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What annoys you about paleontology?; Rant on about moronic theories, complaints, or just animals that annoy you.
Topic Started: Sep 28 2013, 05:04 PM (256,411 Views)
Whalebite
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Mastodon28
Feb 18 2014, 12:07 PM
The fact that some people think dinosaurs evolved from birds, not the other way around.
It is possible but very unlikley
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CyborgIguana
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Umm...no, it isn't possible. Birds presumably evolved from small arboreal coelurosaurs at some point in the middle Jurassic, so saying they could've been around 230 million years ago to evolve into the first dinosaurs so those dinosaurs could later give rise to the first birds is a paradox that does not make sense in any way and, frankly, just makes my brain hurt trying to reason how it could in any way be possible.
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Stan The Man
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I beleive he means that a select number of dinosaurs could've evolved from birds.

Which
Whalebite
 
is possible but very unlikley.
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CyborgIguana
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Well, it's possible that deinonychosaurs could've had avian ancestors that became secondarily flightless.
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CyborgIguana
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It also annoys me when Yutyrannus is called the largest feathered dinosaur. Wrong, it's the largest dinosaur known from direct evidence to be feathered. We do in fact know of larger theropods that were feathered (such as Tyrannosaurus), but these ones we only know to be feathered through indirect evidence. If anyone wants to argue this with me, then be sure also to argue the existence of scaly terror birds and naked ground sloths since these Cenozoic animals haven't been preserved with any integument either.

(PS: Sorry about the double post, but to be fair this topic was inactive for more than a week).
Edited by CyborgIguana, Feb 24 2014, 01:03 PM.
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Stan The Man
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Look at it this way:

We can safely assume Deinonychus was feathered because it's ancestors and descending relatives have evidence of feathers. However, there is only one definite example of a large, feathered tyrannosaur, which is Oxalaia Yutyrannus, with all other examples under 6 meters (20 feet). Some people see this as the only nessecary proof that all other tyrannosaurs had a full coat of feathers, while others aren't so sold on a single species. Understand?



Someone on ZTV posted a topic last week calling out obsolete drawings as inaccurate. Totally not beating a dead horse.
Edited by Stan The Man, Feb 24 2014, 01:27 PM.
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CyborgIguana
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I admit there is a slim chance that some evolutionary quirk could've caused later tyrannosaurid tyrannosauroids to become scaly (or at least feathered to a sparser extent than their ancestors), but until I see direct evidence of this phenomenon I will continue to assume that all tyrannosauroids were feathered.

BTW, that ZTV guy better not be dissing Charles Knight.
Edited by CyborgIguana, Feb 24 2014, 01:36 PM.
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heliosphoros
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It annoys me beyond belief when researchers often deliberately go out of their way to ignore established papers. Most infuriating is Averianov 2013, which pretty much ignores EVERYTHING said by Mark Witton and Naish in order to propose a ridiculous, idiotic idea that azhdarchids were mutant skimmer pelicans.

It's both rude and intellectually dishonest, perhaps even worse than creationist papers.
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CyborgIguana
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*Averianov goes up to a Hatzegopteryx*
Hi there, you cute pathetic thing! I know you can't hurt me because you're a wimpy pelican skimmer that...*gets stabbed by Hatzegopteryx's beak and swallowed whole*
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Similis
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Shh, Cyborg, shhh, you're getting agitated with your azhdarchid thingo again :>
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CyborgIguana
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Agitated? Who said I was agitated? I WILL SUMMON AZHDARCHIDS TO...oh, ok I guess I see your point. xD

Anyway, another thing that annoys me. I don't know if you guys know about the new IMAX documentary film about lemurs that's coming out (I saw the trailer for it when I went to see The Lego Movie), and it looks pretty cool for the most part, but one thing that made me twitch my eye slightly was that the beginning of the trailer seems to vaguely imply that Madagascar was a safe haven from giant archosaurs for the earliest proto-lemurs that washed up there in the Cretaceous, allowing them to evolve without competition. This of course is not the case at all.
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Stan The Man
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Couldn't you have just put this up instead?
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CyborgIguana
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I thought it was more fun the other way. Multiple links within a single sentence add drama. :P
Edited by CyborgIguana, Feb 25 2014, 02:40 PM.
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heliosphoros
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I fail to see the logic behind saying Madagascar was archosaur-free when A) it was an island left without megafauna in the earliest Cenozoic, so lemurs had plenty of time and little competition, and B) elephant birds nod their heads in disapproval.
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CyborgIguana
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Hell, even today Madagascar isn't absent of archosaurs! (birds and crocodiles, anyone?)

Though to be fair, the trailer didn't outright say that Madagascar was dino-free during the Mesozoic, it just seemed to me to imply that.
Edited by CyborgIguana, Feb 25 2014, 05:03 PM.
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