General Chat! - We're all dead!

There were so many posts I broke my scouter. It was expensive too.

*opens a bottle of champagne*

This calls for celebratory gunfire.

Uh, could we remove the Non-Core Roleplay IC section? It serves no purpose right now. I don't have any new RPs in the works... does anyone else?

There's a few that Zar and I have planned.

Also, I just saw the trailer for Jurassic World... It was amazing.

I went and saw Mad Max: Fury Road, awesome movie. I have even more inspiration for the Hithe now because of it too.

Sorry for my recent absense. I've been extremely, extremely busy and my internet has been down for a few weeks. Luckily though it is now fixed.

Christopher Lee passed away on June 7th this year. He was an amazing actor. I'll have to go re-watch Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, in which he played Saruman and Count Dooku, respectively. Really sad right now.

Oh my gosh... no... I haven't heard about this. This is terrible... he was one of my most favorite actors...

Wow, I was expecting at least a few other comments. I guess no-one else here liked Christopher Lee? Well, no matter, he'll be coming for you soon enough. He was famous for playing Dracula, after all.

I was sad too, I just was studying at the time.

Pls don't kill me ghost of Christopher Lee ;_;

Christopher Lee's ghost is welcome to kill me any time.

I just saw Jurassic World in IMAX 3D.

It was awesome.

Let's face it, I haven't watched any movies recently, but I'm really happy that dinosaurs are becoming popular again, even if it's just because of a movie. At some point those creatures needed to receive their due, and the more I research, the more I think that the things we thought we had personally invented as works of fiction were already in existence.

Look at these photos I found of all these dinosaurs. They're artist depictions, but these are actual, genuine dinosaurs that existed. Some of them are really cool, and others look...honestly kind of funny and weird....

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Microraptors apparently had patterned black, iridescent feathers, based on fossil evidence, and people still have no clue if they could genuinely fly or simply glide; speculation is that they can do both, and they have four pairs of wings...perfect real-world inspiration for the final Chimerosu variant I need to design still.

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The elasmosaurus has such a long neck that people actually stuck the skull on its tail at first. these things have necks far longer than a pliosaurus, although they look pretty similar.

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The Longisquama is basically a kind of lizard with long scales on its back that look like feathers. It can glide and parachute using them, though.

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I couldn't find a good, lifelike picture, but the nyctosaurus was a dinosaur that people suspect grew a large, antler-like protrusion on its head after at least one year. It didn't have a skin membrane, but apparently it didn't negatively affect flight, either, despite how big it was.

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The Opabinia was probably the most bizarre animal I've ever seen that existed. It had exactly 30 legs, 30 flippers, five eyes, an appendage like an elephant's nose, and a claw like a lobster.

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Well...a Sharovipteryx is kind of obvious in how it's different from other things....the sails are focused around the hind legs...

So...anyway, those are the weird things I figured out existed in the recent past while looking for alien design ideas.

Lol. This forum's time setting is so weird. It says the above post was made a day before this one, when they were made on the same day.

Interesting dinosaurs, Vipera. I myself wish to see Jurassic World sometime soon. One of my friends irl loved it and told me I had to go see it lol. I've heard some good things about the movie itself. And although they don't portray velociraptors precisely how experts predict them to have appeared, I still rather like their depiction of them. It adds a scarier aspect to them which is still very enjoyable.

Well, Jurassic World was supposedly some sort of sequel in the Jurassic Park series. For the most part people tried to be scientifically accurate in the movie, and it had a bunch of experts behind it, but as a sequel it would be kind of strange if the raptors that were scaly reptiles in the previous films suddenly went and sprouted feathers.

I have to agree, Jurassic World was amazing.
Also: oh crap, there's a prehistory conversation and I'm not participating??? Prehistoric life is incredible because of how weird things get. I can see why you'd look to them for inspiration. Plus, we've over 500 MYA of material, so it's pretty much boundless.

Sees Opabinia

Gotta love the Cambrian Explosion. So many weird things turned up in that time period.

I almost forgot to mention this one, I might have recently and I forgot, but it was a newly-discovered species and it only happened a few months ago in China.

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The Yi Qi is like a bird, but it has leathery, deployable wings like a bat's. Basically, in the past there was every kind of flight ability possible, it looks like, because nature came up with so many crazy ideas...but they're awesome....

You should see some of the ancient sharks, too. There's every kind of jaw type possible in those things, one had a crushing spiral in the back of its throat, and another was almost like a pair of scissors. Another shark had this big, gigantic bump on its back.

E3 presentation today.

So hyped.

@ViperaUnion Of course you realize that but only the first animal there (Microraptor) was an actual dinosaur sensu stricto.

Actually, I think it was likely an aquatic bird. It looks like a bird to me. Besides, the second set of legs apparently cannot function as wings. Anyone remember the Coelacanth, and what the current "majority" interpretive framework suggested it would behave like, before any live ones were found? Well, that turned out to be wrong, and I wouldn't be too surprised if this interpretation of the data was wrong either. (Data doesn't speak for itself! It is viewed through an interpretive framework.)

In 2013 researchers announced that they had found fish scales in the abdominal cavity of a Microraptor specimen. This new finding corrects the previous position that Microraptor hunted only in an arboreal environment. They also argued that the specimen showed a probable adaptation to a fish-eating diet: the good preservation of the mandible shows that the first three teeth were inclined anterodorsally, a character often associated with piscivory. Microraptor was an opportunistic feeder, hunting the most common prey in both arboreal and aquatic habitats.

Wikipedia article

Got a point, Whos, but I doubt Microraptor was primarily aquatic. I imagine that it probably did glide, or was at least spent most of its time on land (Wikipedia article).

Just my extra two cents: I don't think anyone should use the "scientists-aren't-always-right" explanation. While true, it can't really be used to disprove anything. Not saying that speculation isn't interesting, it's just that it irks me a bit.

I tend to regard anything from ancient times that went extinct to be a kind of dinosaur...I also get dinosaurs and birds mixed up because dinosaurs sometimes have feathers...at what point is a dinosaur a bird? I just don't really understand it.

At any rate, I don't think Microraptors were completely aquatic; most aquatic birds have webbed feet and a very specific wing shape that indicates that they would dive into the water or swim around. Microraptors don't have fossil evidence of webbed feet, and I don't really think their body type is made for diving or floating.

That in mind, I don't consider predatory fish-eaters like Ospreys or Fishing Eagles to be aquatic, although their prey is. I think Microraptors were more like Ospreys; they probably lived near water and snatched up their food, but didn't really dive or land in it.