Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. On top of whatever
other issues I may have, I seem to have developed computer/Internet problems… hopefully,
they will be resolved quickly enough. What else? Aside from the fact that the
DA has switched and that is the end of that? What next?
So, yesterday, I have watched one of the ‘Monsters Resurrected’
episodes – the ‘Great American Predator’. It dealt with one of the more obscure
North American dinosaurs – the Acrocanthosaurus. It existed during the early
Cretaceous, millions of years before the T-Rex, and it was not really related
to the Rex – rather, it was one of the carnosaurs, a cousin to both the
Allosaurus of the Jurassic and the giants of the Cretaceous, such as the
Carcharodontosaurus and Giganotosaurus, for example. Compared to them, the
Acrocanthosaurus was smaller, more like the Allosaurus in size, but unlike Big
Al and the rest of the carnosaurs in general, the Acrocanthosaurus had a ridge
on its back. It was relatively short, nowhere as impressive as the sail of the
Spinosaurus, for example, and when compared, the Acrocanthosaurus was the much
more conventional theropod dinosaur out of the two, but it is still worth
mentioning, because it is overlooked in favor of the T-Rex and the other
latecomers.
…Speaking of T-Rex and the other latecomers, I found the ‘Great
American Predator’ to be heavily influenced by Robert Bakker and his ‘Raptor
Red’ novel, which depicted the life and times of an Utahraptor and her family in
the early Cretaceous North America, with the Acrocanthosaurs’ being regular
rivals to the Utahraptors in the first two thirds of the novel. Ergo-?
Ergo, my point is that the Utahraptor is the closest thing
that real life had to the JP/JW franchise’s raptor, period, (which was initially
based on the Deinonychus, also featured in ‘Raptor Red’). Proportionally,
Deinonychus was smaller than the Utahraptor, (and the most obscure
Dakotaraptor), but it was still the third largest raptor dinosaur in Earth’s
history, and it appeared in the ‘Great American Predator’, while the Utahraptor
did not. In particular, Deinonychus was shown harassing younger Acrocanthosaurs
and eventually forcing this species into extinction, (though by middle to late
Cretaceous, not just Acrocanthosaurus, but also Deinonychus and Utahraptor were
extinct on the planet, it should be noted).
Other contributing factors to the Acrocanthosaurus’s
extinction included the eventual extinction of large North American sauropods,
such as Sauroposeidon/Paluxysaurus, and them being replaced by smaller, tougher
prey, such as Sauropelta, a distant cousin to the better-known Ankylosaurus,
for example. Whereas the jaws and teeth of the T-Rex and its cousins such as
Tarbosaurus bataar and Daspletosaurus evolved precisely to crash through bony
armor and skeletal bones of the other dinosaurs, the carnosaurs hadn’t evolved
this sort of feature – their teeth were thin but sharp, designed to slice
through flesh instead, and their jaws were longer and shallower than those of
the tyrannosaurs, and so not as powerful as the latter. …The latter were the
more derived theropods, I suppose, but now they are all gone, and how the kriff
I am going to manage the new DA site, I have no idea. I am half-tempted to just
destroy my pages there and all, and be done with them – I do not really have
much of value on that site, so who knows?..
Getting back to theropods, let us talk about swans instead.
No, not the extinct giants of the Mediterranean islands that used to harass the
pygmy elephants that’d also lived there, but rather the modern species. The
best-known species are the four northern ones, which belong to the genera Olor (aka the mute swan) and Cygnus, (the rest of the white swans of
the Northern hemisphere), as they’d been immortalized in the various works of
art and literature as symbols of purity, chastity, and the like, because
appearance matters.
The other two swans, however, are quite different birds: the
black swan of Australia, (Chenopis
atratus), is all black, of course, but the oldest ‘true’ swan of them all,
(Sthenelides melancoryphus), is the
black-necked swan of South America, and it is white, with a black head and
neck, giving it a rather odd appearance, and making one wonder, as to how the
swan evolution has gone, color-wise at least.
…The continent of South America is also home to the so-called
coscoroba swan, (Coscoroba coscoroba),
which is solid white in color instead, but is considered to be more closely
related to geese and shelducks, (especially to the Cape Barren goose of
southern Australia), rather than to the true swans, appearances be damned…but
we’ve talked about geese (and ducks) before, and right now I don’t want to get
back to them.
Well, this is it for now. Real life sucks, and the new DA
site is worse, but it doesn’t matter; see you all soon instead!
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