Maybe medieval people happened upon a T-Rex fossil and came to a relatively logical conclusion that dragons existed.
I’ve read a couple books on this actually, thats exactly what happened. Also cyclops are from looking at bones from a certain type of baby elephant. The giant note hole and tiny eyes made it look like a single eye.
Yep, can confirm! And what’s even funnier to me is that back in the dark ages, Greek people used to find a lot of prehistoric bear skeletons – and those look exactly like human skeletons, except they’re like eight feet tall or something – so they naturally assumed those were the heroes of legend, and made armour and clothes for them and reburied them with the most splendid and sacred religious ceremonies they could think of? Fast forward five centuries, Athens’ all modern and rational, philosophers and scientists aren’t taking any shit from anyone – but the problem is, people will randomly find graves containing giant-ass warriors, so that’s something that can’t be explained away and yeah, demigods were a thing and yeah, they used to be eight feet tall and sorry I don’t make the rules.
Some scientists suspect that the origin of the cyclops myths came about because of elephant skulls, which are vaguely human in shape but with a honking big hole in the middle for the trunk but easily mistakable for an eye socket without any flesh
These hypotheses are heavily debated so I want to be clear when posting that this is in no way 100% fact.
…but I also want to add that the dinosaur Protoceratops or similar genera are hypothesized by folk scientist Adrienne Mayor to have been partially responsible for the griffin myth.
(via wikipedia commons)
I mean, yeah, I can sorta see how someone could mistake that for some half-bird, half-mammal beast, especially with incomplete remains that fossils almost always have as well as the lack of knowledge of what a dinosaur is.
Whether or not it’s true? Who really knows at this point, but it’s fun to think about.
Adrienne Mayor has a book out called The First Fossil Hunters on this exact topic if anyone is interested. I haven’t read it myself though so I couldn’t tell you how good or bad it is!
Sometimes I remember that there’s a massive beef in the paleontological community between Jack Horner and Robert Bakker and it’s so big that when they both worked as advisers on the Jurassic Park films, Spielberg made 2 characters based on them and had a T. rex eat Bakker’s character as a favour to Horner.
“The bearded paleontologist Dr. Robert Burke, who is eaten by a Tyrannosaurus rex in Steven Spielberg’s film The Lost World: Jurassic Park, is an affectionate caricature of Bakker.
In real life, Bakker has argued for a predatory T. rex, while Bakker’s rival paleontologist Jack Horner views it as primarily a scavenger.
According to Horner, Spielberg wrote the character of Burke and had him killed by the T. rex as a favor for Horner. After the film came out, Bakker recognized himself in Burke, loved the caricature, and actually sent Horner a message saying, ‘See, I told you T. rex was a hunter!’.”
people who complain about dinosaurs “not being scary anymore” because its been discovered they have feathers and are closely related to/ancestors of birds are so bizarre like
its not about how scary they are, they are/were real life animals and what matters is learning more about them, not how well they fit into your science fiction horror film lol
can you imagine a 13 foot chicken running at you with full intent to eat you??? thats fucking terrifying holy shit
peacocks are synonymous with vain, frivolous beauty and they will attack cars. they will attack you while you try to get to your car. they’re like six feet of useless feathers and they will destroy you. imagine if they were carnivorous and had functional spurs.
a t-rex could look like a gay disco ball and i guarantee that you would fucking book it if it had a problem with you
listen
listen
have you ever met a swan
if anything the birdier they get the scarier they are
Australia literally fought a war against giant birds AND FUCKING LOST
“Oh man, I can’t deal with birds ‘cause they’re dinosaurs and sometimes it’s like they get this glint in their eyes and they remember.”
“Have you ever interacted with a goose? ‘Cause those things are dicks.”
If chickens were still the size of a T-Rex we’d all be dead. No question.
Feathered creatures that give some serious lie to the idea that feathered dinosaurs ain’t scary:
This is a bearded vulture, or lammergeier. It’s four feet long and has a nine foot wingspan and it eats bones.
This is a shoebill stork. It dropped the duck without biting down shortly after the picture was taken, but if it had decided not to-
… it could have been the end of the road for that duck.
This is the last thing a fish sees before a macaroni penguin eats it.
This is a secretary bird in the act of demonstrating to Lord Voldemort that he came to the wrong neighborhood, ese.
This is a goose.
This is a vulture.
This is a cassowary on the attack.
Be glad I couldn’t find the actual gif of a pelican swallowing a fish, because it’s freakin’ Lovecraftian in its HEADS SHOULD NOT BEND THAT WAY factor. You’ll have to settle for the idea of a feathered dinosaur suddenly going GLORP and devouring its victims whole just like this lady here.
Steven Spielberg didn’t create these. These are the feet of an emu.
And this is what happens when a swan (this one is named Asboy; his father was Mr. Asbo, the first swan in the UK to get named after an anti-social behavior order in ‘honor’ of his tendency to attack boaters) decides it doesn’t like you. I should probably note that this one attacked a cow.
Respect the feathered dinosaur, yo.
Terrifying. The last two illustrate why you did not fuck around with the Children of Lir.
I suspected that a dinosaur could have been feathered after I heard that a T-Rex is the chickens’ ancestor.
For those who think dinos aren’t cool because they’re feathered…whatever, mutherfuckers. Evolution doesn’t give two shits what you think is cool or not.
You showed a cassowary on the attack, but forgot to show what exactly it’s attacking with. Their feet are nearly identical to the Emu’s, except for one minor, teeny tiny detail: A five-inch claw for killing motherfuckers, raptor-style.
This is like the “fuck birds master post” and I love it because Honestly, Fuck. Birds.
So my mom works at a church. Actually, she works somewhere that is located in a church, but close enough for government work. It’s not important. Anyway, they had an artist gallery, because sometimes churches do that; it’s a whole “supporting local artists” thing, and it’s pretty standard.
What is very not standard is the artist they happened to host this week.
Susan B. Hale is a musician and painter in the Upstate NY region. (For people wondering where that is: it’s all the not-NYC part. There’s actually an entire state attached to the city, like a big, slightly-racist wart. I’m getting off track.)
Susan’s art is fairly standard, lovely oil-on-canvas Impressionist stuff. Mostly flowers –
– some pretty landscapes –
– some weird abstract shit –
Pretty stuff. If I had anything resembling disposable income, I’d wanna buy some of this stuff, because it’s gorgeous.
You know what else she paints, sometimes?
BIG FUCKING DINOSAURS
BIG FUCKING DINOSAURS FROLICKING WITH FLOWERS
BIG FUCKING DINOSAURS NOSHING ON HUMAN SKULLS IN A BLACK VOID-LIKE HELLSCAPE
BIG FUCKING DINOSAURS ON BIG FUCKING CANVASES PLAYING HIDE-AND-SEEK WITH DEAD FLOATING LADIES BY PICTURESQUE PONDS HOW ARE YOU NOT DELIGHTED BY THIS
Obviously, my immediate reaction was to seek this woman out and find her all of the money. But while I did absolutely spend two hours looking up who she was and then emailing her, she doesn’t appear to have an Etsy – or any online store at all. She has virtually no digital presence, and not much of a reputation offline either.
And this is tragic.
Because let’s be real: this woman should be a fucking internet star. She paints lovely scenes of tranquility and fills them with T-Rexes for no apparent reason, other than that she thinks they’re rad. There’s an alternate reality in which she’s a Tumblr legend, and I want to live in that reality.
So here’s the thing. I know I’m not a Big Tumblr Person. I have virtually no clout in things like this, and the odds of anyone seeing this post are kinda limited. But I also want this woman to be so inundated with requests for awesome dino paintings that she has no choice but to open up an online store. I want my home and those of everyone I know to be filled with humungous, lush oils of morbid hilarious dinosaur beauty, like if Monet spent a glorious weekend binging all of Jurassic Park while also on a cocaine bender.
Reblog this. Email her telling her how great you think she is and how much you wish she had an amazon site or whatever. Consider supporting her, if you have some money and love dinosaurs. Boost the shit out of this, because even if she doesn’t get a single dime, her artwork makes me smile and I want to at least share the happy with others, and maybe bounce some of it back to her.
I am not sorry for the length of this post. You got pretty flowers and fucking dinosand you are welcome for it.
See those feathers? The skeleton they found was so well-preserved that scientists were able to examine the pigment cells in the feathers and compare them to those of modern day birds.
And they were able to do this with such accuracy that they know the coloration of this dinosaur. In life it looked something like this.
It just baffles me that we know the color patterns of an animal that has been dead for 161 million years
They found a prehistoric chicken that wears adidas swear pants my god
OP HOW CAN YOU NOT ADD THE BEST PART OF THIS TWEET THREAD
swans pretty much like that
Honestly the thought of giant ass sparrow like dinosaurs running around is such a good thought could you imagine just seeing a house sparrow but like 6000x the size incredible
Remember in 1993 when Jurassic Park was like…the end all, be all of special effects?
not gonna lie that still looks intimately real
I’m still somewhat convinced that someone sold their soul to create the special effects in Jurassic Park because that shit is over 20 years old and it still really, really holds up, better than the stuff in a lot of current movies, even.
Fucking witchcraft, man.
fucking look at this shit though
Literally see this post flying around with a few different responses added to the bottom each time so I’ll say it for this one myself:
THEY ACTUALLY BUILT A GIANT MASSIVELY DETAILED FUCKING ANIMATRONIC T-REX FOR ALL OF THIS THAT’S WHY THE EFFECTS ARE SO GOOD. CAUSE IT AIN’T CGI. AND IT AIN’T GUY IN A COSTUME. IT’S A BIG FUCKING ROBOT DINOSAUR. AND EVERY PART IS DESIGNED TO MOVE. IT COST LIKE HALF THE BUDGET OF THE FILM.
amazing
And they had the film it in small increments, especially in the outdoor scenes, because the rain fall kept soaking into the ‘skin’ of the rex and would slow down and mess up its movements. So they would stop filming and have a crew out there drying off this massive, fake dinosaur, and then they’d start filming again until it was too wet. Repeat until the end of the scene.
They used animatronics and detailed costumes for most if not all of the dinosaurs in the first movie.
The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic.
One of my favorite anecdotes I’ve read on tumblr is how the t-rex robot from Jurassic park would malfunction while it was drying out. How did it malfunction, you might wonder?
Motherfucker randomly started moving.
So apparently if you were on the jp set you would sometimes hear people screaming bloody murder even though they were all well aware that it was a giant animatronic puppet and wouldn’t actually, you know, eat them.
Did not know this, had to reblog for awesome movie history insights.
So, I knew about the animatronics bit but I did not know the raptors were guys in suits and the malfunctioning t-rex sounds terrifying.
And i just googled malfunctioning t-rexand was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside thet-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics.
So of course, the power goes out.
And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down.
Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while you’re inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best.
And this guy hoped for the best and got it.
Some other people on stage pried open the t-rex jaws and glue guy crawled out of its mouth and was totally okay.
This is getting better and better.
I think they only had like 6 minutes of CGI
I’m just waiting for the T-Rex to come to life and leave its stand.
The thing about this that gets my special effects nerd going is the fact that EVERY single dinosaur was sculpted by artists based on the current existent archeological evidence of the time.
Even better than that, this movie ADVANCED our best understanding of dinosaurs at the time. They were blowing out a budget bigger than anything Hollywood had ever seen, and along with employing almost the last hurrah of incredible physical FX, they had a bank of those newfangled digital SFX computers. Nobody’d ever really created convincing dinosaurs in a movie before. It’d all been stop-motion animation, and even when the models were exquisitely crafted, you could just tell there was something OFF about them. Spielberg wanted THE BEST DINOSAURS EVER, and he figured on using the cutting edge of digital modeling and animation technology to build them for him.
So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said, “We want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.”
The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass. They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that. And when they’d created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that. One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen movement like that before.”
He called up film of a chicken walking. Everyone in the room said, “Holy shit.”
Prior to 1989, the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs existed–we knew about archaeopteryx, we knew there was some minor connection there–but the idea that DINOSAURS LIVE IN THE MODERN WORLD AND THEY ARE CALLED BIRDS was not pre-eminent. Jurassic Park changed our scientific understanding of dinosaurs.
That paleontologists’d be Kevin Padian. Who is awesome.
What if aliens visited Earth during the Jurassic Period, found it to be occupied with a bunch of mean, giant lizards and thought “Well, fuck this planet” and never came back?
what if when humans went out into the galaxy all the aliens panicked because if the dinosaurs’ tiny fur snacks now had spaceships and laser blasters and interstellar colonies then what the fuck were the dinosaurs up to???
Steel Phoenix Studios 