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Falco peregrinus, a small carnivorous dinosaur that preys mainly on other dinosaurs—which it strikes and kills in midair with its claws.
That would be Mongolian Titanosaur for me. The bastard’s massive.
Archaeopteryx
It is to our understanding of dinosaur & avian evolution what Lucy is to our understanding of human evolution. Also it looks cool.
Spinosaurus until the end.
Diplodocus, because I love the name
Do you say Dip-lod-o-kuss or Dip-low-dock-uss?
This is why we have the IPA
As a child, Velociraptor, as an adult I probably wouldn’t choose a velociraptor because of how deadly they are. I would probably choose a more friendly docile dinosaur but I honestly don’t know what the best one would be.
Apatosaurus
Ankylosaurus!
Ankylosaurous gang rise up!
I’m a stegosaurus man myself.
Absolutely. I don’t know what it is about them but yeah, stegosaurus are cool.
For me, I think it’s because they remind me of Godzilla.
Oh yeah, I can se that. I’m not sure why I fixated on stegosaurus but man, if you asked me at age 5 who my best friend was id probably have said, “Stegosaurus!”
As long as we are using looser definitions mine are Pleisosaurus for an aquatic, Pterodactyl for air and Brachiosaurus for land.
Crocodiles are mine. The Crocodilia order they’re from survived 94 million years; they even survived the K-T event. They’re some of the few creatures and probably the only legit dinos left that survived from back then. They’re the closest living relatives to birds.
(I don’t know if people want to debate whether crocodiles can be classified as dinosaurs, but I consider them as such)
There were some really dinosaur-like crocodiles, too. Shuvosaurus and poposaurus, for example.
But for whatever reason, they decided to define dinosaurs to exclude pterosaurs and crocodiles; they’re the closest relatives of dinosaurs but are still relatives and not actual dinos.
Birds, though, are legit dinosaurs.
How the fuck does that make any sense? Birds are dinosaurs but crocodiles aren’t?
Biologists like using clades to describe things, these days. A clade is all the descendants of some common ancestor on an evolutionary tree.
That particularly means that they disfavor terms that refer to almost all of the descendants of something, but exclude one branch because reasons. Which does make sense, right? “Paraphyletic groups” are like saying “The Vanderbilt family is all the descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt… except for Anderson Cooper and his descendants”.
So the technical definition of dinosaur, right now, is anything descended from the most recent common ancestor of triceratops, diplodocus, and the house sparrow.
That is dumb as fucking hell. I don’t deny that is true, I just assert that it’s dumb. Crocodiles are clearly dinosaurs while birds have diverged so much they can only reasonably be called descendents of dinosaurs and nothing more. You can look at them and tell.
Thanks for the insightful info though. I didn’t know dinosaurs were painted with such a small brush. Does that mean pterodactyls aren’t dinosaurs either?
Crocodiles are clearly dinosaurs while birds have diverged so much they can only reasonably be called descendents of dinosaurs and nothing more. You can look at them and tell.
Based on what?
Look at a crocodile and then look at a bird.
Various extinct crocodiles like Poposaurus were initially confused with dinosaurs due to some convergent evolution.
But modern crocs lack a lot of distinctive dinosaur traits, like having their legs directly under them.
More to the point, though, look at this fossil of caihong juji and tell me it doesn’t look more like a bird than a crocodile. Through a minor geologic miracle, the feathers were even preserved! It even seems like they were probably quite colorful.
Crocodiles are vastly different in appearance to any dinosaur that has been discovered
Comparing them to a T-rex, I don’t think so. They have the gnarly teeth and their snouts are at least sort of similar.
Not really. even for dinosaurs that are famous for being crocodile-like, its quite hard to see the resemblance
Look at t-rex’s bird-like hips and feet. Compare them to the sprawling legs of a croc. Posture- wise, it looks way more like an ostrich than a croc.
And yeah, T-rex was almost certainly scaly, but evolved from feathered dinosaurs. Other earlier species in tyrannosauroidea like yutyrannus huali and dilong paradoxus had feathers.
I mean, that is not how it works. Also, crocodiles don’t look like any dinosaur I can think of?
Classification is based on genetic relationships, not looks, so bats aren’t birds, for example.
Pterodactyl. And now I have the dinosaur train theme stuck in my head. 🦖
Stegosaurus was my favorite too as a kid. These days I’ve grown more boring ig and I would probably go with T-Rex, but Stegosaurus will always have a place in my heart too.
I’m just fascinated by the sauropods. The big ones. I’m gonna go with Supersaurus (because super! Lol)
Sci Am article on how sauropods evolved to be huge over and over again
Of all the animals ever to have roamed the planet, the iconic long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as sauropods stand unrivaled. No other terrestrial creatures have come close to attaining their colossal sizes.
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Poking the bear are we?
Ah shit, here we go again
