#Dinosaur behavior

[ostensiblynone]

the greatest book cover illustration, ever

#dinosaur behavior

[makenna-made-this]

My mom: i miss having a dog in the house :(

My overly friendly buff orpington: say less

#what a nice dog #i love golden retrievers #chickens #tiny fluffy dinosaurs #the BEST animals #my pets #my feather babies #beula be like is anyone else gonna be the house chicken or?? #chickenblr #birdblr #pet bird #buff orpington behavior

[great-and-small]

Very impressed with this clever grackle snatching a minnow right out of the creek. Watching birds hunt always makes me feel like an early cretaceous naturalist observing a Utahraptor outsmart its prey.

#birds in the wild #birding #animal behavior #grackles #dinosaurs #predation

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Considering how often same-sex couples have been documented in birds, do you think extinct dinosaurs would have a similar rate of homosexuality? Similarly, what do you think the gayest dinosaur is?

100%. It's not even a contest. And, again, research suggests that indiscriminate sexual activity is the **norm** for _all_ animals! sex is just fun! (and, yes, refraining from sexual activity is observed in all animals! And preferential sexual activity! The baseline is just pan/bisexuality, rather than heterosexuality. There are diverse sexual behaviors throughout the animal clade because life is just DIVERSE.) Things try out different behaviors and not everything is about direct reproduction, that's a very misleading view of animal behavior. In truth, social connection and physical pleasure are, well, things animals like. And sometimes they don't. Who knew!

Gayest dinosaur, I mean, isn't it objectively the Albatross?

#queer #author is queer #dinosaurs #lgbtq behavior in animals #birds

[jojirarambles]

Gonna analyze the JP rex’s behavior because fuck it

Okay for my first post on Tumblr I decided I’m gonna go on an analysis of Rexy’s behavior during the first Jurassic Park’s breakout scene because why the hell not. Don’t worry I’m a biologist in training, I know what I’m talking about (not really).

Okay, first a dumb nitpick. The iconic scene with the water tremors is... Really not what would happen. The T.rex is big, but not so big to make the ground literally shake. Elephants are well known to sneak up on people with ease and they’re just a bit smaller than a T.rex.

With that out of the way, the actual breakout scene: She rips out the wires, steps out and gives us the money shot with a cool pose and a mighty roar... Except not quite. She first takes a look around, THEN she lets out that iconic roar we all love. If you ask me, I think she’s probably announcing her presence. She’s knowingly leaving her territory and entering an area she doesn’t know, so she checks if that spot is already taken by telling any other potential Tyrannosaurs she’s coming through.

Oh, but then the mayhem starts! Nope, she just... Leaves. There’s no immediate response, so she’s got green light to just explore this new environment. Really, she didn’t actually want anything to do with humans, at most she nudged the car out of curiosity. Everyone would have made it safe and sound...

Until Lex turns the god damn light on. I guess she was trying to catch Alan and Ian’s attention? Which good job girl, you also caught the attention of a 7 ton predator. Way to gp.

So good old Rexy decides to investigate, and curiously she just seems to be generally aware that the light is coming from somewhere around the area since she’s not really looking at the car.

That is until Tim closes the door.

Well kids, you got her full attention now. So she starts inspecting the car. Like, really inspecting it, sniffing it around to try and get a good sense of what this weird, shiny thing is.

And that’s when she sees there’s something inside. I don’t think she fully understands there’s food in there yet, she’s probably still seeing the car as a whole, but there’s definitely something weird about it, so she roars and tries to get a reaction.

Then she sees the kids moving inside, and she nudges the car. That’s when the kids start screaming and moving all erratically, with Tim trying to wrestle the light out of his sister’s hands and screaming at her to turn it off.

Of course Rexy is seeing and hearing all of it, and that’s when she realizes there’s definitely food in there, plus all that sudden movement and screaming must be sending her predatory instincts into overdrive.

And have you ever seen any video or photo of a big cat in a zoo trying to get a treat out of one of those enrichment balls?

Yeah.

Luckily for the kids there’s a thick enough panel of glass between them and those banana sized teeth, so she can’t get them that way. But that’s fine of course, because there’s always plan B. What’s plan B you ask?

Well flip the car over of course. The top of the thing is armored, so maybe its underside will be softer? That’s how a lot of animals work, there’s a reason predators start eating their prey’s guts a lot of the time, so the logic is sound.

She then bites the tire too, I’m guessing out of curiosity or trying to test different spots. Of course the tire gets completely pierced by the teeth, freeing a lot of air... And making noise, which catches Rexy’s attention... And makes her bite it again.

She gets completely side tracked by the tire and starts trying to tear it off, and I honestly think here she’s just playing and has completely forgotten about the snack.

Not that the kids are in any less peril anyways, with an animal the size of an elephant crushing the car they’re currently trapped in with its sheer size alone. Thankfully Alan’s quick thinking and knowledge of animal behavior are here to save the day!

He grabs a flare and lights it on. This catches Rexy’s attention, because new weird sparkly thing. Then, he throws the flare back into the paddock, and Rexy follows it because she really wants to check out what the hell that new weird thing is. That’s it folks, the day is saved!

Right. For some reason, Ian decides to grab another flare and light it up too. This obviously catches Rexy’s attention because hey, another weird sparkly thing! Then Ian starts running with the flare, and throws the flare while running. The thing is, the point of the flare is giving Rexy a new target to check out, but if you start running and screaming then you become a target. A target that acts an awful lot like prey at that.

So Ian runs straight to the toilet for some reason, and Rexy lunges at him, running her head straight into the small hut because let’s be real, that thing wouldn’t be able to withstand a full charge of something that big lol.

Anyways, the whole thing comes crashing down, leaving poor Gennaro exposed. Now something that’s interesting here is that she doesn’t instantly eat him, she actually checks him out at first! She’s actually curious about him, tilting her head like a quizzical dog.

And eats him. So long for the whole “won’t see you if you don’t move” thing I guess.

Fortunately Gennaro being eaten alive gives Grant enough time to get Lex out of the car (which he would have had even if Ian hadn’t tried to be a hero anyways but I digress), but before he can get Tim, Lex screams. This obviously catches Rexy’s attention, who must be having the time of her life with all this stimulation and she comes back to the car.

We get this scene where she’s supposedly not seeing Grant and Lex because they’re not moving, but IIRC the Lost World novel retconned that to her just not being hungry anymore and honestly I’m gonna roll with that because even if she didn’t see them there’s no way she didn’t smell them. I think she just lost interest in humans after eating a goat and a lawyer, especially when she has a much bigger toy right there!

I honestly think she’s not even trying to get Tim out and eat him anymore, the way I see it she’s just playing around with the car, pushing it around and generally just dicking around with it for the hell of it.

Then she pushes it off a magically appearing cliff like your cat knocking over that one glass at the edge of your kitchen table, either because she wants to get rid of the used toy or simply because she thinks it’s funny. Or because Spielberg didn’t tell her there was suddenly a cliff where she had just walked off. Then she gives one final roar to the camera, which is probably just for cinematic effect tbh.

So... Yeah, that’s all. As you can see, one of the best things of the scene is that the T.rex is... Just an animal. It’s not a movie monster going on a rampage, everything it does is completely normal animal behavior. This is big part of what makes the scene just so good and tense. It just feels real, you can actually believe the protagonists are being put in danger by a wild animal. Because, at the end of the day, that’s what dinosaurs are. Just animals.

Unlike mister “wants to watch the world burn” over here.

#jurassic park #jurassic world #tyrannosaurus #t. rex #scene analysis #animal behavior #if i see another person say jurassic park's dinosaurs have always been monsters? #i'm gonna fucking lose it

[charlat-anne]

So just then I was re-watching Disney's underrated "Dinosaur" (2000), and there happened to be this scene where they've reached the watering hole just to find out it dried up, shortly after, Aladar found a way to get them water with Baylene's help.

Without hesitation, he called out to the rest of the herd.

and unfortunately, had to deal with a pretty rough, unexpected backlash when he tried containing their reaction, and basically got flooded.

That was when someone called him "stupid"..? I couldn't get where that came from so, I asked, and was answered with:

" He should've waited for the older ones to be done drinking first before calling others, to avoid this kind of situation."

So, what makes him stupid is basically lacking your knowledge ..?

If we shall take a look back on his life ..

Aladar was the unchallengeable creature on his island, meaning that he never really had to experience opposition, that along with the way he was raised, never fed the "potential threat" he could've become.

° °

Though it's also obvious that before the catastrophic meteor shower, he never went through scarcity of resources, which would lead us to remember that even when he did, it'd only shown his true nature;

(He was the last one digging, though he wasn't any less thirsty than the rest, but look at his proud smile! and him stepping back for them to start drinking first)

He'd proven to be an altruist..

time and time again.

Hence, clashing against self-seeking behavior was rather perplexing to him.. (not like he knows what that even is..)

° °

Knowing that already should naturally interpret that he wasn't "stupid", but inexperienced..

If we'll be setting that way of ignorant thinking, we'd easily ignore his motives & assume that Aladar staying behind with the "weak" was because he's an idiot. (Deliberately ignoring that it was out of benevolence)

And Bruton's death was an illogicality.. not at all sacrificial or noble

° °

The issue with setting that behavior irl is ignoring facts & passing judgment without taking the other side's morals, characteristics, knowledge, and motives into account. which wouldn't only make them feel misunderstood, but makes you terribly misinformed!

You managed to know everything but somehow ended up knowing nothing. How unfortunate.

#dinosaur #dinosaur 2000 #underrated disney #Behavioral analysis #character analysis #altruism #Aladar #disney's dinosaur #disney #dinosaur movie #movie analysis #film analysis #animated movies #movies #i love this movie so much #love this movie #altruism in movies #selfless #selfless characters #judgemental #character judgement #disney underrated gems #disney's animal kingdom #disney's underrated gems #dinosaur film #2000s #animation #disnerd #Disnerds #disney movie review

[dwollsadventures]

Two great paleontology books illustrated by @bobnichollsart and @knuppitalism-with-ue respectively!

#books #paleontology #dinosaur behavior an illustrated guide #europasaurus graphic novel

[elbiotipo]

The fact that raptors must have acted a lot like a mix between chickens and cats and now we'll never see them again life is so fucking unfair

#this post is not based on research on dinosaur behavior #I just know okay. I know what they were like #cosas mias #dinosaurs

[wolfie245]

Animated Feral Kids

#disney #Tarzan #the jungle book #mowgli #pixar #the good dinosaur #spot #cartoon saloon #wolfwalkers #The girl from dinosaur island #Xotchi #studio ghibli #princess mononoke #anime #radical edward #ed #the wild thornberrys #donnie thornberry #this is just a post of kids who are or were raised by animals #or just have animal like behavior

[nerdfighterwhatevernumbers]

Future Ben: I've decided to study Paleo-pediatrics

College board: That's not really a field

Ben, whipping out a foot thick binder: I designed my own curriculum

#jwcc #camp cretaceous #ben pincus #obsessed with the idea of college ben #him and darius having worked on a thesis informally then formally basically since their teen years #eventually publishing it as their grad thesis and making it into a book #keeping in touch with dr turner so she can keep them updating on the dinosaurs #darius and ben as roommates both studying at the same college because dinosaurs #ben gets really attached to bumpy then firecracker so i love the idea of him focusing on the psyhology behavior developent care for etc #of young dinos

[makenna-made-this]

Take off in 5, 4, 3, 2...

NYOOM

#what a nice dog #beula #buff orpington behavior #chickens #tiny fluffy dinosaurs #the BEST animals #my feather babies #my pets #she's mad because it's too early for her her period dramas to be on yet #what we expect her to sit on a nice comfy lap WITHOUT entertainment?? #honestly #chickenblr #birdblr #pet bird

[blorbologist]

If a child inherits 50% of their dna from their parents, and their sibling also inherits 50%, the siblings share 50% with each other. But if, for example, one child’s ancestry results are different from their sibling’s, what happens to the non inherited ethnicites(?)? Like, if one parent is mixed race and the other is full, I know the children receive a randomized half of each, but what happens to the rest? Is it passed down or is it in the junk dna? I took a test with my sib and I’m confused :/

Hi anon!

Before we start, I'll clarify that my speciality is animal behavior, ecology and evolution, with some neurobio thrown into the mix - so any geneticists are free to correct me if I stumbled on any of this!

Walk with me, here:

You get 50% of your DNA from one parent, and 50% from the other. Right? Pretty standard. What DNA this is will vary wildly, because you're only getting one of any two alleles each parent has. During Meiosis, your parent's chromosomes are duplicated, mix things up a little, randomly* assort, and split to form gametes with half of that parent's alleles. Due to the sheer numbers at play, roughly half* of the DNA in each gamete will end up being the same (so 25% the same from the sire, 25% the same from the dam). But the gist of it is you'll end up with a roughly 50% overlap with what your sibling got... but half their DNA is different, remember.

For instance, I have blue eyes and my brother's are brown. Due to our knowledge of our family tree, we know this is due to a coinflip with our dad's eye color alleles - he got that blue allele from his blue-eyed father, and the brown allele from his mother. Which means I have one of my grandfather's blue eye alleles, but not my grandmother's.

Does that mean I have less of my grandmother's DNA? No! The eye color gene is just one of many, many, many, and a more obvious visible marker than a mutation midway through some random protein that doesn't give me lovely baby blues. Iirc my blood type is more in line with hers, but I'd need to check.

Where am I going with this?

Well, the way a DNA test decides who you're related is by zeroing in on very specific genes that are commonly found in X populations. It's not a 100% match, because humans migrate and mingle a lot, but it offers an educated guess based on probabilities. It's looking for the obvious blue vs brown eyes in your DNA, so to speak.

DNA tests are not looking at *all* your DNA, just at specific areas with known associations. You both likely have roughly the same total % of DNA from those ancestors, it’s just that some of the many coinflips didn't favor keeping those genetic markers used to identify these ethnicities in simple tests. You and your sibling likely each carry a host of traits from those same ancestors that aren't simple brown/blue markers, so to speak. Maybe your sibling inherited an allele commonly seen in X population, but you’re the lucky one who got the toenail shape or what have you.

However, if you don't have that specific allele, it's gone for good. My dad's brown eye allele he got from his mother is not hiding in my back pocket, or in another patch of DNA. It was not included in that original gamete, so I just... flat out do not have it. It ended up in some other sperm cell that didn't get quite so lucky. Likewise, if you don't have X genetic markers, you just don't have them. There have been generations of these coinflips, on top of chromosomal crossover events, and it just so happens that these markers stuck around until this generation - it's luck they made it far enough to be in your parent! There's still ample DNA in you from that ancestor, just less obviously linked to that branch of your family tree.

TLDR: you likely inherited more than what the test is telling you, because it's just looking at obvious makers associated with those populations. However, what markers you didn’t get you flat out do not have (because they ended up in different gametes).

I hope that was a bit of help anon! <3

Also obligatory disclaimer, DNA ancestry tests can and will sell your genetic data to anyone on the market, including informing insurance companies of predispositions to certain illnesses among other things. I recommend people keep their genetic info under lock and key so it does not get used against you or your relatives. Said brown-eyed brother o mine did a test before we knew how shady these companies are, so the best I can hope for is that our overlapping 50% doesn't include anything they'd care to hold against me 🙃

Anon, maybe check the TOS of the service you used and see if you can opt out? I'm not optimistic but you never know! ;; Just be careful going forward. It's not the end of the world, but it might bite you and your parents in the butt going forward.

*The DNA you get from each parent is not completely random, because some alleles are linked due to being very close on the chromosome and thus less likely to be swapped around. Plus some recessive combinations might be nonviable and so those gametes never end up producing viable zygotes. And sex-linked genes. It's fun :D

#ask #biology #genetics are weird #though not really weird this is pretty standard stuff #I think this is my first biology-related ask? glad I graduated beyond CR asks! yall ask me about dinosaurs or social behavior next :DDD

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Holy crap

#psittacosaurus #Repenomamus #behavior #fossils #paleontology #dinosaur #mammal #holy shit holy shit holy shit #palaeoblr

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Author issues stark warning over cancel culture - ‘We’ll be studying it in 100 years!’

John Cleese: I'm so grateful that you came. Greg Lukianoff has co-written the best book on this subject that I've read. You co-wrote it with Jonathan Haidt, wonderful author. It's called "The Coddling of the American Mind," and it's the most interesting thing I've read on all this stuff.

But what I'm fascinated by, is that it all started with you having a severe depression. So, tell the tale.

Greg Lukianoff: Well, in 2007 I got so depressed I had to be hospitalized as a danger to myself. And in the process of recovering the next year, I studied Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. And Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is something that teaches you to talk back to your own exaggerated thoughts.

Cleese: So, when you have the voices in your head you argue with them?

Lukianoff: Exactly. When you're catastrophizing, you call it out…

Cleese: So catastrophizing means what?

Lukianoff: That you're just thinking everything's going to be a catastrophe. It sounds very much like it sounds. When people are anxious and depressed, they have all of these cognitive distortions you know at Volume 11 going on in their head. And that just getting in the habit of talking back to them can relieve many of the symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Cleese: So, when you discovered that, what happened then?

Lukianoff: Well, you know, it changed my life, but I started seeing all over the place ways in which we were teaching young people the habits of anxious and depressed people. It was as if, both in K through 12, in grade school and in higher education, it was like the adults were saying, by the way do catastrophize, do engage in emotional reasoning, do engage in binary thinking, which I know you think a lot about as well.

Cleese: So, you linked up with Jon?

Lukianoff: I linked up with Jon Haidt, I told him what I thought was -- cause I'm a constitutional lawyer. My major focus…

Cleese: Are you? I thought I liked you.

Lukianoff: … and I was defending freedom of speech on college campuses, and academic freedom, and I noticed around 2013 that students were really clamping down, both on freedom of speech, but they were also rationalizing it in this kind of medicalized way that was all catastrophizing, all binary thinking, all of these cognitive distortions. So, we wrote an article together in 2015, saying the things that are threatening free speech on campus are also the kind of mental habits that will make young people anxious and depressed.

Essentially, it's teaching people that essentially, they should avoid challenges, they should avoid things that cause them any pain, but of course and things that cause you pain are also what cause you growth. And so, the emphasis on having your children not experience either physical or emotional pain or challenges, is actually a profoundly unhealthy way to teach kids to think about the world, and to let them be kids and grow up. It's tempting as a parent, because I have a five and a seven-year-old, I understand that you want to protect your kids from emotional difficulty, but if you don't prepare them for a world that's difficult, and you don't prare them for challenges, you're not preparing them to be adults. And even worse. you're creating a situation where of course they're going to be anxious and depressed, because they're afraid of the world, they're afraid of adulthood.

Cleese: Having all these insights with you, how do they affect the people who are advocating woke ideas?

Lukianoff: I think that to a degree, this terrible advice is inherent to a lot of what we might call woke ideology. That essentially, challenge is bad, that you should always follow your emotions, and most importantly, that life is a battle between good people and evil people. A lot of the ideology that we're seeing particularly on campuses, is this very simple narrative of there is pure good and pure evil, and you want to be on the side of pure good always at war with the other.

Cleese: So that if you agree with a lot of the transgender agenda but disagree with some of it, then you are a very bad…

Lukianoff: You're absolutely evil.

Cleese: … person and you're absolutely wrong.

Lukianoff: Yeah, and this is part of the way that unfortunately, in the places where we should be learning to argue like adults, we're teaching this very childish way of arguing. It creates the situation where you can just dismiss any person, any book, any thinker, any institution you disagree with, because since you can find everything is evil, anytime you don't want to listen to somebody, you just declare them evil and…

Cleese: You don't have to bother with them.

Lukianoff: You don't have to challenge your thinking at all.

Cleese: Now, I want to ask you a little bit more about cancel culture, because every time I get on television, the second question is something to do with cancel culture, and my friends are saying, why are you always talking about cancel culture. And the answer is, we're obsessed with it. Tell me what you're thinking about it.

Lukianoff: So, I have a book coming out called "Cancelling of the American Mind."

Cleese: Cancelling, yes.

Lukianoff: Yes, and it's making the point that not only is cancel culture real, but it's so bad we're going to be studying it in 100 years. One thing that we've collected is the number of professors who have been punished or fired. And in the United States, you have to go back to the 1950s to McCarthyism to see numbers that are anywhere near as close to the number of professors…

Cleese: What? The McCarthyism?

Lukianoff: In terms of numbers, absolutely. The estimate's about about 100 to 150 professors were fired from 1947 to 1957. And right now, we're approaching 200 professors getting fired.

Cleese: How does it happen? The students?

Lukianoff: Used to be the administrators were the ones getting professors in trouble. And then it increasingly became the students and the fellow professors who were reporting them. So, McCarthyism, it was generally people outside of higher education who were reporting professors. But now it's coming from within, and it's devastating for the production of knowledge. Because if people think -- people aren't stupid. If they look at an expert, and they come up with an opinion, and they say to themselves, "wait a second, if you can be cancelled for having the wrong opinion, why should I trust you to be objective about this anyway?"

Cleese: Is it anything to do with the fact that the fees at universities now are so high that the students are also kind of customers as well as students?

Lukianoff: That is part of the problem.

Cleese: And they don't want to lose their customers, right?

Lukianoff: It's related to the fees both because it creates a "customer is always right" situation, but also because those fees, at least in the states, increasingly pay for armies and armies, ever growing numbers of bureaucrats and administrators who enforce really rigid ideological norms. They police freedom of speech and it creates an environment that is very chilled.

Cleese: Because the only real aim they have in life is not to get fired.

Lukianoff: Careerism definitely plays a part, but there's also people who think that the key to saving the world is less and less freedom of speech. You would think we would have learned a bit from Galileo.

#John Cleese #The Dinosaur Hour #Greg Lukianoff #The Coddling of the American Mind #Cancelling of the American Mind #cancel culture #academic corruption #cognitive distortions #cognitive behavioral therapy #woke ideology

[dragoncarrion]

Do you think there were any dinosaurs in a yuri relationship

#shortext #like think about it... #so many birds are gay #(ok actually does anyone have any articles about how dinosaur behavior was regarding mates and shit? #like obvs its going to vary a LOT between species n shit

[keepthetension]

watching cooking crush again and i noticed there's a guy in the background just strolling around campus in an animal onesie???

sadly, by the time onesie dude passes prem, dynamite's moved closer and is in the way, so you can't see him anymore

so this potato quality screencap of a blurry dude is the best i have but i freaking NEED some backstory

#cooking crush the series #like LOOK there's a little tail and everything! #also WHAT IS IT like dragon or dinosaur is my best guess #but who knows! #and there's people with him who DON'T seem to be in costume so why the FUCK my dude #the absolute commitment to the bit of wearing this fucking thing to campus #when everyone else is in fucking short sleeves #unhinged behavior #maybe he's the same flavor of neurodivergent as ten #and his dad was like well i bet you can't wear that thing all day #if anyone's spotted him in any other scenes or has better screenshots please tag me PLEEEEEEEASE