this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

"Hey, isn't that Dave's skull?"

"Can't be, I just saw him this morning. Sure looks like him though. Weird."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

I suddenly feel very small, but also the load off my shoulders lifted.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

OK, now I'm imagining dinosaur archaeologists (monocles and brushes, not bullwhips and quips).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

There are still a few of them in government.

[–] [email protected] 152 points 1 week ago (2 children)

There are fossilized humans. Fossilization really doesn't take that much time, geologically speaking; it just requires very specific conditions.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (6 children)

About how much time are we talkin here?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

Also makes you wonder what fossils they mean, of the same species or then already extinct ones.

Because according to a quick Wikipedia search the oldest hominid fossils (?) are something like 7 millions years old

That's much much shorter than dinosaurs where around but hey " hominins are around long enough to unearth hominin fossils"!

[–] [email protected] 127 points 1 week ago (6 children)

It is more chronologically accurate to show a t-rex being hit by a car than it is to show a t-rex eating a stegosaurus

[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I said I'm sorry. But if you're going to let your T-Rex out at night you should at least put a reflective collar on it.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Hi, I was just calling because I live down the street from you, and your daughter come to my house today and she kick my t-rex.

Your daughter come to my house today, And she come on my property and then she kick my t-rex. And now my t-rex needs operation.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How cruel.

My T-Rex ist mostly armless

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

That would be a knee slapper if I could reach.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago

This is the comparison I was looking for. It’s great to explain that media shows them together but untrue, it is a totally different idea to explain the staggering time difference between the two.

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[–] [email protected] 123 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

This is only mind blowing because popular media likes to show every dinosaur at once. Like there's a lot of things depicting stegosaurus fighting T-Rex; but these animals never would have met. They're from entirely different periods.

[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 week ago (2 children)

How dare you suggest DinoTrux lied to us!!!

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

If gasoline is made from dinosaurs, what did the Dinotrux run on?

[–] argh_another_username 46 points 1 week ago

The blood of their enemies!!!

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

DinoTrux drove the earth for such a long time BP Oil^®^ existed while DinoTrux drove the earth.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago

You can tell because non of them has feathers.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

We live closer to the time of T-Rex than T-Rex lived to the time of Stegosaurus.

67 million years separate us from T-Rex.
83 million years separate T-Rex from Stegosaurus. (150 million years between us and Stegosaurus)

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (4 children)

on a similar note: When cleopatra lived, the pyramids were already ancient

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Cleopatra lived closer to t-rex than us

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 week ago (3 children)

This meme made me gasp loud enough that my girlfriend was worried something was wrong.

Then I had to explain that I'm 41 years old and was just shocked by a dinosaur fact.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

To be fair, things can fossilise very quickly given ideal conditions. Still dinosaurs reigned for a lot more time than mammals and frankly nature is still feeling the loss in certain ways.

https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-miss-the-mammoths/

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Another fun fact (dino facts are the best facts): There are more "dinosaur" species alive today than there are mammal species.
11,000 bird species alive today (approx)
6,000 mammal species alive today (approx)

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago

Also, my favourite fact is we know almost nothing about dinosaurs from jungles and mountains. Most of our knowledge comes from wetland and oceanic creatures because of the way fossils are formed.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

Forty-one?! You're practically a fossil!

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 week ago (6 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

There's always a relevant xkcd

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Birds are considered to be dinosaurs. Birds exist now. We are finding dinosaur fossils now.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

That's what the XKCD that was posted says. Mostly.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (5 children)
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Also, water you are drinking has probably been peed by dinosaure. Several time. But probably not peed by a human.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Well, there are human fossiles aswell and we have been here for a pretty short time.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

Well, there are plenty of hominid fossils and we humans are plentiful.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Which makes me ask, why were mammals able to evolve to produce an apex predator that relies on it's inventiveness (Humans) in quite a short time, but no similar "dinosaur" got to that point in a much longer period?

We're searching planets for signs of life as a pre-cursor to intelligent life, but there's no guarantee that life will evolve in the same direction as ours.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Evolution isn't aimed. A T-Rex needs to be good enough to hunt enough food.

Our ancient ancestors smashed the skulls of animals killed by African predators to eat the brains, smashed bones to eat the marrow.

Later as our ancestors became bigger and stronger they hunted and needed to communicate with each other to effectively track and take down an animal. Maybe they needed twenty words. Chickens have three words (or cluck patterns)

At the same time women collected stuff and needed to share how to identify this from that with younger women. They might have needed a hundred words.

Then those who could talk better were more attractive to the other sex than those who couldn't (even now being well spoken is attractive) then a few millions of years later we're making stone knives, hammers, axes; then ten minutes later aeroplanes and machine guns

In short: we had it hard enough we needed to share information. We later found communication sexy. T-Rex had no such trouble. We seem to be the only animal that solved "scavenging is dangerous" and "hunting is hard" with talking to each other rather than by getting bigger and getting claws or vicious teeth

I understand we selected for tall by fighting humans

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Evolution isn't aimed.

I realise that, but the use of tools and sharing of ideas may well have had advantages against the T-Rex. Just as I'm sure they've helped us against things that would eat or kill us.

We seem to be the only animal that solved "scavenging is dangerous" and "hunting is hard" with talking to each other rather than by getting bigger and getting claws or vicious teeth

Right, but why are we the only ones to solve it that way? Some lesser "dinosaur" could have evolved tactics to fight bigger predators through basic weapons (sharp sticks), but no evidence of that exists.

An advantage is an advantage, so I think it's reasonable to ask why mammals and not murder chickens came up with it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Weird to leave at animals like crows with that last one.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Corvids and psittacines display human child level intelligence. They use tools. They recognize other people. Hell the psittacines can mimic speech.

I personally suspect it's a matter of energy density. Birds have to use almost all of their available calories on flying. Doesn't leave a lot of energy left over for a massively hungry brain. No clue what's holding back penguins, emus, and cassowaries.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

Most birds are extremely light and efficient. Their bones have evolved to be light weight to help with this. Some species even fly in a V formation to conserve energy.

Evolution doesn't mean get better or smarter. It just means the species can survive and keep reproducing. Emperor Penguins in Antarctica for example, where they nest in a place where there are no predators. It seems insane the hardship and their silly walk which takes forever. But it works.

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