Just another way to die

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also fanfic writers write whatever they want to read for themselves first and foremost. they didn’t write to please you, random stranger on the internet.

fanfic writers didn’t force you to read their works. they’re kind enough to let you in their house for free if you want to. if you don’t like how they decorate their own house, quietly leave instead of telling them things you want them to change about their own house to better suit your personal preferences and calling it “constructive criticism”.

if they specifically ask for one, then sure. give them that. but if they didn’t ask and if you don’t have anything nice to say, quietly leave.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

It is NOT the default, it is NOT human nature to exclude disabled people from society. By nature we look after each other, by nature disability is just a natural part of the human variety that's made us so successful as a species.

I'm gonna repeat myself as I always do when this shit comes up because I fucking love it. Shanidar 1 was a Neanderthal man who had suffered multiple injuries. He was probably partially or fully blind in one eye and had hearing loss in at least one ear. He had some sort of degenerative disease that made eating difficult. He had a spine injury and his right arm was weakened and amputated because of it. He probably had further paralysis down the right side. He had broken both legs at some point and is theorized to have had a limp. He had a collapsed lung from a rib injury shortly before his death, but he survived weeks after that injury.

He died around age 35-40, and all of these injuries had at least partially healed.

And when he died, he was properly buried near members of his group, no ifs ands or buts about it.

There is so much proof of Hominins of every stripe being capable of compassion. This most recent find just solidifies that:

“For decades, it has been known that Neanderthals cared for and looked after their vulnerable companions,” Conde-Valverde said. “However, all known cases of care involved adult individuals, leading some scientists to believe that this behaviour was not genuine altruism but merely an exchange of assistance between equals.

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

- We have fossils of spider webs

- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of

- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa

We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.

We know roughly how they sounded (as the person above me said).

We know they had remarkable vision.

We know they had the second. strongest sense of smell in history.

We know from their bones that they grew to a certain size and stayed there until about 14 or so, then absolutely ballooned up to their adult size in about three or four years.

We know they likely lived in family groups, because we have bones with certainly fatal injuries for a solitary animal (broken legs and such) that are completely healed.

We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.

The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it’s colors, and it’s tail rings (which one would argue would be it’s “iconic feature.”

(Art credit Julio Lacerda)

Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.

(Art credit Vitor Silva)

This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We’ve found pigmentation in scales and skin. We’ve completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We’ve figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.

We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.

We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by “accident” by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.

We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it’s life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)

We learn and understand way more from “rocks” than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is “We can’t possibly know anything about these animals,” then you don’t understand science.

As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They’re only concerned with Awesombro.

If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as “proof” that paleontologists don’t know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)