert dunes of the Sahara to the frozen rim of the Antarctic Circle - and from the balmy islands of the South Pacific to the high flanks of the Himalayas. The thing is, you don't have to imagine very hard. In fact, wherever you live, you can probably step outside and look up into the trees and skies to find them. For the dinosaurs are the birds and they are all around you. Dinosaurs didn't die out when an asteroid hit the earth 66 million years ago. Everything you were told as a child was wrong."

"From nesting, brooding and sex, to metabolism, development and even the diseases that afflicted them, many of the traits found in birds today were inherited from the dinosaurs. The boundary between dinosaurs and birds has become utterly blurred."

"Alterations to our favorite dinosaurs filter into the public consciousness only slowly, often taking a generation or more to become accepted. I’m now an unabashed advocate for fuzzy, fluffy, bristly, and feathered dinosaurs, but before I knew better I couldn’t believe that dinosaurs were different from the scaly monstrosities I grew up with. The fact that Jurassic Park 4 is supposed to feature naked dinosaurs—contrary to the overwhelming evidence science has to offer—confirms that many paleo fans of my generation and older prefer the comfort of recognizable pseudo-dinos to the more realistic ones paleontologists are reviving. But the latest generation of little dinosaur maniacs is fully onboard with the latest science. Then again, today’s dinosaur dreams might become fossilized in their minds, too. I wonder what they will scoff at when they grow up and see future museum displays or films that depict dinosaurs in ways that are strange and unfamiliar from what they learned in their childhoods."

"Sauropod dinosaurs are the terrestrial superlative: they were not just the largest animals ever to have walked on land, but an order of magnitude heavier than their nearest rivals – the hadrosaurid dinosaurs, and the proboscidean and indricotherian mammals."

"Come ho estesamenente discusso in passato, non ci sono prove che questo teropode avesse un'intelligenza "da scimpanzé"..., né che cacciasse in branchi organizzati. Anche se banale da dire, esso non deve essere visto come una terrificante "macchina da morte" ma solamente come un interessante predatore diapside opportunista, molto probabilmente solitario e tendente all'agguato, con un comportamento ed un'intelligenza intermedi tra quelli dei coccodrilli e quelli dei grandi uccelli non volatori."

"As I've said numerous times before, there is no proof that this theropod had chimpanzee-level intelligence..., nor that it hunted in organised packs. It may seem obvious, but it shouldn't be seen as a terrifying "killing machine", but simply as an interesting and opportunistic diapsid predator which was most probably a solitary ambush hunter, with a behaviour and intelligence intermediate between that of crocodiles and large flightless birds."

"Yes, while T. rex played a prominent role in Crichton's pair of novels Jurassic Park (1990) and a sequel, The Lost World (1995), those nasty, sickle-clawed Velociraptors absolutely stole the show! The raptors took center stage in both novels and three Jurassic Park movies. But while no movie featured raptor dinosaurs before the Jurassic Park phenomenon, by then raptors had already stormed the beaches of science fiction literature... For besides fear and nightmares, now, simply the name Velociraptor - a dinosaur the name of which few knew thirty years ago - also evokes thoughts of DNA cloning, feathers and avian connections, warm-bloodedness, and even the softer side of familial relations. Now raptors are veritable monsters not only due to their inherent savagery, but also for their crafty, menacing intellect. Indeed, the raptors are imbued with qualities far too human-like for our comfort."

"Raptors did not actually resemble the reptilian monsters depicted in popular cinema, but were very large predatory ground birds, some with wings of substantial size (evidence of this comes from feather anchor points found on the wing bones of Velociraptor mongoliensis). The "raptors" did not closely resemble their carnosaurian cousins, but rather oversized Archaeopteryx."

"These are among my very favourite dinosaurs. Their long up-curved skulls, slender yet compact proportions, and great sickle claws make these elegant, attractive, yet demonic animals. There is nothing else like them. Pound for pound, these are among the most powerful of known predators; certainly no other theropod had such a combination of foot, hand, and head weaponry... Among theropods only Tyrannosaurus, with its extreme skull strength, equalled Velociraptor in total power relative to weight."

"The scene has been portrayed in paintings, drawings, and illustrations hundreds of times, but it remains thrilling. Tyrannosaurus, the greatest dinosaur toreador, confronts Triceratops, the greatest set of dinosaur horns. No matchup between predator and prey has ever been more drammatic. It's somehow fitting that those two massive antagonists lived out their co-evolutionary belligerence through the very last days of the very last epoch in the Age of Dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurus stood over twenty feet tall when fully erect, and a large adult was as heavy as a small elephant - five tons. No predatory dinosaur, no predatory land animal of any sort, had more powerful jaws. Withstanding a Tyrannosauruss attack required either tanklike armor - the approach taken by Ankylosaurus - or most powerful defensive weapons - the approach taken by Triceratops."

"The most popular exhibits in any natural history museum are, without doubt, the dinosaurs. These creatures' popularity grows each year, partly because of the recent resurgence of dinosaur movies, but also because a skeleton of a full-sized tyrannosaurus rex still has the ability, even 65 million years after its death, to chill us to the bone."

"I was looking forward to buying fluffy dinosaurs for my granddaughters and a bag of assorted fossils for my grandson, and for me. However, as I approached the door I realised that it was not a shop; it was a church. The preacher and his congregation, far from celebrating dinosaurs, would be cursing them, if indeed they believed in their existence at all. Even more abhorrent was the concept of 'evolution', especially the suggestion that man himself is descended from 'lower forms', which is considered not merely a fallacy, but an iniquitous falsehood, a heresy and a sin. Such are the convictions and the creed of the 'Creationist' churches. There are an awful lot of them in the States, especially down south."

"And let us squarely face the dinosaurness of birds and the birdness of the Dinosauria. When the Canada geese honk their way northward, we can say: "The dinosaurs are migrating, it must be spring!""

"It will blow some people's minds to realise that those dinosaurs in the movies would have been even weirder, and I think even scarier - like big fluffy birds from hell."

"No one, either in the nineteenth century or the twentieth, has ever built a persuasive case proving that dinosaurs as a whole were more like reptilian crocodiles than warm-blooded birds. No one has done this because it can't be done."

"Twentieth-century paleontologists have fallen into the bad habit of reconstructing the dinosaurs' life functions by using crocodiles as a living model. But the earliest researchers of the nineteenth century proved beyond a doubt that the dinosaurs' powerful hind limbs must have operated like the limbs of gigantic birds."

"Dinosaurs are not lizards, and vice versa. Lizards are scaley reptiles of an ancient bloodline. The oldest lizards antedate the earliest dinosaurs by a full thirty million years. A few large lizards, such as the man-eating Komodo dragon, have been called "relicts of the dinosaur age", but this phrase is historically incorrect. No lizard ever evolved the birdlike characteristics peculiar to each and every dinosaur. A big lizard never resembled a small dinosaur except for a few inconsequential details of the teeth. Lizards never walk with the erect, long-striding gait that distinguishes the dinosaurlike ground birds today or the birdlike dinosaurs of the Mesozoic."

"Humans are proud of themselves. The guiding principle of the modern age is "Man is the measure of all things." And our bodies have excited physiologists and philosophers to a profound awe of the basic mammalian design. But the history of the dinosaurs should teach us some humility... If our fundamental mammalian mode of adaptation was superior to the dinosaurs', then history should record the meteoric rise of the mammals and the eclipse of the dinosaurs. Our own Class Mammalia did not seize the dominant position in life on land. Instead, the mammal clan was but one of many separate evolutionary families that succeeded as species only by taking refuge in small body size during the Age of Dinosaurs. As long as there were dinosaurs, a full 130 million years, remember, the warm-blooded league of furry mammals produced no species bigger than a cat."

"I dromaeosauridi terricoli ricordano un modello predatorio felide non-cursorio (come lince e giaguaro) basato sull'agguato e sull'uso dell'arto anteriore nella predazione, piuttosto che un modello canide (stile lupo e licaone), più cursorio, basato sull'inseguimento e che non usa l'arto anteriore nella predazione, plausibile invece per i tyrannosauridi... Quindi il velocissimo "raptor" corridore è solo un mito post-moderno, privo di fondamenta scientifiche: in quanto a corsa, un dromaeosauridae era nettamente meno portato di un ornithomimidae, tyrannosauridae, troodontidae, alvarezsauridae o avimimidae."

"Even though paleontologists have uncovered numerous dinosaurs with everything from bristles and fuzz to full-flight feathers—which document the evolution of plumage from fluff to aerodynamic structures that allowed dinosaurs to take to the air—creationists deny the clear fossil record. There’s plenty of reason for creationists to abhor dinosaur feathers. The mountain of evidence that birds are living dinosaurs, and that many “bird” traits were widely shared among non-avian dinosaurs, are among the most gorgeous examples of evolutionary change yet found. Put feathers on a Velociraptor—we know it had feathers thanks to quill knobs preserved along its arm bones—and you get something disturbingly birdlike, revealing the dinosaur’s kinship to the ancestors of Archaeopteryx and other early birds. Not surprisingly, creationist groups like Answers in Genesis don’t feature feathery dinosaurs in their literature and museum exhibits. Instead, they take pride in promoting out-of-date, monstrous dinosaurs that more easily fit their contention that these animals were created separately from all other forms of life."

"Archaeopteryx is so nearly identical in all known features with small carnivorous dinosaurs that it is hard to believe feathers were not present in such dinosaurs."

"When the dinosaurs fell at the end of the Cretaceous, they were not a senile, moribund group that had played out its evolutionary options. Rather they were vigorous, still diversifying into new or­ders and producing a variety of big­brained carnivores with the highest grade of intelligence yet present on land."

"The dinosaurs are not extinct. The colorful and successful diversity of the living birds is a continuing expression of basic dinosaur biology."

"I would be thrilled if palaeontologists discovered compelling evidence that tyrannosaurs were social hunters. A trackway preserving the footsteps of several individuals moving in the same direction at the same time would be excellent. But until then, tableaus of tyrannosaur families dining together must remain tantalisingly speculative parts of prehistory."

"Of all the organisms scientists have found in the fossil record, Tyrannosaurus rex is the most prominent ambassador for paleontology. No dinosaur hall is complete without at least some fragment of the tyrant dinosaur, and almost anything about the dinosaur is sure to get press coverage. We simply can't get enough of old T. rex."

"BLAIN [offering a plug of chewing-tobacco to his comrades, which they each refuse] ...bunch of slack-jawed faggots around here... [holds up plug] ...this stuff will put hair on your hogleg... guaranteed... make you a God-damned sexual ty-ran-toe-sore-ass... just like me."

"This is the theropod. Indeed, excepting perhaps Brontosaurus, this is the public's favourite dinosaur, having fought King Kong for the forced favor of Fay Wray and smashed Tokyo (with inferior special effects) in the guise of Godzilla."

"To a fair extent the Tyrannosaurus species are the tyrannosaur's of tyrannosaurs; they have taken to an extreme the development of skull size, strength, and power. This and the larger, more forward-pointing mid-upper jaw teeth suggest a more potent wounding ability than the albertosaur's. The stoutness of Tyrannosaurus relative to albertosaurs is readily apparent in the skeletal restorations. They are not as graceful, but they have a well-proportioned, majestic attractiveness of their own."

"The culmination of tyrannosaur evolution, T. rex was one of the very last North American dinosaurs. Nothing else combined its size, speed, and power. Since its demise we have had to make do with lions and tigers and bears, and other "little" mammalian carnivores."

"We comprehend... that nuclear power is a real danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest danger of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs."

"Tyrannosaurus is universally known by its full specific name, Tyrannosaurus rex, a fact which elevates it above the anonymous generic labelling of other fossil species, which are almost all known only by their generic names without mention of their species. Does anyone ever talk about Velociraptor mongoliensis? No, there is only "the velociraptor" (or, worse still, "raptor")."

"Tyrannosaurus è universalmente noto con l'intero nome specifico, Tyrannosaurus rex, fatto che lo eleva al di sopra del genere anonimato delle altre specie di fossili, quasi tutte note solo col nome generico, senza mai menzione della specie. Qualcuno cita mai Velociraptor mongoliensis? No, esiste solo "il velociraptor" (o, peggio, "il raptor")."

"We have as much evidence that T. rex was feathered, at least during some stage of its life, as we do that australopithecines like Lucy had hair."

"Here again one sees the gigantic man-made fallacy that informs our "Genesis" story. How can it be proven in one paragraph that this book was written by ignorant men and not by any god? Because man is given 'dominion' over all beasts, fowl and fish. But no dinosaurs or plesiosaurs or pterodactyls are specified, because the authors did not know of their existence, let alone of the supposedly special and immediate creation."

"If we measured success by longevity, then dinosaurs must rank as the number one success story in the history of land life. Not only did dinosaurs exercise an airtight monopoly as large land animals, they kept their commanding position for an extraordinary span of time - 130 million years. Our own human species is no more than a hundred thousand years old. And our own zoological class, the Mammalia, the clan of warm-blooded furry creatures, has ruled the land ecosystem for only seventy million years. True, the dinosaurs are extinct, but we ought to be careful in judging them inferior to our own kind. Who can say that the human system will last another thousand years, let alone a hundred million? Who can predict that our Class Mammalia will rule for another hundred thousand millennia?"

"All existing evidence indicates that dromaeosaurids were covered in thick feathers. This holds for all dromaeosaurids, from Graciliraptor to Utahraptor, including those whose fossils bear no traces of intigument due to unfavourable fossilization processes. I'd like to point out that the alternative to the feathered model, that is, the hypothesis that big dromaeosaurids lacked feathers or were even scaley like crocodiles, is blatantly anti-scientific, seeing as unlike the feathered model it is not based on either any anatomical evidence or on known zoological phenomena (there is no proof whatsoever of feathered animals evolving into scaley ones). Dromaeosaurids belong to Maniraptora, and no maniraptoran fossil discovered so far has ever shown traces of scales. On the contrary, all feather impressions found so far belong to maniraptoran skeletons, including some dromaeosaurids. Overall, the data supports with undeniable proof the feathered model."

"Because of its proportions and maximum size, its probable that it doesn't represent the typical tyrannosaurid (much less other tyrannosauroids), despite having been the object of the majority of studies and analyses, not just on its skeleton, but on its growth rate, its physiology, its ecology, and its spatio-temporal range."

"Tyrannosaurus rex did not have 6-to-8-inch serrated teeth and an arc of D-cross-sectioned teeth set in a massive, powerful skull just to consume rotting carcasses! These were killing tools. In sharp contrast are the weak beaks and feet of vultures and condors- the only true living scavengers."

"The more that we learn about these animals the more we find that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like Velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like Velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds."

"Much that is good and all that is evil has gathered itself up into the Western Gull. He is rather the handsomest of the blue-mantled Laridae, for the depth of color in the mantle, in sharp contrast with the snowy plumage of back and breast, gives him an appearance of sturdiness and quality which is not easily dispelled by subsequent knowledge of the black heart within. As a scavanger, the Western Gull is impeccable. Wielding the besom of hunger, he and his kind sweep the beaches clean and purge the water-front of all pollution. But a scavanger is not necessarily a good citizen. Call him a ghoul, rather, for the Western Gull is cruel of beak and bottomless of maw. Pity, with him, is a thing unknown; and when one of their own comrades dies, these feathered jackals fall upon him without compunction, a veritable Leichnamveranderungsgebrauchsgesellschaft. If he thus mistreats his own kind, be assured that this gull asks only two questions of any other living thing: First, "Am I hungry?" (Ans., "Yes.") Second, "Can I get away with it?" (Ans., "I'll try.")"

"An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom.So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware."

"Behold, within the leafy shade, Those bright blue eggs together laid! On me the chance-discovered sight Gleamed like a vision of delight."

"The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, That it had it head bit off by it young."

"The sparrows chirped as if they still were proud Their race in Holy Writ should mentioned be."

"Tell me not of joy: there's none Now my little sparrow's gone; He, just as you, Would toy and woo, He would chirp and flatter me, He would hang the wing awhile, Till at length he saw me smile, Lord! how sullen he would be!"

"Across the narrow beach we flit, One little sand-piper and I; And fast I gather, bit by bit, The scattered drift-wood, bleached and dry, The wild waves reach their hands for it, The wild wind raves, the tide runs high, As up and down the beach we flit, One little sand-piper and I."

"Where in venerable rows Widely waving oaks enclose The moat of yonder antique hall, Swarm the rooks with clamorous call; And, to the toils of nature true, Wreath their capacious nests anew."

"Invite the rook who high amid the boughs, In early spring, his airy city builds, And ceaseless caws amusive."