#inaccurate science

[samasmith23]

You know, as much as I defend Stan Lee’s original Silver Age run on the X-Men, I don’t think he quite understood how Magneto’s powers (or magnetism in general) were supposed to work...

Lol! I had no idea magnetism allows you to create psychic astral projections of yourself or to hypnotize others into obeying your every command!

#x men #x men comics #silver age marvel #silver age comics #stan lee #jack kirby #magneto #max eisenhardt #erik lehnsherr #magnetism #how do magnets work? #inaccurate science #marvel comics

[soulless-bex]

my new favorite hobby is scaring my classmate by telling them their was a univers before the big-bang

they absolutely hate it, it’s great

#bigbang #inaccurate science #what if the bigbang was actually the conclusion to an intergalactic war #i’m mean and proud #but like it would make sense too #afterall matter is never lost merely transformes

[alphynix]

April Fools 2024: The Curious Case Of The Chunky-Necked Ceratopsians

Much like the aquatic Compsognathus featured here a couple of years ago, not every novel idea that came out of the Dinosaur Renaissance was a winner.

And one of the oddest examples came from author/illustrator John C. McLoughlin.

His 1979 book Archosauria: A New Look at the Old Dinosaur featured an unusual interpretation of ceratopsian dinosaurs' characteristic bony frills, proposing that they were actually muscle attachment sites for both powerful jaw muscles and enormous back muscles to help hold up their large heavy heads. This would have completely buried the frill under soft tissue, giving the animals massive thick necks and humped shoulders, and resulted in an especially weird reconstruction of Triceratops with a grotesque sort of wrinkly sewn-together appearance.

This concept didn't entirely originate from McLoughlin – three years earlier in 1976 he'd illustrated Ronald Paul Ratkevich's book Dinosaurs of the Southwest, which seems to have been the inspiration for Archosauria's fleshy-frilled ceratopsians. A few paleontologists had also proposed jaw muscles attaching onto the frills during the 1930s and 1950s, and there's even a book from as far back as 1915 that also shows the top of a Triceratops' frill connected to its back! But McLoughlin's Archosauria image is still by far the most extreme and infamous version of the idea.

There were a lot of things in Archosauria that were actually very forward-thinking for the time period, such as putting fuzz and feathers on small theropods and depicting non-avian dinosaurs as active fast-moving animals. The unique ceratopsian reconstructions, however, never caught on for several big reasons:

Firstly, all that hefty muscle tissue would have locked ceratopsians' heads firmly in place, unable to move at all, which just doesn't make sense biomechanically. Then there was the lack of skeletal evidence – muscles that big should have left huge visible attachment scars all over the frill bones, and there was no sign of anything like that on any fossil specimens. Finally, it turns out the ceratopsian head-neck joint was actually highly mobile, suggesting their heads were free to make a wide range of motions in life.

As wrong as they were even at the time, McLoughlin's ceratopsians were still an interesting speculative idea, and notable for advocating for fleshier dinosaur reconstructions at a time when paleoart was trending towards shrinkwrapping.

Further reading under the cut:

A Very Alternative View of Horned Dinosaur Anatomy, Revisited – https://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/11/22/alternative-view-of-horned-dinosaur-anatomy

Trope of the Buffalo-Backed Dinosaur – https://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/11/27/trope-of-the-buffalo-backed-dinosaur

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Archosauria - Part 3 – https://chasmosaurs.blogspot.com/2013/10/vintage-dinosaur-art-archosauria-part-3.html

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs of the Southwest – https://chasmosaurs.blogspot.com/2016/11/vintage-dinosaur-art-dinosaurs-of.html

The Forgotten John C. McLoughlin Book – https://www.manospondylus.com/2021/03/the-forgotten-john-c-mcloughlin-book.html

#april fools #inaccurate paleoart #retrosaurs #science illustration #paleontology #paleoart #palaeoblr #triceratops #ceratopsian #dinosaur #art #mcloughlin ceratopsians #they are very shaped #she's beauty she's grace she can't even turn her face

[ohno-the-sun]

I could not get @oobbbear mad scientist au out of my head I love it so much

#fnaf daycare attendant #sundrop #moondrop #mad scientist au #tw body horror #I fuckin love like mad scientist shit #ones hubris leading to their downfall #and also science info dumping #I imagine moon was likely engineered like a neuron #where the spikes are more so like spindles than hard points #with the vines themselves being a mixture of fast growing plant cells and stem like progenitor cells #which tend to automatically grow into nerve cells #but also require signaling factors to lead to their end fate #essentially suns cells give the blueprint #unwittingly #to moons cells which would allow them to adapt and invade suns nervous system #this is defo pretty inaccurate and I’m stretching stuff but like in general that’s what I imagine #also trying to figure out how their goofy fuckin heads would look like in an mri #this is prob just like a bojack horseman type world where some people are animals or humanoid #also don’t mind the inaccuracies in outfit #I’m like a bad artist #tw needles #I have more doodles #but I needed to break them up #my art #fanartception

[veryferaldistributions]

(I have this headcanon that Dan loves “Weird Science,” but Herbert hates it because of its “inaccuracies.” Yet, somehow, Dan always gets his way on movie night. And eventually they bicker about it.)

Herbert: “You’ve made me watch ‘Weird Science’ fifteen times! I don’t even like it!”

Dan: “That’s insane! You love ‘Weird Science!’ You’ve seen it fifteen times!”

#inaccurate reanimator #parks and rec #danbert #weird science #dan cain x herbert west #herbert west #dan cain #daniel cain #i also hate weird science #but i love oingo boingo #reanimator #inaccurate quotes #re-animator #re animator #bride of reanimator #incorrect quotes #incorrect reanimator quotes

[bat-connoisseur]

The thing that bothers me the most about the whole 'feathered dinosaurs look stupid!' or 'not scary' debate is that... They were real animals. These were actual real animals.

They aren't movie monsters or fictional creatures who are conciously designed by someone, they were real and shaped by their environment. Natural and sexual selection 65 million years ago didn't care what some random human thought looked cool, it cared about what allowed a species to survive long enough to reproduce, and it's so annoying that people treat them otherwise. Paleoart and reproductions of what they looked like are (generally) aiming for realism. You don't flip over a rock and chastise a salamander for not looking cool enough. And you don't ignore scientific evidence because you think that dinosaurs look cooler featherless and shrinkwrapped.

I know it can be hard to picture them as real animals because their presence is usually limited to media, occupying a similar place in people's minds to dragons perhaps, and with fictionalised stories of extreme violence. As much as I liked Jurassic Park, the leveraging of dinosaurs as horror monsters puts them in a similar place to fictional characters, and people treat them as such.

I need to emphasise- Dinosaurs weren't conciously designed. Dinosaurs weren't conciously designed. And getting upset at more realistic representations of them because you preferred how innacurate depictions looked is wrong, fustrating, and shows a deep misunderstanding of what a dinosaur is. Accurate science isn't there to create a cool monster. It's there to approximate what real animals looked like before we existed.

#Been thinking about this a lot recently #It annoys me to NO end #also. I'm sorry I'd take a dinosaur with fat and muscle and feathers if applicable over a shinwrapped inaccurate monstrosity any day #they look cool! and they look like actual animals! #paleontology #obligatory I'm not a paleontologist I just like prehistoric creatures and accurate science. #also obligatory this is a general statement. not all dinosaurs were feathered

[coquelicoq]

you can read an andy weir novel that features your area of expertise. but watch out

#me reading the martian: physics and botany. i don't know anything about these! what fun i am having! #me reading project hail mary: THATS NOT HOW MEMORY WORKS. THATS NOT HOW LANGUAGE WORKS #not that i am even an 'expert' but still #[man gripping sink voice] i don't need interesting linguistic worldbuilding in every book i read. i don't. i do not #books #my posts #talking to my scientist friends about the martian they were so annoyed by the science. whereas i was having a grand old time #the thing that annoyed me most about the martian was how all these world governments banded together to spend billions #of dollars just to rescue one measly astronaut? there's asking me to suspend disbelief and then there's whatever that was. #this book also features a lot of international cooperation at an unrealistic scale but it has a better excuse #so i'll allow it #i'm still having fun i do find his books eminently readable i just. sir please talk to one (1) conlanger i'm begging you #there are aspects where i'm like okay i can see how you needed to fudge that to get anywhere with your plot #but there are other aspects where i'm like hey you actually could have made this part less inaccurate. and didn't for no reason. boo!

[shatterstar]

affirmation of the day: it’s ok to reblog a post that mentions silicon-based life forms without talking about the thermodynamics of silicon oxidation & reduction in the tags. Nobody cares that Si=O bonds are vastly more stable than Si—H meaning that interconversion of different silicon species is energetically much more frustrated than say interconversion between the same types of bonds but with carbon in place of silicon. I can let people enjoy things

#generally I don’t care about inaccurate science in sci-fi in fact I love good technobabble I was raised on star trek #this is like the one exception I just. I j #carbon is sooooooo special

[biracy]

Some concept art I drew up for a creature/zombie/Frankenstein/whatever AU Seren! Not sure which one I like the most, maybe they'll all coexist. I've also got some ideas like neck bolts and mismatched eyes, but I'll explore them a little bit later. Also yeah she got hairier she does it when I'm not looking

[rbs appreciated ofc]

#idk anything abt science btw these scars are almost DEFINITELY 'inaccurate' #scars are based off of sniper tf2 in the tf2 comic tho! which was fun for me #i also thought having a mismatched middle finger would not only be funny but also a cool homage to her og design #where she's got the ring on her middle finger? yeah #open mick night #art #my art #serendipity johnson

[monsterlets]

we're learning about fossils this unit and I'm not about to correct the kids every time they call something a dinosaur that isn't a dinosaur or whatever, howmever I'm looking at the old version of the lesson and it calls mesosaurus a lizard in the class packet and that shit will not stand

#I'm not about to actively tell them inaccurate information #what science teacher put that in there

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"Science has already easily proven the Old Testament to be a collection of Bronze Age myth, superstition, and a much less than accurate historical account.

And to this day, no one has been able to verify any shred of evidence that the New Testament is any more than make believe.”

#bible #bible study #christianity #new testament #old testament #bible fables #science #science vs religion #religion vs science #religion #bronze age myths #superstition #superstitious nonsense #historically inaccurate #historical inaccuracy #no evidence #religion is a mental illness

[alphynix]

April Fools 2023: How Titanis Lost The Right To Bear Arms

Huge, flightless, and carnivorous, the phorusrhacids (or terror birds) were some of the largest apex predators in South America during its Cenozoic "splendid isolation" as an island continent – and they were possibly the closest that birds ever came to reclaiming the ecological roles of their extinct non-avian theropod dinosaur relatives. 

And for a while in the late 1990s and early 2000s there was a hypothesis that they'd even re-evolved clawed hands.

This idea was based on the wing bones of Titanis walleri, the only terror bird known to have dispersed northwards during the Great American Biotic Interchange when North and South America became connected via the Isthmus of Panama.

Living during the Pliocene and Pleistocene in Florida and Texas, between about 5 and 1.8 million years ago, Titanis stood around 1.5-1.8m tall (~5-6') and was heavily built, with long strong legs and a massive hooked beak. Remains of its small wings were incomplete and fragmentary but had seemingly unusual joints, with what looked like a stiffer wrist and more flexible "fingers" than other birds, which led paleontologist Robert Chandler to propose in 1994 that this terror bird species had modified its wings into clawed grasping arms similar to those of dromaeosaurs, used to restrain prey animals while its beak tore them apart.

But the idea of a giant murder-bird with added meathook-hands only lasted about a decade. Further investigation in 2005 showed that Titanis' arms weren't that weird after all – the same sort of joints are found in terror birds' closest living relatives, the seriemas, and so Titanis really had the same sort of small vestigial wings as many other large flightless birds.

…However, there still could have been some claws on there. Many modern birds actually have one or two small claws on their hands that aren't visible under their feathers, and terror birds like Titanis having something like that going on is completely plausible – they just wouldn't have been using them for any sort of specalized predatory function.

———

NixIllustration.com | Tumblr | Twitter | Patreon

#april fools #titanis claw hand hook bird claw #inaccurate paleoart #science illustration #paleontology #paleoart #palaeoblr #retrosaurs #titanis #phorusrhacid #terror bird #cariamiformes #bird #dinosaur #art

[strawberryfaced]

did u know there is a type of zombie protist that lives in cat’s urine and then goes to invade a mouse’s brain and controls what they do for their entire life and essentially possesses the mouse. and then before the mouse dies they do this thing to their brain that makes the mouse not scared of cats anymore so that they get a free ride back to the cat’s urine

#this might be inaccurate #im just writing the scraps of what i remember of what my science teacher taught us today #but I thought it was cool!

[mockingbirdshymn]

Nerris: Why are your tongues purple? Preston: We had slushies. I had a blue one. Harrison: I had a red one. Nerris: oh. Nerris: Nerris: OH. Nikki: Nikki: You drank eachothers slushies?

#they probably did tbh #here they are sitting at 711 like “fuck i hate cherry” “want mine?” “sure” #camp camp #incorrect quotes #cc preston #cc harrison #cc nerris #cc nikki #nerriston #harriston #nerrison #presner #nikki is oblivious as to what was implied #also okay can i talk about slushi logic #if you have a red tongue and make out with someone who has a blue tongue from slushis #and ive never had bitches so this may be inaccurate #but wouldnt that do absolutely nothing to change your tongue color #someone pls make out at a 711 with someone so i can watch and take notes #as neil would say #for science

[c-is-for-circinate]

Stranger Things: So there's these psychic kids, right, and one of them can open interdimensional rifts where monsters live, and they're possessing this other kid via black smoke from his PTSD vision--

Me: Yeah, cool, that makes sense, keep going, I'm into it

Stranger Things: --and did you know, there are exactly two species of terrestrial tadpoles--

Me: NOW YOU WAIT JUST A GODDAMN MINUTE

#I AM THE SCIENCE SIDE OF TUMBLR AND I SAY NO #THIS HAS GONE TOO FAR #HOW DARE YOU PRESENT INACCURATE HISTORICAL AND SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION #ABOUT WHAT WAS GENERALLY AND EXPERTLY KNOWN ABOUT TADPOLE ECOMORPHOLOGY IN THE EIGHTIES #those species were NOT classified in those genera at that time and their tadpoles had NOT been described in such a manner yet #I will find Boulenger's 1882 species description for Rana semipalmata so help me #no seriously y'all it's terrible #I took screencaps #I ran google searches #I got out my grad school textbooks and tracked down cited sources #if the Hawkins Public Library was really really good Dustin MIGHT have been able to track down #the then-very-recently-published anthology “Key Environments: Madagascar” #and discovered Blommers-Schlosser and Blommers' notes about the arboreal tadpoles of Mantidactylus pulcher #but that is NOT the same thing #ah the duality of being a scientist watching scifi

[my-ceiling-is-tilted]

comin atcha with a late day 3, brought to you by rushing a redraw of an og ceiling post. am i satisfied? no. Should heaven have kept the original angel body plans? yes. 0/10 alteration why the fuck do i always make eldritch shit have deer traits

#dystober2022 #digital art #sci fi #urban fantasy #science fantasy #digital painting #art prompt #inktober #drawtober #oc art #UNITYs Amalgam #eldritch #biblically inaccurate angel #concept art #someone turn its eyes back on #jk the heaven roomba doesn't have the battery capacity