Woah - I had never heard of the Hatzegopteryx. I spent some time today watching videos of this guy today (and its relatives, Quetzalcoatlus and Argentinosaurus). They are really cool.
I know that there is a lot of arguments about what dinosaurs actually looked like - I hope that in the videos they make these guys scarier than they actually were… This video is especially: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYniD_MQ7Rg
Personally, this style (from a great PBS Eons video) is my favorite interpretation:
And artists apparently like to emphasize that these guys could eat small dinosaurs!
I am going to be that guy and point out that pterosaurs were not dinosaurs, unless you consider primates to be squirrels cause we are distantly related. Also fun fact pterosaurs may have had a type of feathering which either means that the ancestors of both dinosaurs and pterosaurs had feathers or it evolved at least twice. And on a similar thing of body coverings, stem mamals/proto-mammals had fur before the dinosaurs ever evolved.
I am going to be that guy and point out that pterosaurs were not dinosaurs, unless you consider primates to be squirrels cause we are distantly related.
Ah, thank you for being that guy! Now I know 😄
Also fun fact pterosaurs may have had a type of feathering which either means that the ancestors of both dinosaurs and pterosaurs had feathers or it evolved at least twice. And on a similar thing of body coverings, stem mamals/proto-mammals had fur before the dinosaurs ever evolved.
Can the feathers and fur (or their impression) be preserved for millions of years in some types of fossilization? Or is the presence of these concluded from the bone structures, fossilized skin, or other not so direct pieces of evidence? And, is any direct evidence of color preserved? No pressure to answer, I am just wondering out loud.
On the preservation thing, it depends but it usually comes down tp either skin impressions, soft tissue fossilization, or imprints kinda like fossil footprints. You were basically on point with your guess. But yeah this type of evidence is varried and highly temperamental in how we find it.
Thanks! I can imagine preserving a feather for 65 millions of years is no easy feat.
I think the only thing that preserves worse are soft bodied organisms like jellyfish. But yeah if ya want to learn more on this shit PBS Eons on youtube is a pretty solid start.
Also a nice birdy
Harpy eagle?
Yes
Reminds me of the Wilddruden from the Ronja Räubertochter (Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter) movie.
Oh man, this movie had such an impact on a couple of generations of Scandinavians. I’ve talked to multiple folks in the BDSM community who had their sexual awakening to the scene where Ronja is tied underground by the small elf people.
The Scandinavian bdsm community sounds really fun
That first picture…
As a small mammal compared to that my evolutionarily developed survival instincts must be off. I want to befriend it. I assume it wants to eat children though.
I have to agree
/c/Beetlejuicing
That too right picture for a second looked like a man in a bunny suit t-bagging the camera
we have found birdperson
Cool username btw
Hatzegopteryx
HatzeGOPteryx
GOP
What, did this thing hate women?
Pteryx means wings, hence the joke doesn’t fly.
It’s odd that razor sharp teeth is kind of the gold standard for a scary animal, but honestly, getting swallowed whole and slowly digested by stomach acid sounds so much more horrific. I’d so much rather a T-Rex eat me than that.
I dunno, can the stomach digest you, or smother you, before you pull out a knife and slice your way out?
I feel like “being comped to death” beats “swallowed whole” on the total chance of dying.
The stomach isn’t like a big cave with a pool af acid in it. It is compacted by muscles around it so if you are swallowed whole, you would have to fight against those muscles to even be able to move at all. If your arms are above your head it’s likely you would die before you are able to move them to your hips to draw your knives. If they are at your hips, good look moving the knives to point outwards. Also the stomache is lined with thick mucous to protect it from sharp objects… Also it’s completely dark and disorienting.
It’s almost certainly you’d drown, suffocate and get crushed VERY quickly after getting swallowed alive.
The stomach isn’t like a big cave with a pool af acid in it.
Unless your predator has been eating a lot of air or drinking a lot of soda/beer. Although one burp would quickly get rid of all that headroom. And the CO2 from carbonation would quickly suffocate you as well as it’s heavier than air.
You can blame the Magic School Bus for my incorrect perception of how the stomach works. I know they cleared things up at the end, but as a kid I remembered only the adventures.
If it’s any consolation, you would suffocate long before any stomach acid got to you.
Drowning in stomach acid sounds particularly excruciating.
It would have cost you nothing to not say that.
it sounds…faster? So, it’s got that going for it (which is nice)
Not necessarily! Could be juuust strong enough to sear the exterior of your body and slowly dissolve you over days.
If it was that weak it you would drown long before being dissolved
Probably not enough volume to engulf you and make you drown. Usually stomach acid is strong enough to irritate but not dissolve a whole prey, so those two are out. However accidental inhalation and fumes might be a motherfucker and getting it into the eyes would be horrendous.
Two possible scenarios:
-
Suffocation due to a lack of oxygen.
-
Crushed to death by the stomach. It is conceivable that this baby (slaps roof of the dinosaur) can crush large prey to death in the stomach and grind it to small bits by having an especially strong muscle lining.
-
I recall reading a meme about the ocean being bullshit, something along the lines of “the most common way to die on land is something making your blood fall out”.
Idk I’m still partial to quetzacoaltus!
Fucking quesadilla birds…
They’re first cousins: Quetzalcoatlinae
Apparently Arambourgiania are also Quetzal’s sibling.
This must be a poor reconstruction, no? how could this possibly fly? Tiny wings and a massive imbalance with like 2/3 of the thing being neck and head?
There’s a little of both in play here.
First, the whole black and white part of the illustration is a neck flap that may or may not have existed. It makes the neck look super thick, but it was just the artist’s interpretation.
Second, penguins. Pterosaurs have big, hollow heads and skeletons that look like they should have flown. The same can be said of penguins.
Well hollow bones in birds aren’t for flying but for breathing purposes so your second point isn’t exactly right.
I recall reading something about a similar Dino that didn’t so much fly and ran and glided instead. I wonder if it’s similar to what this big boy did.
Look just because we haven’t found any air fossils yet
But penguins are flightless birds? I could imagine the big guy being a flightless bird with vestigial wings, like ostriches.
The strong head, small body with all four extremities being used to stand seems more evolved for walking to me (I know next to nothing about fossil reconstruction though)
But penguins are flightless bird?
That’s his point.
you can make anything fly if you strap a big enough rocket to it.
S’why I never understood the expression ‘when pigs fly’. Like… do you really want me to abuse a pig?
Just look at the F-117A. That thing has the aerodynamic profile of a school bus made of cinder blocks. It “flies” because it goes fast enough to just about hit escape velocity.
The F117a isn’t actually that bad. It’s very unstable, mind, but it’s not relying on brute force for lift.
It’s not fast at all. Its slowness is a design feature since going fast reduces stealth- by generating more heat in the exhaust and more noise. It also means the engines can be smaller which reduces the size of the engines (which, the fans are a nice flat surface to generate returns off of,)
Almost the entire weight of the animal on the drawing is between its wings, and by that human there, there are more than 10 m of wingspan. Many small aiplanes are smaller than it.
Pterosaurs had a very unusual body shape that is nothing like birds.
My very quick research leads me to believe they have very little skeletal remains that they used to guess what this guy must have looked like. I could be wrong
deleted by creator
Pelicans for humans
hezezodxkdieutpuyrex
im just gonna call it big bird
WTF?! Is that a bird or a starship?
looks like an upside down stingray to me
There’s a reason the Romulan starship class was named Bird Of Prey.
It was modeled after albatrosses?
Yes
Add a Cesna 137 there too.
The turning invisible at the end is just great.
It’s a bird of prey.
Other weird pictures
Ya see, this i don’t mind getting eaten by. But OP’s pic looks like some sort of eldritch horror that would have me spiral into madness before devouring me.
Thank you for the perfect complementary comment, sincerely,.
Haha, I actually laughed out loud.
You’re entirely right.
I love the different interpretations of concept artists, whether they’re galactic or paleontological or whatever, it’s always fun to see the differences between what people come up with.
kitty : 3Minnesota’s true cryptid
Despite its size, it only weighed about 250 lbs. Most of its skull is hollow.
In international standard SI units that’s about 113 kg.
If you’re using SI, shouldn’t it be 1.1 kN?
Kilonewton? That would be a force and not a mass. For mass the standard unit is (kilo)grams.
Weight is a force and it’s not mass. Weight is measured in Newtons.
We are not talking about the weight force here. We are simply converting pounds-mass to kg. If you dont believe OP meant the mass (whicg Im sure he certainly did) then aks him but when saying something weighs a certain amount then one is usually referring to its mass.
We were actually talking about Force, though. Pounds is a force, not a mass. I am OP and I meant force because I’m assuming the animal lived on earth. If I wanted to specify mass then I would have used Slugs, the Imperial unit for Mass.
Could you provide any source that states that a pound is a unit of force? Because the American National Standard Institute (here), aswell as Wikipedia and numerous other sources claim its a unit of mass.
Did you take into account that earth was heavier millions of years ago? Also, you would have to specify where on earth it weighed that amount.
Anyway, pound is an imperial unit for mass, just like slug. The “pound-force” is not part of the imperial units, jut rather of the “English Engineering Units” that differentiate between pound-mass, pound-force, pound-foot and others.
“Pound” is not a unit of force in ANY system. If you really meant force (I doubt that) you should have used lbf. Anyway, noone cares how many Newtons of force the earth exhibited on that animal, all the metric-using people in this thread are interested in its mass. All scales used to weigh something display kg (or pounds), so units of mass.
No, we don’t refer to mass when weighing something. Measuring mass is quite hard, measuring weight is simple - just use scales.
If you use a scale, the force acting upon the mass is calculated out such that you get a mass displayed.
In both the British Imperial System and the US Customary Units, a pound is a unit of mass, defined as 0.45359237 kg. In fact, all the definitions in the section “Weights and Masses” of the US Cusomaries are defined in either kg, g or mg.
Thank you, apparently most people here don’t understand the difference.
LBS is Imperial Pounds which is a measure of Force and not Mass. That is why your LBS fluctuates based on gravity but your mass doesn’t. So they are correct.
I see. Okay. Didn’t know that.
But weight is gravitational force not mass. These are deeply related but not the same because us customary is based on pre Newtonian measurement systems
Us customary defines the pound to be a unit of mass. Thats all you need to know.
This has the energy of an 11 year old who just learned what weight is in physics
Or a middle school physics teacher that barely knows what they’re talking about.
If you say that something “weighs” something, that’s a description of mass, not weight, because the wording is from before a time when it was understood that mass and weight are different things.
All has been said that needs to be said, bloody pedant.
Specifically LBS is a force, though. Imperial Pounds is not a mass measurement, so converting it would be a better equivalent to Kilonewtons.
I was mostly just joking. Of course we use lbs as pseudomass. Fuck, we’ve moved to lbm vs lbf in America because mechanical engineers must be stopped and metricated by force if necessary. We’re a spacefaring species that’s advanced enough to have planetary gravitational maps, of course mass is what we should be using. But also weight as force is just kinda funny to use outside the myriad times you actually need to in engineering
just like the average internet user.
Beautiful
Badum’tsh
The spice must flow.
omg u think I’m skinny😍😍
