As many field-oriented scientists will tell you, large herbivores can be far scarier than large carnivores. In that spirit, I readily confess that a surprise encounter with a fill-grown adult ankylosaur would've been absolutely terrifying. 🧪
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A mini-van would be about right. The genus is Peloroplites, which was about 5-6 m (meters) long, 2 m tall, & weighed around 2 tonnes. It was, as the kids might say, a chonky unit.
I assume there’s an all-dinosaur Skyrim mod out there where I can just watch them from a respectful distance while the grass waves in the wind, and occasionally have one sneak up and ragdoll me into the game’s troposphere
Ark is really pretty, and with the right settings and mods (and the occasional console code to deal with ludicrous crafting requirements) a nice single player exploration and action game.
Yano, certain animals are just totally chill because nobody besides huge predators mess with them. Intraspecies competition and predatory defense (AFAIK) is the prime motivator of aggression in large grazing mammals; do we have any speculation on behavior for ankylo?
As cute as the ankylosaur on Camp Cretaceous can be, one good swing with that tail would be cause to reflect on your life choices. A shot to the stomach would probably be like getting hit with a cannonball.
Yup. One of my top 5 scariest moments in the field happened in central Idaho, where other trackers & I were looking for wolf tracks & instead found fresh moose track & scat. Turns out they were from a nearby momma & her calf, who we spotted nearby. We got low & retreated very quietly & quickly. 😱
....I'm guessing areas you're supposed to do research in where you had to say "Actually, we can't gather the data today because the moose got here first"?
Yeah, spots to measure data, dropped on a map randomly to comply with statistics so you're not only choosing easy-to-get-to places and biasing the results.
Thinking back to the Jurassic franchise ... Pachys absolutely have that energy going. But it's the full-bore irrational murder goose attitude of the Pteranodons that always sticks with me. We don't see all their victims, but it's implied that they're responsible for the vast majority.
Stegosaurs are perpetually mean. Almost every encounter with them, from The Lost World to Camp Cretaceous, has them running people down and trying to give them the biggest thagomizing of their lives.
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Still a cousin of the anky but sooooo intact for us to admire
Hop aboard 😂
With dinosaurs.
That you can ride.
#JWCC
My favorite Mesozoic attitude was little Lystrosaurus in the extended cut Dominion. Of course I love disaster taxa, but they nailed that one.