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Paleontology and Dinosaurs

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troodontid
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02 May 2023, 3:00 pm

Anybody else love this?
I missed out on this special interest as a child (although I was passionately devoted to archaeology) but got deeply interested in it as an adult when my child got into it. I mourned when he moved on (although his herpetology special interest has been a delight too).
What books/audiobooks/articles/shows/movies do you love? What are your favorite species?
What are your thoughts on the weird way that we have culturally symbolized an entire clade of animal life? It's wild to me that, for example, eagles are predatory dinosaurs, and yet the way we symbolize them is hugely different than extinct theropods.



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03 May 2023, 1:50 am

Back in the 80s I saw David Attenborough's "Life on Earth" TV series, and got turned on to the evolution thing, and how groups of animals had their (often seemingly unlikely) origins.

Began to devour books about fossils for a long time. And that was right when the radical new think about dinosaurs came in ...that some of them may have been warm blooded, and that they were more birdlike than lizard like, and so on. So I would read books about the debates about it.

Its become the new orthodoxy now that "birds are dinosaurs", but there are still some scientists who hold out on the old idea.



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18 May 2023, 8:09 pm

Dinosaurs were a huge special interest as a child and even now they're a latent one.

Recently I've been really interested in the basal pterosaurs and hoping their evolution from their last common ancestor with dinosaurs will become better understood.


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RandoNLD
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20 May 2023, 2:13 pm

Had to take a Paleontology class as part of a GEOL cluster in college. Non-dinosaur fossils were the most interesting, like Trilobites, Ammonites and prehistoric relatives of octopi.



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20 May 2023, 2:28 pm

RandoNLD wrote:
...and prehistoric relatives of octopi.


Would they find much more than a beak and the little vestigial shell?


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RandoNLD
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25 May 2023, 12:34 am

funeralxempire wrote:
RandoNLD wrote:
...and prehistoric relatives of octopi.


Would they find much more than a beak and the little vestigial shell?


Soft tissues are very rarely mineralized, but fossilization in of itself is rare, plenty of organisms that lived on dry terrestrial biomes or in deep cold marine environments will likely never be known to science . The instructor would say that Paleontologists had found about as many different types of fossil as they were likely to and that Paleontology is a "dead field" (Haha).



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25 May 2023, 5:41 am

funeralxempire wrote:
RandoNLD wrote:
...and prehistoric relatives of octopi.


Would they find much more than a beak and the little vestigial shell?


On the contrary. Their big ass shells are a common find in the American west.

Not close cousins of octopi specifically.

They were "cephalopods". In the same large group of mollusks as nautiluses, cuttlefish, squids, and octopi.

In fact thats part of whats interesting about them. Ammonites could be viewed as being like the knights of old, and octopi as being like their modern special forces descendants (chucking heavy armor for cunning and flexability).

What they find are their big elaborate shells...Some primitive ones had straight conical shells that looked dunce's caps, but the later ones had spiral shells that looked like ram's horns.



RandoNLD
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26 May 2023, 1:49 am

naturalplastic wrote:
funeralxempire wrote:
RandoNLD wrote:
...and prehistoric relatives of octopi.


Would they find much more than a beak and the little vestigial shell?


On the contrary. Their big ass shells are a common find in the American west.

Not close cousins of octopi specifically.

They were "cephalopods". In the same large group of mollusks as nautiluses, cuttlefish, squids, and octopi.

In fact thats part of whats interesting about them. Ammonites could be viewed as being like the knights of old, and octopi as being like their modern special forces descendants (chucking heavy armor for cunning and flexability).

The name of these specific Cephalopodae escapse me, but they were fountain pen shaped and a fraction of the length and width of a small paperclip.

What they find are their big elaborate shells...Some primitive ones had straight conical shells that looked dunce's caps, but the later ones had spiral shells that looked like ram's horns.



naturalplastic
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27 May 2023, 12:42 am

RandoNLD wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
funeralxempire wrote:
RandoNLD wrote:
...and prehistoric relatives of octopi.


Would they find much more than a beak and the little vestigial shell?


On the contrary. Their big ass shells are a common find in the American west.

Not close cousins of octopi specifically.

They were "cephalopods". In the same large group of mollusks as nautiluses, cuttlefish, squids, and octopi.

In fact thats part of whats interesting about them. Ammonites could be viewed as being like the knights of old, and octopi as being like their modern special forces descendants (chucking heavy armor for cunning and flexability).


What they find are their big elaborate shells...Some primitive ones had straight conical shells that looked dunce's caps, but the later ones had spiral shells that looked like ram's horns.

he name of these specific Cephalopodae escapse me, but they were fountain pen shaped and a fraction of the length and width of a small paperclip.

(Fixed it for you . ^)



RandoNLD
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27 May 2023, 2:15 pm

Belemnites I think. I learned all sorts of things in that class, like Michigan is all Limestone and Flint because it was part of a shallow marine environment at some point, this is also true of Dover U.K.



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29 May 2023, 8:28 am

RandoNLD wrote:
Belemnites I think. I learned all sorts of things in that class, like Michigan is all Limestone and Flint because it was part of a shallow marine environment at some point, this is also true of Dover U.K.


Just googled Belemnites. They were quite squidlike. Not all were paper clip sized. Many were half of meter long.

Yes there were shallow seas where there is now land. The Appalachians, the Scottish Highlands, and the Ural Mountains of Russia were all one long mountain range, as tall as the Alps, back in the days of the dinosaurs.

India was its own little continent. But after scooting across the Indian Ocean it slammed into the belly of Asia and forced up the Himalayas. And thats why there are so many marine fossils in the Himalayas...including those of funny swimming mammalian critters with legs that were evolutionary links between land mammals and modern whales that lived in the seas that once existed between India and Asia.