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I'm really sorry to be that guy, but just FYI, the pterosaurids weren't dinosaurs or dinosauroporphs, and were on a pretty independent evolutionary lineage. It'

I'm really sorry to be that guy, but just FYI, the pterosaurids weren't dinosaurs or dinosauroporphs, and were on a pretty independent evolutionary lineage. It's astonishing how many times vertebrates evolved flight independently. It's a sharp reminder of how long dozens or hundreds of millions of years are. Having said that, the "long necked stabby stabby from elsewhere" was a theme with the dinosaurs proper. Some have theorized that this was the hunting mode of the giant Spinosaurus. You're right on the money with the dinosaurs=birds though though. Paleo guys even have started saying "non-avian dinosaurs" to reference the kpg "classic" dinosauromorpha, because the lineages are so intertwined. Archaeopteryx, to take one example, might not have been a bird, exactly? Birds might be even more intertwined than that, with separate bird lineages branching out at different times. The takeaway from the big extinctions is that you need to be less than fifty kilos and preferably able to dive or burrow very very deep. And be lucky, of course. Everything standing around within a few thousand miles of Cancun 65mya was probably screwed no matter how cool it was.

RajT88 3y ago
> I'm really sorry to be that guy No worries! Someone already beat you to the punch anyways. ;)
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
> ...of how long dozens or hundreds of millions of years are. "Hundreds of millions" is less than 30 bits of information. That's a miniscule, infinitesimal amount compared to what we're typically used to dealing with. (If you choose a random number every year, that's less that 1 gigabyte of numbers, not enough for a 30 minutes of an HD Marvel blockbuster.)
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  Yeah, mostly it's impressive in a biological or evolutionary context, not in a raw number context. You multiply everything by every genetic piece of data, multiplied by the environmental variables, and so on and so forth, until you arrive at something insanely complex, to an extent that's hard to overstate. There's not much that can't happen in 12-24my. Although I don't like to call anything incomputable, taken as a whole, it's pretty close to incomputable. Believing otherwise is often a trap. To take one example, older paleo people would see fossils of creatures like nimravids, and they'd say to themselves, "oh, a long-lost ancestor of the sabretooth cats!" - but they're not getting how long ten million years is for living systems. Sabre teeth didn't evolve once, or twice, or even three times, but evolved separately at least six completely separate instances, across 200-300 million years. This is true for all sorts of morphology that might look incredibly distinctive to our human eyes, but which aren't actually distinctive in fact.

RajT88 3y ago

> I'm really sorry to be that guy No worries! Someone already beat you to the punch anyways. ;)

otabdeveloper4 3y ago

> ...of how long dozens or hundreds of millions of years are. "Hundreds of millions" is less than 30 bits of information. That's a miniscule, infinitesimal amount compared to what we're typically used to dealing with. (If you choose a random number every year, that's less that 1 gigabyte of numbers, not enough for a 30 minutes of an HD Marvel blockbuster.)

MilStdJunkie 3y ago
Yeah, mostly it's impressive in a biological or evolutionary context, not in a raw number context. You multiply everything by every genetic piece of data, multiplied by the environmental variables, and so on and so forth, until you arrive at something insanely complex, to an extent that's hard to overstate. There's not much that can't happen in 12-24my. Although I don't like to call anything incomputable, taken as a whole, it's pretty close to incomputable. Believing otherwise is often a trap. To take one example, older paleo people would see fossils of creatures like nimravids, and they'd say to themselves, "oh, a long-lost ancestor of the sabretooth cats!" - but they're not getting how long ten million years is for living systems. Sabre teeth didn't evolve once, or twice, or even three times, but evolved separately at least six completely separate instances, across 200-300 million years. This is true for all sorts of morphology that might look incredibly distinctive to our human eyes, but which aren't actually distinctive in fact.