What makes it weirder is probably that you know the animal to have one size, so basically the same animal but larger or smaller is what freaks you. Check out prehistoric miniature horses: https://www.britannica.com/animal/dawn-horse
Or the giant monster ostrich that ate them. Or the VW-Beetle-car-sized armadillos that roamed near them.. All of them not so far from the giant sloths you mentioned.
Moose had this effect on me like last year when I saw a video of an actual Canadian moose next to a highway. I always thought they were the size of large deer.
Seeing some of this prehistoric megafauna shit like a snake that could flick its tail and cut your house in half EZ mode would be terrifying beyond comprehension. Also I read an article that said that grass as we know it did not exist back then???
Makes sense, plants are subjected to evolution too.
And yeah, mooses are fairy tales monsters that should be used more in fantasy world building
It's definitely partially that and partially that I'd hate to be walking to the shops while keeping an eye on the sky in case one of those carnivorous birds with a 6m wingspan is in the neighborhood. It makes zero sense logically but there you go. I wouldn't wanna fight a giant sloth.
I don't know if they were dangeorus as a bear but worse or, you know, just a giant sloth you can avoid and it will be happy to not interact with you either.
The giant sloths where also eaten by the largest crocodile in OP's picture, there's bones of them that have bite marks clearly fitting Purussaurus.
lots of collapse stories set the timer back like 50 years. "80% of animal life wiped out since 1950" or whatever. But humans have been doing their thing since they moved out of Africa. We are the most "successful" invasive species on earth right now. and no, I won't provide sources
There was a dude who wrote a book about how all megafauna conveniently died out from "climate changes" the moment we moved to their biome. I wish I could remember what he was called, or what the book was called.
This was the counter story that I was worried about getting called out on. Just seems too convenient, but I suppose it's possible. Like, jellyfish blooms didn't cause the massive die offs in the ocean, but they took advantage. :Shrug:
For what it is worth I took a class on this subject last year from a professor who is well respected in the field, and we evaluated all the possible explanations for the Pleistocene Megafaunal Extinction - the most well supported theory was hunting by humans. For larger animals that we didn't kill directly, we still eliminated their populations by overhunting their smaller prey ("predator crash").
Yeah, the wildest thing I heard was that cattle raising created the Sahara desert
On that note, just wanna say that all fictional aliens are hilariously human-centered. The idea that life on another planet, would follow the exact same paths as our planet's species did, is absolutely beyond preposterous. I'm talking about our warm-blooded mammals thriving over the cold-blooded reptiles, so life on another planet could look like absolutely anything.
I was always tickled by the fact that almost every star trek alien is just a human with some kind of minor distinguishing facial feature
Ancient origins
Despite the vast distances separating their homeworlds, many humanoid species have been found to share a remarkable commonality in form and genetic coding. These similarities were believed to be evidence of a common ancestry, an ancient humanoid species, who lived in our galaxy's distant past some four billion years ago.It's of course a necessary explanation to make the show feasable in a world without infinitely powerfull CGI, but Star Trek isn't that thoughtless.
Nah my problem was that I never watch movies, less sci-fi and I had just gave my Physics 1 exam, so on top of bitching about plotholes and lines I couldn't stop bitxhing about all the brocken laws of physics and shit.
so wack how many people hate on this episode. It worked very well for me.
There are restrictions to getting into space, tho. like, you need to be able to use tools, can't be massive or too small, probably land dwelling, reasonable life span, etc
I do think some of the suppositions that people make about the chemistry and basic structure of alien life are pretty convincing. Like any complex life form is probably going to have lots of liquid bits surrounded by solid linings, with lots of complicated carbon-based compounds throughout, simply because that's pretty much the only way you can get complicated chemical things to happen. Water is a good bet for being the main liquid component because it's extremely common and is a good solvent, though something like ammonia is also plausible.
Beyond that I think it's hard to be sure of anything. All kinds of strange body shapes could make sense on a world with different gravity, different geological formations and different plant life from ours. To be fair, a big reason why a lot of sci-fi sticks with aliens that are roughly the same size and shape as humans is because it makes storytelling easier, not to mention costumes/animation.
can’t be massive or too small
That's largely determined by the planet itself though, if it's smaller or spinning faster, it's easier to get into space.
Fair. A whale sized creature living on a planet with 1/100th gravity could work. The square/cube law starts doing weird things tho at that scale. Like, could you build a pressurized space ship that big, or would the walls have to but meters think?
The thickness of the walls is determined by pressure it's trying to contain, a city sized ship and human-sized space suit are trying to contain the same pressure.
Well, there's the argument that they might be really similar to us due to convergent evolution. Like, the traits that we have might just be favored for intelligent species that could develop civilizations and technology.
giant capybara https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d8/2e/38/d82e383196e7103867491685602f92b1.png
Why is the scale a WV Beetle and a dude in a cowboy hat? Both of those are oddly specific...
I mean, it's not the fault of the extinctions themselves but rather the changing conditions that lead to the extinctions. What I'm saying that all of these cool prehistoric animals probably couldn't survive on our modern Earth : (
And capitalism has flattened the still surviving alligators, what will we ever do next?!?!?111
And if you try to feed them bagels the pigs arrest you.
I will keep feeding the iguanas in my backyard, fuck the police.
well if you feed gators they approach people and people get hurt and then people kill the gators so don't feed them. also its probably not good for their health.
Yeah, I know. But the lizards I feed are small: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_black_and_white_tegu
Dunno, the largest one being named "Pure Brazilian" seems a little race-sciency. Kinda sus.
I always heard "Brazilians have them bigger", they must have been talking about gators
The Rimworld mod Megafauna will let you do battle with/tame/hatch Purusauruses
