What's your favorite dinosaur?

IAdventurer01

Well-known member
For me, it's always been the good ol' Brontosaurus

brontosaurus.jpg


Which, upon searching for this picture, I have discovered doesn't exist. Those smug paleontologists apparently discovered its the same thing as the previously discovered apatosaurus.

Oh, well.
 

The_Raiders

Well-known member
The velociraptor definitely. Fast, Agile, cunning, sneaky, down right conniving bastard. As a little kid they memzmorized me in Jurassic Park. The T-Rex was always great but I always loved the raptor much more because of its cunning.

Turok.jpg
 
Last edited:

Joe Brody

Well-known member
Convenient page break.

Finn said:
You necroed a thread just to pull a cheapshot? Oh c'mon, Monty.

'necroed'! Excellent turn of phrase. I'm sure I'm behind the times but that's the first I'm hearing it.

As for the question posed in this thread, from a Darwinian P.O.V., I've got to go with any dinosoaur (or near descendent) that's been able to survive to this day.
 

Montana Smith

Active member
Joe Brody said:
As for the question posed in this thread, from a Darwinian P.O.V., I've got to go with any dinosoaur (or near descendent) that's been able to survive to this day.

...like...

shark-dinosaur.jpg


...

Living Dinosaur Shark Found in Japan


Recently Japan caught a very rare deep ocean shark.

This type of shark is very different from what we usually see. It has six gills and the body is like an eel, normally living under 600-1,000 meters deep in ocean. They have very long history of 50 million years, that?s why they are also called living fossil.

The shark was in a very weak condition and died a few hours later.

By Mui Mui on 24-01-2007


116.jpg


http://www.weirdasianews.com/2007/01/24/first-living-dinosaur-found-in-japan/
 

Joe Brody

Well-known member
Joe Brody said:
As for the question posed in this thread, from a Darwinian P.O.V., I've got to go with any dinosoaur (or near descendent) that's been able to survive to this day.

Somebody must be listening . . .

20CASEY-articleLarge.jpg


Respect Your Elders
By CONSTANCE CASEY
HORSESHOE CRABS AND VELVET WORMS
The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind
By Richard Fortey
Illustrated. 332 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.
Richard Fortey has spent most of his life looking at fossils, the imprints of the skeletons of the very thoroughly dead. Here he sets out ? like a more deeply thoughtful David Attenborough, without the cameras ? to describe the distinguished groups of organisms that are still recognizable and thriving after millions and millions of years. The horseshoe crabs, velvet worms and other venerable creatures he encounters are Earth?s true conservatives. ?We?ve devised a system that works very well for our niche,? they would tell us. ?No big changes necessary. Maybe just a tweak at the molecular level.? As Fortey says, ?to look at a living horseshoe crab is to see a portrait of a distant ancestor repainted by time, but with many of its features still unchanged.?

Fortey?s dozen or so subjects have survived the many cataclysms the planet has thrown at them over the past 450 million years. As if repeated earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and ice sheets weren?t enough, there were two mass-extinction events. The best known was the disaster 65 million years ago that led to the downfall of the dinosaurs. We?re less familiar with the more devastating earlier extinction ? about 251 million years ago ? that erased 90 percent of life from the sea and almost as large a percentage of the little things struggling on land. The horseshoe crab made it through; its fossil remains date from 450 million years ago.

Somewhere then, perhaps at the bottom of a poisoned sea, with tsunamis rolling above, some organisms stayed alive, including something we would recognize as the horseshoe crab if it clambered up onto the beach. It?s astonishing to consider that the lucky few ? arthropods, snails, clams, jellyfish, worms and a few small four-legged creatures on land ? that survived the worst extinction gave rise to everything that followed, including us.

Fortey, who was a senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London until his retirement in 2006, is comfortable with great sweeps of time. In fact, he?s best known as the author of the almost laughably ambitious but amazingly readable ?Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth.? Two years later, he challenged his fans with ?Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution.? The exclamation point demonstrated Fortey?s wry realization that not everyone would be quite as excited as he was about the feeding habits of extinct marine arthropods. One can imagine a young museum visitor asking Fortey, some time in his 35-year career there, where to see a living trilobite. The answer: nowhere. But you can see horseshoe crabs, what most scientists believe to be the trilobite?s closest living relative.

So Fortey?s round-the-world pilgrimage begins in exotic Delaware, where hordes of male horseshoe crabs climb aboard thousands of females to fertilize the emerging eggs. The lustful display stretches along the beaches for miles. Characteristically he sympathizes with ?the poor exhausted females, gravid and overprovided with mates.? The horseshoe crab, we learn, isn?t a crab; it?s much more closely related to spiders and scorpions. The creatures are well armored, with bodies like little tanks, and defended by an unusually effective immune response, one we might envy.

Fortey travels on to a damp forest in New Zealand for the velvet worm that shares the book?s title. Squishy rather than velvety, it comes from an even lower branch of the evolutionary tree than the horseshoe crab. At least 300 million years ago, this worm?s ancestors emerged from the sea onto the land. It looks like a big caterpillar; its many stumpy legs feel *****ly on Fortey?s arm. (He is nothing if not a good sport.) Then come sponges, clams, lungfish, ginkgo trees, reptiles with a lizardlike appearance called tuataras and more. Those familiar with his easeful erudition would read Fortey on practically any subject ? bacteria even. And, lo, moving ever deeper back in time, he does write about bacteria. Nothing that ever lived on earth ? no thread of green algae, no slimy invertebrate ? is alien to him. It?s a relief to learn that he has a healthy fear of snakes.

Beside the steaming geysers of Yellowstone, Fortey gets down on his hands and knees, undeterred by staring tourists, to observe the steamy environment of heat-loving bacteria. Gazing at the green microbial mats the bacteria form, he has a sobering thought: ?Yellowstone National Park may be the best place there is to reflect on the fact that we are all pond slime. Every cell in our body acknowledges a deep history, a time when organelles floated free in a world we would have found *insupportable.?

Whether it?s Yellowstone or Newfoundland or China, Fortey vividly describes the many places he goes. But it?s not always easy to tell where you are in the world, and from what geological period the beast at hand comes. That worm in the mud flat is where? And derives from the Ordovician? Or is it the Devonian? But even suffering some befuddlement, the reader is inspired to take the very long view. The Oligocene starts to seem like last Thursday. What qualities did it take for these survivors to make it through vast sweeps of time, and are human beings as durable? Fortey?s view is that the survivors had the right qualities at the right moment ? and they had luck.

We human beings, he suggests, also owe our existence to luck, to the chance collision with that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and left room for mammals to evolve. The oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens date back a mere 200,000 years. (Dinosaurs dominated the world for at least 160 million years, and we have the nerve to call them unsuccessful.) Compared with the horseshoe crab, we?re frighteningly fragile, with our oversize brains on top of an unsteady two-legged form.

At the end of his joyful travels, full of heartfelt appreciation for so many humble, enduring creatures, Fortey strikes a somber note, giving precious little hope for the next four billion years. He fears that his fellow human beings, lacking humility, will cause the third great extinction. And then what will survive?

Bacteria: ?They will be there to rot down the last bodies of the last humans, and then the wheel of life will have turned full circle.?

Constance Casey writes the ?Species? column for Landscape Architecture Magazine and the ?Revolting Creatures? series for Slate.

Link



roundshort said:
Carneige Museum Green dino is my favorite, ro was it yellow? Does anyone know it's name?

Just saw this. Oh, the stories I could tell.
 

IndyJoey

Member
The only single dino that i love is Archaeopteryx! Because its the oldest known bird, and it really supports Darwin's theory.
 

Pale Horse

Moderator
Staff member
Finn said:
You necroed a thread just to pull a cheapshot? Oh c'mon, Monty.

The minions have no new content or creativity. :whip:

To that, I'll add, no one's said the Lickalotovpus...
 

foreverwingnut

New member
The triceratops has always been my favorite dinosaur; it's a beautiful animal. The sickly Triceratops scene in Jurassic Park was dear to my heart because Dr. Grant admitted that the trike was also his favorite. Incidentally, the trike scene was the first one shot because Spielberg wanted to give the actors a better understanding and personal closeness to the project. I've often wondered if the trike suddenly became a favorite of any of the actors in that scene.
 

foreverwingnut

New member
Marshal2288, great choice and you're not alone. Spielberg was so inundated with requests for a stegasaurus in The Lost World that he specifically added the scene just for those fans. I've always been partial to the plant-eaters.
 
Top