You know I’ve always had this suspicion/barely articulable theory that Dinosaurs looked (from the silly human ape perspective) far more terrifying and surreal then current science can account for
The theory that their skeletons are the least scary thing about them and that their appearances and behaviors were far more strange and inconceivable (again, to our ape eyes)
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Yeah it’s amazing how well museums capture the sheer size of them.
“Oh, you thought a Triceratops was about as big as a rhino? Haha cute. Stand next to this skull the length of an entire man laying down.”
There is a full size cast of a blue whale skeleton that hangs from the ceiling in the lobby of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and that thing has always filled me with awe and dread.
Whales scare the hell out of me. They’re so alien and giant.
There’s also a partial one at UCSC
instead of scales they just had dicks flopping around everywhere, birds are freaky we know why
Have you ever seen a cassowary? I imagine its like that.
Can you elaborate? Sounds interesting
I mean its basically the uncanny valley, I remember as a kid the two things that tipped me off that maybe there was something more to these fossils then we see
The first thing was the forward facing eyes, imagine in a live dinosaur the sockets were filled with what look to us like very human looking eyes, with either a very dead look or a very ALIVE “human” look, both equally terrifying
Then what if the feathers looked less like feathers and more like human “hair” and what if certain species sported “hair” that looked to our pareidolic brains like “human hairstyles”
Now consider all the outlandish varieties of beaks that contemporary bird species sport, imagine instead of keratin or pseudo-keratin those outlandish beaks were instead made of luscious lip meat, face meat that triggers all kinds of pareidolic reactions in humans
Then add the size, the teeth, the likelihood they were far more muscular and bulkier then we assume with the movements and grace of birds and I think we got an organism that can easily brick a human brain just by looking at it
I love this specific genre of paleoart. The kind where they’re framed like you’re coming across them by accident during a walk in the jungle. Like turning a corner around a tree and suddenly coming face to face with a wild boar. It helps you see them as real animals.
P.S. sorry for taking over this thread I just really like dinosaurs
TIL T. Rex had forward-facing eyes. Makes it even scarier.
I love this model scientists made to show off it’s binocular vision, because it reminds me of how chickens will stare at you
Crocodile face with chicken aura
It’s incredible that these things existed.
