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| Paleo-King
Paleo-King
[10567362]
[2009-05-23 19:54:50 +0000 UTC]
"Dinosaurs as they should be"
(United States)
# Statistics
Favourites: 258; Deviations: 75; Watchers: 1291
Watching: 82; Pageviews: 265865; Comments Made: 7159; Friends: 82
# Interests
Favorite writers: Ones that make you ask "WHO?"Tools of the Trade: mechanical pencils, oils, brushes, sweat and most of all BLOOD.
Other Interests: far beyond the scope of what can be shown here
# Comments
Comments: 6967
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Hi, Nima. I'm an amateur paleoartist from Greece. I really love your skeletals! I have been watching you ever since you made the braciosaur parade.
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Any more Forgotten Giants coming soon?
If not, when can we expect them?
Do you have a time-frame in mind?
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What’s your take on Carpenter’s Maraapunisaurus description so far? I know you were one of those supporting the Rebachisaurid classification so how does it feel for it to be realised?
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Well it's a strange feeling... but I would say that it finally makes sense, even though it doesn't matter much to me who formally redescribed it.
As a Rebbachisaur, it is less obscenely oversized compared to the largest other sauropods (we have seen several new titanosaur giants discovered in recent years - Puertasaurus, Paralititan, Futalognkosaurus Dreadnoughtus, Notocolossus, Patagotitan, Ruyangosaurus, and the new Alamosaurus specimens - none of which are significantly larger than Argentinosaurus, and most of which are not significantly larger than "Antarctosaurus" giganteus or the largest referred "Argyrosaurus sp." specimens).
Other new giants like "Huanghetitan" ruyangensis, Daxiatitan, Sauropseidon, the French Monster, etc. are probably not even in that same mass range.
So in other words, the biggest sauropods we know of besides "Amphicoelias" fragillimus, are all much smaller that it would have been, had it been a diplodocid with Diplodocus-like or even Supersaurus-like proportions scaled up to 150 tons or more. But a more compact animal with Rebbachisaur proportions, is more believable, both in terms of how much food it would have required, and how many of them a given ecosystem could sustain... not to mention the biomechanics of its mass and locomotion. Nonetheless, it is a bit odd to have a Rebacchisaur that huge, since all the other ones are not of particularly remarkable sizes.
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So, since you've made master lists for rebuking Torosaurus/Triceratops and Dracorex/Stygimoloch/Pachycephalosaurus, have you thought of doing one for Nanotyrannus/Tyrannosaurus?
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And who might you be? No gallery, no journals, no comments, no name, no watchers. Sure, we should all totally take unqualified advice from a no-name troll, with no standing.
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I guess that is one of the most awesome reply i have seen.
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None of his brachiosaurids and diplodocids are too big. The only disagreements he gets are regarding his titanosaurs, of which most are within the expected size range.
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While I've always been critical of Horner's Toroceratops theory, I thought that the Dracorex-Stygimoloch-Pachycephalosaurus ontological series was widely accepted by scientists.
What is the evidence against the series?
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The burden of proof is actually on the Hornerites to defend their evidence. Because their own evidence is actually "against the series", being rather ambiguous at best and often actually indicating that their conclusions are likely wrong (as is the case with the baby skull)... and Horner essentially admits (in a roundabout way) that he is speculating.
All the gory details are here, you can read more in my journal:
Nuking Pachy-Stygi-Dracorex - the Master ListI've been asked several times what is the evidence to disprove Jack Horner's hypothesis of Dracorex and Stygimoloch being immature growth stages of Pachycephalosaurus. Now unlike most of the problems with his "Toroceratops" theory, which are scattered all over the place in different papers and fossils and took some time to hunt down, the problems in Horner's "Pachy-Stygi-Dracorex" theory are all pretty much accessible in one spot:
It's all in Horner's own paper. Yeah, you heard right. Most of the flaws in Horner's idea are, ironically, glaringly obvious in his paper itself, though cleverly masked, downplayed, or spun around so they don't even look like flaws at first glance. Classic arm-waving where most of the fossils don't even support your conclusions. But it's still possible to make them look like they do:
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I do have a question, regarding your profession. Are you exclusively a dinosaur artist, or do you also do artwork of other prehistoric creatures, such as Paleozoic and Cenozoic fauna?
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Mostly dinosaurs and a bit of Paleozoic is my focus.
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Oh dear. Jack Horner's at it again, this time with a wacky Triceratops restoration for a VR game he's consulting on:
youtu.be/RsrDeGnqWeY?t=1958
Bright yellow keratin mask with a red rooster comb around the frill, with a bright blue body. Display is great and all, but don't animals need to, uh, camouflage? So they can survive to adulthood without being spotted by predators? He draws an analogy to birds but all large ground dwelling birds, the closest analogy we have to dinosaurs alive today, are more conservatively coloured; even Cassowaries are mostly black, with just a little splash of red and blue on the head. He's also pushing a feathered T. rex close to a year after this was discredited by Bell et all.
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Nice! More nutty Hornerisms!
That Triceratops is actually a Torosaurus. Which makes it even funnier because he's giving it very pronounced frill studs, despite the fact that mature Torosaurus have them almost completely reabsorbed into the frill! (In fact this was one of his "reasons" for claiming that Torosaurus are all just really old Triceratops... a silly reason, given how they differ from Triceratops in nearly everything else from beak shape to frill shape, to horn shape, to being totally absent in the uppermost Maastrichtian layers where T. proorsus is found, to actually being younger and smaller-bodied animals than the biggest Triceratops specimens we know of).
Nice to see Horner has flip-flopped YET AGAIN and now is suddenly depicting his "Toroceratops" as a much younger animal with big pointy frill studs. He's making pure fantasy at this point - neither accurate to the fossil frills, nor even consistent with his own discredited theory.
Big birds are indeed conservatively colored, even the most starkly colored of them is the male ostrich, and still... "black and white" isn't a very colorful plumage. And both Triceratops and Torosaurus were far larger, not feathered, and yes, needed camo to deal with far bigger and faster predators than we have today. Even if they did have bold patterns, these sorts of flashy neon colors are very unlikely - bright pigments in keratin (either scales or feathers) are EXPENSIVE, nutrient-wise. With small birds, finding enough high-nutrient food is simple (insects, rich fruits, etc.). But big herbivores like Troceratops and Torosaurus, had to make do with some very rough and low-nutrient food, and thus eat huge amounts of it just to "break even" as warm-blooded megafauna.
They probably did not have ruminating chambers in their stomachs (as no surviving bird or croc has them, and there's no evidence such a system ever evolved in any diapsids), and so would have had to eat for hours, considering they were chewers and did not have the scale of unchecked digestive pass-through that sauropods did. So they'd be constantly eating and chewing new food, due to their digestive system probably wasting a lot of nutrients, like a horse or an elephant (rather than like a cow). So it simply was not feasible for such animals to extract enough nutrients from low-grade ferns and grasses (yes, the Maastrichtian did have grasses) to supply such lavish neon colors over such a large skin surface. It's make-believe, not good science.
The feathered T. rex is yet another Horner flip-flop. In the '90s he was actually 100% dead-set against the idea - Horner was one of the LAST major dinosaur specialists to embrace the warm-bloodedness of dinosaurs. He was fighting tooth-and-nail to keep open the possibility of cold-bloodedness 20 years after Bakker discredited the theory, comparing T. rex to komodo dragons in 1993 rather than to birds... in the meantime other paleontologists had confirmed Bakker's histological findings of fast growth rates and warm-blooded harversian bone in dinosaurs. Horner also continued endorsing the theory of "gigantothermy" even though it has no living analogues and most realistic mathematical models of dinosaur metabolism do not leave any room for such a "middle ground". You're either endothermic or ectothermic. In reality mass-homeothermy is simply cold-bloodedness with a big body; it still cannot maintain stable temperatures, as even with basking sharks and leatherback turtles, their temperature still fluctuates with that of their surroundings, only with about a 5-10-degree celsius buffer.
Now Horner has gone the other extreme... making T. rex so "hot-blooded" that it has to have piles of feathers sprouting everywhere... except he STILL doesn't get it. Because being warm-blooded at T. rex's size, negates the need for insulation and actually makes it more of a burden than a blessing (due to body mass increasing exponentially as length and height increase arithmetically). Horner is trying to restore T. rex skin the way raptor feathers are restored. Even though he still (along with his fanboys like Carr and Hutchinson) portrays T. rex as much slower and less active than a raptor - basically as a sluggish (and possible still as a "gigantothermic") scavenger, with stiff elephant-like legs that don't even articulate properly.
At this point it looks like Horner is just trolling science itself. Arm-waving and then jumping ship, to "Jack" other people's theories and "Horn" them into something that should by all laws of physics fall off the planet. Flexed knees must be held straight like elephants, adult ceratopsians must be juveniles, Nano and Nedo must be growth stages of something more famous and marketable, "warm" must be both freezing cold and boiling hot, up must be down, black must be white, etc.... Where is that reverse-engineered chicken raptor he keeps promising?
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Spectacularly spot on as always.
Just hear me out here.
Paleo-King for President 2020
"Accurate Dinosaurs. Or Death."
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Hahahahaha! Give me the power, I will give you noble paleo-art!
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I remember looking at the skulls of Torosaurus and Triceratops, and I found enough differences in them aside from the horns and frill; namely the beak and the placement of the nasal horn.
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Thanks. I did a pretty extensive journal entry on this subject a while back:
NUKING 'Toroceratops' -The master list!!!Any questions about why "Toroceratops" theory is not valid should be directed here. If you want to know more about it, just read this and if you have questions about Toroceratops or Jack Horner's other hyper-lump theories, comment here - it's a lot easier and less messy than asking me about it in the main page comments.
Q: I have heard that the Jack Horner theory about Torosaurus being nothing more than old individuals of Triceratops is getting a lot of pushback. Paleo King, what are your views on the theory, and what does the evidence actually say?
A: They are arm-waving. Horner actually has a pattern of doing this, it isn't the first time. Remember the “obligate scavenger T. rex”? Every piece of evidence Bakker, Currie, Weishampel, etc. looked at, Horner basically ignored or dismissed or even denied – even things as basic as eye socket shape – just to preserve his precious theory. Later Horner confessed that he “never liked T. rex anyway” (h
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What kind of Titanosaur do you think Choconsaurus was?
sci-hub.tw/10.5710/amgh.01.08.…
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Thanks! I always look for time and opportunities to make more.
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you can say anything about this post
ttps://twitter.com/DTeammember12/status/979371711593353218
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So basically that shows a 30 yr old with the mind of a child?
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whatever you said is acceptable.
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you did ask for more comedy
knock yourself out with this
twitter.com/DTeammember12/stat…
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Somebody used your artwork on a print: www.imagekind.com/Argyrosaurus…
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That's me. That's an online store I opened long ago with (outdated) images.
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Getting real sick of carnosaur fanboys oversimplifying tyrannosaurs as small game hunters. An adult sauropod would curbstomp a Carcharodontosaur just as badly as it would a Tyrannosaur; having a slightly different biting style does not enable you to slay a beast the size of a building. If anything it just seems impractical and wasteful - for any theropod - to attempt to bring down such a giant they could just flesh graze or stick to killing prey in their own weight class. A "small" sauropod could still feed a megatheropod for days.
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Did this come about from the game "The Isle?"
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True. The disadvantage of T. rex with sauropods, is that its teeth were round cross-section and had blunter tips than other predators, so they couldn't flesh-graze something that big.. or at least had a hard time doing so... especially a titanosaur like Alamosaurus that had armor nodules as well as osteoderms (yes, now we know it had osteoderms).
However this only applies to T. rex. Not all tyrannosaurs. Tarbosaurus had slimmer and sharper teeth, and its skull reinforcement was also more "traditional" for a flesh-grazer. It was a very likely sauropod-hunter.
What the casual reader doesn't get about theropods in general, is that they were opportunists, not martyrs. They would prefer to avoid injury, therefore a "hit and run" flesh grazing attack was much preferred to a head-on fight. T. rex would ordinarily be the same way, except that it evolved to deal with a 90% Triceratops fauna (very unhealthy ecosystem, but what are you gonna do?) and Triceratops was armed so well, and was so maneuverable on its feet, that flesh grazing was almost impossible. Therefore T. rex HAD to evolve a bone-crushing bite, to actually kill a Trike instantly, even break through a solid frill and snap the neck, to avoid being gored. This necessitated the evolution of teeth that were not very good for flesh grazing, so not very suited for attacking sauropods. Other theropods that were actually weaker than T. rex, made for more effective flesh grazers due to their tooth and skull design.
T. rex might still be able to flesh graze a giant sauropod, but it's not their natural prey and they're not evolved for doing that. But even big carnosaurs with steak-knife teeth would not try to directly take down something that huge. It's suicide.
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I'm actually not so sure about Tarbosaurus' teeth being slimmer and sharper than those of Tyrannosaurus. Here's a picture of what's apparently a Tarbosaurus tooth.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia…
That said, I agree that putting down tyrannosaurs as restricted to small prey just cause "no slysing teeethuh" is stupid.
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we remember him
now he is putting up size charts of twitter
twitter.com/DTeammember12/stat…
i have no idea where the silhouette is stolen from or its original owner
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Uh-oh.... this silhouette looks like it's copied from National Geographic or some big mainstream news outlet. It's awful proportions and that photo for sure looks like something from a large news agency. There's a lead for you; Conchoraptor from one of the major news outlets. Happy hunting! The photo isn't even a side view. And the fool tries to pretend he's Japanese and living in Niigata prefecture. Except real Japanese usually outgrow DBZ fandom by the age of 7.
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what do you mean by outgrow?
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Exactly that. Visit Japan, and you'll see.
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