Extinct animals size

[SameerluvAnimals]

(01-23-2019, 05:24 PM)Catherine Wrote: Saltasaurus would have looked like a baby compared to the big guys. There is something beautiful and graceful about the sauropods. I know the T.Rex and the velociraptors are exciting and they are the ones people want to hear about, but the big slow moving herds would have been beautiful to watch. 

Deep down inside I am still sad that the dinosaurs are gone. The world was a very different place in those days.

There are people who like veggie beasts but usually predators have more fans. Let me put it this way.. as Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) says in Jurassic Park -- "Dinosaurs had their shot and nature selected them for extinction". 

Well, some of the vegetarian mid sized dinosaurs can be kept in sanctuaries, but how come people can manage the large predatory dinosaurs ? If they continued to exist till now, i guess human beings would have not evolved.

[Catherine]

Quote:There are people who like veggie beasts but usually predators have more fans. Let me put it this way.. as Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) says in Jurassic Park -- "Dinosaurs had their shot and nature selected them for extinction". 

This is where I would disagree with Jeff. After all, some dinosaurs continued to evolve and we see them around us as birds.
Sadly I think it is the sauropod line that was lost.

The barapasaurus has "spines" down its back like an iguana. Were they soft or hard. Iguanas are vegetarian as adults, but they are much smaller than the dinosaur. Interesting that this was a primitive sauropod. The more evolved ones lacked spines.

[SameerluvAnimals]

(01-25-2019, 04:06 PM)Catherine Wrote:

Quote:This is where I would disagree with Jeff. After all, some dinosaurs continued to evolve and we see them around us as birds.Sadly I think it is the sauropod line that was lost. 

The barapasaurus has "spines" down its back like an iguana. Were they soft or hard. Iguanas are vegetarian as adults, but they are much smaller than the dinosaur. Interesting that this was a primitive sauropod. The more evolved ones lacked spines.

But the biggest dinosaurs are gone though. 

No, it's not like the barapasaurus had spines, i just gave it. Some sauropods like diplodocus did had spines.

[RogerSmith]

Imagine having a time machine and could go back to the jurassic age and watch these spectacular giants..

[Catherine]

Quote:Imagine having a time machine and could go back to the jurassic age and watch these spectacular giants..

I would take a trip like that.  There is something impressive about the dinosaurs. The Eotriceratops is particularly beautiful.
I think I have seen fossils in the Tyrell museum in Alberta. They have a very good collection. Even better is the setting. You know there are dinosaur bones in the hills just waiting to be dug up.

[RogerSmith]

(01-26-2019, 04:08 PM)Catherine Wrote:

Quote:Imagine having a time machine and could go back to the jurassic age and watch these spectacular giants..

I would take a trip like that.  There is something impressive about the dinosaurs. The Eotriceratops is particularly beautiful.
I think I have seen fossils in the Tyrell museum in Alberta. They have a very good collection. Even better is the setting. You know there are dinosaur bones in the hills just waiting to be dug up.

Crazy how the Earth was populated by these giants, then wiped out, and everything became so much smaller, blue whales and elephants are probably like dogs compared to the biggest dinosaurs

[Catherine]

Evolution took a different direction.  Who knows, the dinosaurs may have gone in a different direction if they were not wiped out.
Maybe we would have ended up with small intelligent bipedal dinosaurs instead of intelligent primates. It would be a very different world.

[SameerluvAnimals]

(01-26-2019, 08:59 PM)RogerSmith Wrote: [quote pid='23353' dateline='1548482917']

Quote:Imagine having a time machine and could go back to the Jurassic age and watch these spectacular giants..

Crazy how the Earth was populated by these giants, then wiped out, and everything became so much smaller, blue whales and elephants are probably like dogs compared to the biggest dinosaurs.

[/quote]

Indeed any person who love extinct animals would like to travel in a time machine including myself to see the different periods of the past.

[Catherine]

You are right, the Blue Whale is extremely large. It is so big it could only exist in the oceans. The pull of gravity would be too much on land. Even fresh water would lack the buoyancy and no fresh water lake would be big enough. It seems that nature likes to experiment with large animals in every line of evolution. 

I would love to see the dinosaurs, but I would settle for the mammoths and mastodons. They are closer to our age and fit our current environment better.
I saw Mastodon and Mammoth skeletons in the Page Museum at the Los Angeles tar pits. It was an amazing feeling to stand there right in front of a Mastodon looking up at its head and seeing just hard large its tusks were.

[SameerluvAnimals]

(01-28-2019, 04:20 PM)Catherine Wrote: I would love to see the dinosaurs, but I would settle for the mammoths and mastodons. They are closer to our age and fit our current environment better.I saw Mastodon and Mammoth skeletons in the Page Museum at the Los Angeles tar pits. It was an amazing feeling to stand there right in front of a Mastodon looking up at its head and seeing just hard large its tusks were.

You may remember that i love proboscideans very much. Next time i will post the mastodon pic. That's awesome, some proboscideans are more robustly built than modern elephants. If you see those skeletons again, note that the mastodon will look somewhat less tall but it has a longer body and overall robustly built than the mammoth and modern elephants. Unfortunately i have never seen the skeletons of any extinct animal and most likely never will see. 




Liopleurodon is an apex predator which was about 6.4 m (21 ft) in length or more and weighed about 1 - 1.7 tonnes.

Fossils have been found in Europe (England and France).

Based on the reconstruction by Newman and Tarlo.




The giant thresher shark is one of the largest sharks to have existed. It reached lengths of about 7.3 m (24 ft) or more.

Fossils have been found in North America and Europe.