Palaeontology 🦖

713 readers

1 users here now

Welcome to c/Palaeontology @ Mander.xyz!

🦖 Notice Board

2023-06-23: We are looking for mods. Send a dm to @[email protected] if interested! This is a work in progress, please don't mind the mess.

🦖 About

Paleontology, also spelled palaeontology[a] or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes the study of fossils to classify organisms and study their interactions with each other and their environments (their /c/paleoecology. Read more...

🦖 Rules

Don't throw mud. Be kind and remember the human.
Keep it rooted (on topic).
No spam.

🦖 Resources

Smithsonian's Paleobiology website
University of California Museum of Paleontology
The Paleontological Society
The Palaeontological Association
The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology
The Paleontology Portal
"Geology, Paleontology & Theories of the Earth" – a collection of more than 100 digitised landmark and early books on Earth sciences at the Linda Hall Library

🦖 Sister Communities

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Mangan

Could dinosaurs have had symbiotic relationships with other animals? (www.sciencefocus.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yes.

The interesting bit is the top article linked at the end of the article:

https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/if-the-dinosaurs-didnt-go-extinct-could-they-have-developed-a-civilised-society/

Not only were they involved in symbiotic relationships with others species, it seems they may have been on the brink of the first dinosaur city states!

[–] Swictor 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

That's not what the article says.

There's a bias we have that humans are the pinnacle to evolution and if evolution makes everything better over time then shouldn't everything end up being human-like eventually?

In reality evolution just makes us adapt to the environment as it is, and to have larger energy consuming brains is not always better for survival. If it were, everything would evolve bigger brains.

Dinosaurs could have taken that step incidentally at some point in another timeline, but they were nowhere close to the traits that are necessary for maintaining a large social society.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Fair enough, I found both articles a little silly and in the latter one it seemed very much like using humans as the yardstick of evolution, especially with the anthropomorphic dinos on the article and that all the traits the dinos could have achieved in the authors imagination are human traits.

They outnumber us at the very least 10 to 1 and have a wider global distribution than humans. Don't fall for the "Birds Aren't Real" stuff, they are real, they are dinosaurs, and they are likely prepped to rise again....literally on the hot currents of air we are providing them.

The way humanity is going at the moment it doesn't seem unreasonable that our dinosaur cousins could become dominant again for a few million years at some point.

[–] Swictor 2 points 2 years ago

Birdsarenotreal is a ploy by big bird to make us complacent and miss the real conspiracy of avian domination.