General rules:
Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.
Bones and tendon attachment points give us a clue as to their weight. Plus, no escaping the square cube law, they could only be so massive.
Earth seems to have topped out with the Blue Whale. Guessing the fatty pictured would mass more and not have the benefit of being suspended in water. :)
Maybe the asteroid impact actually changed the rotational speed of the planet and increased gravity. There, I just created a new theory.
What a shitty way to go that would have been for the dinosaurs and any other giant species. Imagine some ELE hitting humankind but sparing all the little people.
You created a new hypothesis
The current difference in apparent gravity between the equator and the poles is about 0.3%.
I think the centrifugal effect squares with angular velocity (plus the bulge of the earth would make the distance from the center of gravity ever so slightly larger), so maybe doubling the rotation speed would bring it up to 1.2%.
So maybe a measureable effect but probably not enough to actually overcome the biological limits on size/mass/weight.
Dinosaurs were pretty big already .... but if this possible ... they would have been honkin big!!!!
There are almost certainly errors like this in current artists' depictions. The penguin isnt the only skeleton that doesn't look like the animal while alive.
Hippo skulls are wild without the rest of the hippo around it!
Also elephants, the trunk has no bones in it so it's just a hole in the skull, I'm sure future generations will portray it but the single giant eye.
But honestly pretty much no animal looks the same as its skeleton because every animal has a lot of fat and connective tissue which just doesn't get preserved. Really the only animal that looks the same as a skeleton as it does when it's alive is the frog.
Iirc it's really where cyclops myth came from, they found a mammoth skull and thought that hole is the eye socket. There's also same thing for dragon as well, people just don't know what the skull looks like when alive so they made stuff up
There's theories that the Cyclops myth came about from ancient people's finding fossil elephant skulls from the period where European Elephants were a species
(They went extinct in Europe 50,000-10,000 years ago)
A hippo skull is a great example of how soft tissue structure can be seen in bone structure. Check out that enormous jaw bone and compare it to a human skull. It's easy to see how it must have massive jaw muscles and an incredible bite force.
For another strong jaw you can look at the orca, but notice also how flat its skull is where you'd expect it to be round. On top is where it keeps its echolocation melon.
In more recent decades we've learned to better interpret muscle structure from the bone structures the muscles would attach to, and how they'd move together. Then we can couple that with not only physics, but historical differences in things like atmospheric pressure and oxygen concentration. (For example: How does it move air down that whole long neck to its lungs?)
A lot of updates have been made, but outdated info is still extremely prevalent. It's also difficult to search for accurate depictions because there's not a good way to distinguish between a science-based depiction and an artistic drawing.
How do those techniques work starting from and elephant skull? Would they guess it had a trunk? Really big nose?
If elephants weren't around anymore to look at, we could potentially notice similarities with the tapir and extrapolate a trunk based on the shape of and connective area on the elephant's skull. We'd have to guess at the specific properties of the trunk, but at least we'd know it was there and be able to support arguments for things like its size without them being pure guesswork.
Without a similar animal I don't know how close we'd get. Maybe it would be a mystery that inspires wild speculation.
Its easier for the penguin to support the extra weight, but the dinosaur couldn't lift their head.
It was all muscle. A little known fact is þat Argentinosaurus had such a massively muscled Schwarzenegger neck, it could strike like a Black Mamba.
For some reason I thought it was the inverse, stubby neck.
Chungusaurus.
Fuck, now I can't unconsider it.
I think we've found the next Godzilla enemy.
I have a coworker who used this very meme to argue dinosaurs don't exist.
Dinosaurs are birds, after all.
