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Post by creature386 on Jan 9, 2022 16:11:10 GMT 5
Welp. I thought I had replied to the Megalodon bit already, but it seems like my reply has never been sent. I don't even have the slightest clue what I wrote back then, so, let me just give a brief commentary on the whale vs Megalodon fight. Other than the jumbo jet BS, I'd say this depiction represents the way we saw this animal 11 years ago pretty well. The interesting bit is, of course, while the oversized great white shark has become more and more outdated, their Brygmophyseter got retrospectively validated through the discovery of Livyathan. Although even this doesn't excuse just how ridiculous their fight was. I think the only way this whole "whale pod vs lone shark" scenario makes any sense is if we take the stated length for Brygmophyseter (35-40 ft) at face value and ignore its relative size to the shark in the animation. Honestly, by this point, I have no idea what is even canon and what is not. The animation and the narration contradict each other more often than they agree. (On a trivia note, wasn't this the JFC episode that got Steve Alten - author of The Meg - as a talking head? Maybe he gave them the idea of Megalodon being as big as a jumbo jet.) You know, I find this title funny. When I read it and I forgot what the title was about, I thought it'd be about predator being killed by prey, but no, it's just a big predator killing a smaller predator. It's also thematically awkward as the episode's entire theme is basically "Evolution is a ladder, new theropods > old theropods". Funnily enough, the "hunter becomes hunted" theme was far more prevalent during the Bloodiest Battle episode where we got introduced
- We see an extended characterization of Ceratosaurus as a dumber, smaller, and less deadly animal than the more “advanced” theropods of its time, like Allosaurus, which ended up outcompeting Ceratosaurus (basically, the Virgin Ceratosaurus vs the Chad Allosaurus). I’ve addressed this above.
One old analogy I’ve come across is that ceratosaurs were to tetanurans what marsupials are to placentals. More precisely, if Ceratosaurus was the thylacine of the theropods, Allosaurus was the dingo. I’ll just quote what Darren Naish said about this analogy in one of his recent books: “…don’t overthink this as it becomes less defensible the more you analyze it.”
You've already done a great job of showing why this Great Chain of Being nonsense is, well, nonsense, so, I won't comment further on this. But what makes this truly hilarious is that it's asking us to ignore what happened in the Bloodiest Battle episode. The behavior of Ceratosaurus there seemed somewhat reasonable, but Allosaurus? I mean, you practically turned their decision to attack the Camarasaurus into a meme. So, yeah, one of those instances where what is shown and what is told have nothing to do with one another: In this conflict, I'd just like to ignore that narration entirely. - When the Ceratosaurus ends up raking the Allosaurus’ face with its hand claws, DG says “it’s personal”. Oh my lord…
While I don’t doubt that feeling pain might make an Allosaurus (or any animal) angrier, the Allosaurus is being anthropomorphized here. DG might as well be talking about a psychopathic serial killer here.
The Allosaurus is such a Highly Intelligent and Advanced PredatorTM that it already has the sapience of a Hollywood action hero whose wife and kids just got killed.
Seriously though, there isn't much I can say about the animal behavior here. I think I already said enough about intelligence in fights between animals that are used to one another. Regardless of how primitive the Ceratosaurus was shouldn't "run away when you see a bigger predator and you can escape" be an instinctual behavior response at the level of "eat tasty meat when you have it and you're hungry"?
100% agreed on your final verdict. A truly fascinating concept wasted on an episode trying to teach us false ideas about goal-oriented evolution. |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Jan 10, 2022 1:53:31 GMT 5
(On a trivia note, wasn't this the JFC episode that got Steve Alten - author of The Meg - as a talking head? Maybe he gave them the idea of Megalodon being as big as a jumbo jet.) I just checked the IMDb page (I didn't feel like checking the episode again to see where he was, I've had enough of that). He is indeed in this episode. www.imdb.com/title/tt1275922/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Jan 11, 2022 2:42:03 GMT 5
Biggest Killers Screen capture from Jurassic Fight Club. - We’re now halfway through Jurassic Fight Club. Also, this is the first (and only) episode that deviates from the usual formula. That is, there’s no fight here, which hopefully means there’s less ridiculous crap to pick out here. It just goes over a handful of predatory theropods and how scary and terrifying they were.
- JFC’s dates for the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous are rather off. They claim the Triassic ranged from 225-193 Ma, the Jurassic 193-136 Ma, and the Cretaceous from 136-65 Ma. I know geologic time scale will undergo some revision, but I don’t think we’ve ever thought the Triassic only began 225 Ma; it really began about 25 million years before that. According to the most up to date version of the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, date ranges are at 251.902-201.3 Ma for the Triassic, 201.3-145.0 Ma for the Jurassic, and ~145.0-66.0 Ma for the Cretaceous (link->). Obviously I don’t blame JFC for putting the end of the Cretaceous at 65 million years ago; that’s been the often-quoted dinosaur extinction date for the longest time now; the revision to about 66 million years ago is relatively recent.
- ”…at its time, there was nothing as bad as Allosaurus.”
Except maybe Torvosaurus? - The height and length estimates for Allosaurus aren’t completely consistent with what they claim in previous episodes. In the very previous episode, they claim it was 35 feet long and 15 feet tall. Here, they claim it was 40 feet long and 13 feet tall. True, these aren’t too far off from each other, but you would think that they’d just recycle “facts” they stated in previous episodes.
- DG propagates the “higher oxygen levels made dinosaurs” big myth. I already addressed this in my “T-Rex Hunter” review.
- It really becomes apparent how they just recycle their own dinosaur models to represent miscellaneous dinosaurs. In one brief sequence, an Allosaurus is stalking a prey item. While you can’t see it completely (because it’s behind a rock), its tail sticks out, and the tail pattern is exactly like that of the Deinonychus in this program. In another, an Allosaurus is eating a dinosaur carcass; its skin pattern is clearly that of the Ceratosaurus in this show (so this is a perfectly justified example; nothing wrong with showing an Allosaurus eating a dead Ceratosaurus).
I fully understand why they do this (to save time and money), but it kind of lessens the immersion into the prehistoric world. - The entire narrative of the previous episode (Allosaurus outcompeting Ceratosaurus) is briefly summed up before they begin talking about Allosaurus’ extinction, paving the way for…Utahraptor!
Utahraptor is claimed to be a “missing link” in raptor evolution. That is, thought still fairly large, it was part of a trend for smaller, sleeker, and smarter raptors. But I think anyone who knows their dromaeosaurids can see it’s not as simple as this. Large dromaeosaurids were a thing that popped up every once in a while throughout the Cretaceous. You had Utahraptor in the Early Cretaceous, but you also had Achillobator in the early Late Cretaceous, and Dakotaraptor during the very end of the Cretaceous (Dakotaraptor, of course, was not known at the time, and to my knowledge is mired in controversy). Small dromaeosaurids were already a thing by the time Utahraptor evolved (Yurgovuchia, a much smaller dromaeosaurid, was found in the same rock member as it!). - DG tells us that pneumatic theropod bones are still very strong. Which is definitely true (they’re no weaker than normal animal bones), but that’s something they’ll forget and contradict in a later episode.
- Utahraptor skull reconstruction is definitely dated btw.
- The narrator claims that future dromaeosaurids, being smaller and swifter, rendered Utahraptor “obsolete”.
Interestingly, it’s possible Utahraptor went extinct for the exact opposite reason (I made a more detailed post here->). Apparently, the arrival of large carcharodontosaurids (similar to, or the same as Acrocanthosaurus) in Utahraptor’s region corresponded to the giant dromaeosaurid’s extinction (link->). Utahraptor remains are found in the upper Yellow Cat Member and the Poison Strip Member of the Cedar Mountain Formation. Jim Kirkland told me that no remains of any other large theropod was found in Utahraptor’s stratigraphic level (link->). By contrast, once you get to the Ruby Ranch Member (which is right above the Poison Strip Member), Utahraptor is gone. What you do start finding, however, are large theropod remains, including teeth similar to those of Acrocanthosaurus. If we find cf. Acrocanthosaurus remains right when we stop finding Utahraptor remains, that could suggest competitive displacement. Of course, we would need further study and stronger evidence for this, and a lot of “out-competition” hypotheses in paleontology turn out to be bunk. But for now I’d say it’s an idea worth considering, and at least I can see how/why Acrocanthosaurus and the likes could outcompete Utahraptor (Acrocanthosaurus was a way bigger and more powerful predator than Utahraptor, thus it could easily take down far larger prey than it could, at least on an individual level). - Majungasaurus is apparently often called the “T. rex of the east”. That’s new to me…
- Thomas Holtz undermines the whole “Ceratosaurus outcompeted Ceratosaurus inferior” narrative of JFC when he points out that abelisaurids were descended from Ceratosaurus-like theropods from the Jurassic.
- Once again DG proposes that the ugly, short face of Majungasaurus was a result of inbreeding from existing on a small island, ignoring that literally every abelisaurid had the same short and ugly face, whether they lived on islands or not.
- The disappointing thing about Majungasaurus in this entire show is that you never see it interact with any species other than its own. All Majungasaurus footage here is of them walking and doing random shit or the intraspecific interactions you saw in the very first episode. Of course, they only really needed to show it off as the “cannibal dinosaur”, so it’s easy to see why. But like I said before, it diminishes the immersion factor at the same time. If they had shown Majungasaurus attempting to hunt say, a contemporaneous sauropod, it would have emphasized how powerful of a predator it was.
- Oh look, a bit where a T. rex just killed some generic ornithopod. The skin pattern is exactly that of the show’s Tenontosaurus.
- DG does describe the teeth of Majungasaurus pretty well. Although they were undoubtedly ziphodont, they were also short-crowned, which made them stronger and more resistant to stress.
He also mentions the foot claws of Majungasaurus as weapons, grasping/pinning an animal down with its foot and ripping a chunk of flesh out. While I agree that predatory theropods in general could and would use their feet as weapons/predatory tools, DG compares it to an eagle. Eagles are ridiculously specialized in using their feet as weapons, more so than any of the land-dwelling predatory non-avian theropods of the Mesozoic. I think a more fitting comparison might be something like a ground bird that kicks and stamps with its feet, though with some additional use of the feet in pinning and anchoring prey. Majungasaurus, interestingly, has some unusual foot claws. They did not have flexor tubercles, where the flexor tendons usually attach. Instead the claws had long, deep ventral fossa and were asymmetrical in shape. The digits also had pronounced, flattened ventral tendon attachments. I’m going to guess that the flexor tendons instead attached to these deep pits on the ventral surfaces of the foot claws (Carrano, 2007). Not sure why Majungasaurus had this foot claw morphology. - The narrator claims that as the Earth cooled in temperature, Majungasaurus “was not fast or smart enough to survive”. Afterwards, he claims winters and summers became harsher than before, and how dinosaurs evolved as a response. This is his segue into talking about Albertosaurus, as if he thinks Albertosaurus lived after Majungasaurus went extinct. Needless to say, that isn’t right. While there may have been a few million years of overlap between the two genera, Albertosaurus definitely went extinct before Majungasaurus. Majungasaurus was one of the last non-avian dinosaurs with T. rex, Triceratops, etc., etc.
- DG goes over Albertosaurus’ teeth. What he says is pretty much true, though he seems to be wrong about the “blade-like” part. Albertosaurine teeth were incrassate just like the teeth of tyrannosaurines (Therrien et al., 2021). I used to think their teeth were ziphodont based on previous descriptions, but I guess they were referring to juvenile individuals.
- A family of Albertosaurus is depicted at one point. The juvenile is basically just a downsized version of the adults, but we certainly know at this point that juveniles had more elongated and less robust skulls than the adults.
- I don’t think there’s much for me to say about pack hunting. While we could still learn more and gain more data, I definitely think it’s possible, and tyrannosaurids (Albertosaurus specifically included) seem to be among the best candidates for pack hunting.
- With six minutes left for this episode we finally get to…dun dun DUUUNNNNN!!! Tyrannosaurus rex.
- I see they haven’t corrected their Cretaceous period typo (136 to 55 mya).
- The height and length (16 feet and 43 feet, respectively) are rather exaggerated, the height more so than length, but weight is about right (6-7 tons). Not even representative of the largest known Tyrannosaurus specimens, even.
- ”There’s no animal living today that had the strength of Tyrannosaurus rex”
Well, all of the gigantic cetaceans as big as if not vastly bigger than T. rex living in the ocean today would like to have a word. But yeah, discounting them, the only living land animal as big as T. rex is the bull African bush elephant, leaving it as the only runner-up to T. rex’s raw physical power (and I’d argue T. rex still has it beat). - The function of rex’s forelimbs is briefly discussed. My current personal opinion is that they may have been used extensively when the animals were young and had much larger forelimbs relative to size, but became much less important to predation when they grew up.
- The episode concludes by talking about human adaptability, as well as anthropogenic influences on the environment and how well other animals can adapt. DG tells us why not all animals can simply adapt to environmental change, and the narrator tells us that we humans can affect the environment as much as we are affected by it. “Whether this will prove to be an advantage remains to be seen.” looks at climate change
Final verdict:Given the lack of a ridiculous fight in this episode, you’d think that it would chip away less at my sanity than the others. Is that so? Well, although this episode certainly had its share of misinformation, some of which is parroted from previous episodes, it’s rather banal as far as JFC goes. Let’s pretend this was the only episode of this entire documentary (instead of calling it “Jurassic Fight Club” let’s just call it “Biggest Killers”). I still wouldn’t consider it a great or remarkable one, but at the same time I don’t think I would call it outstandingly bad either. It would be a “Another dino doc, moving on” sort of deal. I honestly think the other episodes drag it down with them. So I suppose this was a bit of respite from the usual nonsensical battles that represent the premise of this documentary. So uh…yay?
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Post by creature386 on Jan 12, 2022 15:15:08 GMT 5
- JFC’s dates for the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous are rather off. They claim the Triassic ranged from 225-193 Ma, the Jurassic 193-136 Ma, and the Cretaceous from 136-65 Ma. I know geologic time scale will undergo some revision, but I don’t think we’ve ever thought the Triassic only began 225 Ma; it really began about 25 million years before that. According to the most up to date version of the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, date ranges are at 251.902-201.3 Ma for the Triassic, 201.3-145.0 Ma for the Jurassic, and ~145.0-66.0 Ma for the Cretaceous (link->). Obviously I don’t blame JFC for putting the end of the Cretaceous at 65 million years ago; that’s been the often-quoted dinosaur extinction date for the longest time now; the revision to about 66 million years ago is relatively recent.
To be fair, I've seen these dates a lot in books I've read as a child, especially the idea that the Triassic began 225 or 228 million years ago. I read that so often that I was surprised when I learned that it, in reality, began much earlier. I have no idea what this was based on. If I had to wager a guess, people who say that think the Traissic started when dinosaurs first appeared (and, for a long time at least, 225-228 mya was a close match for their first appearance date). - The height and length (16 feet and 43 feet, respectively) are rather exaggerated, the height more so than length, but weight is about right (6-7 tons). Not even representative of the largest known Tyrannosaurus specimens, even.
Speaking of my old books, they gave pretty similar numbers for T. rex, too. Only difference is that they exaggerated its height even more (some of them come from an era where T. rex was seen as a 6 m tall kangaroo). Either way, other than the fact that JFC didn't do basic fact checks, this episode isn't particualrly interesting to talk about. I second your final verdict. Final verdict:Given the lack of a ridiculous fight in this episode, you’d think that it would chip away less at my sanity than the others. Is that so? Well, although this episode certainly had its share of misinformation, some of which is parroted from previous episodes, it’s rather banal as far as JFC goes. Let’s pretend this was the only episode of this entire documentary (instead of calling it “Jurassic Fight Club” let’s just call it “Biggest Killers”). I still wouldn’t consider it a great or remarkable one, but at the same time I don’t think I would call it outstandingly bad either. It would be a “Another dino doc, moving on” sort of deal. I honestly think the other episodes drag it down with them. So I suppose this was a bit of respite from the usual nonsensical battles that represent the premise of this documentary. So uh…yay? Your summary is quite fair. Though, personally, I'm kinda glad that this wasn't the only episode. Honestly, I forgot that this episode even existed. I'm not sure if ever watched it, but if I did, I'd have immediately forgotten about it. The other episodes might be more inaccurate, but their inaccuracy is at least entertaining. Here, it's just boring. I guess you could consider it a breather episode. |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Jan 13, 2022 2:15:24 GMT 5
To be fair, I've seen these dates a lot in books I've read as a child, especially the idea that the Triassic began 225 or 228 million years ago. I read that so often that I was surprised when I learned that it, in reality, began much earlier. I have no idea what this was based on. If I had to wager a guess, people who say that think the Traissic started when dinosaurs first appeared (and, for a long time at least, 225-228 mya was a close match for their first appearance date). I had no idea. Maybe I should check some of my own old books and see what they say. Though tbh, I don't think I paid much attention to the dates (except the dinosaur extinction date) in those books when I was a kid. I only grasped them when I was in my preteens. Honestly, I forgot that this episode even existed. Understandable, this is after all the most tame of all the episodes. I agree that I'm kinda glad this wasn't the only episode, even if those reasons pertain largely to entertainment and childhood memories. Not to mention, I feel like the overall structure of this episode would make less sense without the other episodes putting it in context. The other episodes drag this one down in the sense of the quality of the paleo documentary (i.e. accuracy, sensationalism, and whatnot). |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Jan 18, 2022 7:07:48 GMT 5
Raptor’s Last Stand Screen capture from Jurassic Fight Club. - R.e. JFC’s Gastonia model, particularly the placement of spikes on top of the body: there seems to be some disagreement on the placement of certain osteoderms (particularly spiked ones) on Gastonia’s body. First I looked at both Greg Paul’s and Scott Hartman’s skeletal reconstructions of Gastonia (Greg Paul’s skeletal->, Scott Hartman’s skeletal->). At least going by the two skeletals, the real Gastonia doesn’t seem to have any of them. All the spikes are either on the sides of the tail, the shoulders, the first half of the ribcage, and even the neck. However, there are skeleton reconstructions of Gastonia (by Robert Gaston and Jim Kirkland) where the spikes are placed along the back (Kinneer et al., 2016). These seem to be the original reconstructions. I’m not quite sure what to think anymore, but I might lean towards the spikes all on the sides interpretation, given that it seems to be more recent (maybe Paul and Hartman have good reason to doubt the older reconstruction).
The Gastonia model has some large osteoderms on the rump region, where the big solid plate covering it should be (they don’t get the look of this big solid plate right). This region doesn’t have those big osteoderms, it’s just one large, continuous shield of bone. - JFC is about right with Gastonia’s total body length (15 feet; Greg Paul’s field guide put sit at 5 meters, or 17 feet long), but underestimates its weight by two-fold (2,000 lbs; field guide puts it at 1.9 tonnes, or >4,000 lbs). If you look at an ankylosaur, you’ll see that its ribcage is not only respectably deep, but ridiculously wide. And they were not, by any stretch of the imagination, pneumatic animals like theropods were (although, non-avian theropods like T. rex or Allosaurus were almost as dense as normal animals).
- When Jim Kirkland talks about ankylosaurs, we’re given a brief clip of a Stegosaurus walking, for some reason…
- They talk about Gastonia’s tail, and it’s likened to a chainsaw blade on a handle. To be honest, that’s still my favorite description of Gastonia’s tail to this day, as exaggerated as it is.
While we’re on the topic of ankylosaur tails, why don’t we discuss ankylosaur tail evolution for a moment? The famous tail clubs ankylosaurs are known for seem to have evolved from flexible tails to stiffened tails (basically, the “handle”) to the club (handle+club) (Arbour & Currie, 2015). We all know how the club would serve as a weapon. The handle-only tails could function as stiff “bat-like” weapons with sharp osteoderms on their sides (an alternative, and perhaps more fitting, analogy might be a shark-toothed sword->).
Gastonia, by contrast, was one of those ankylosaurs with no modifications to the distal caudal vertebrae. In other words, it had neither a stiffened handle nor a club at the end of its tail. It was your typical, unspecialized, flexible ankylosaur tail (link->). While not stiff, the fact that the tail is flexible would mean that it experiences less inertia when being swung (because it has the option to be flexed while this is happening). And because the tail is still a massive, muscular, and thick organ, it’s still going to hit you very hard+relatively fast. All of this is to say nothing of the sharp triangular osteoderms on the sides of the tail.
Basically, you would not want to get hit by ANY of these types of tail. - But then Dinosaur George says the following. He tells us that as Gastonia swung its tail, the sharp blade-like osteoderms would have overlapped with each other and acted like a pair of shears.
I don’t know if any paleontologist actually ever said this, but it’s an interesting thought. I’ve noted above that Gastonia’s tail had no specialized structures stiffening it, so it could have had the flexibility to make its tail blades come together and overlap. The reconstructions I’ve seen also make me think that there wasn’t too much space between the tail blades that would make overlap impossible. Of course, this “shearing” action, if it were a thing, would be best done by the larger blades on the proximal end of Gastonia’s tail. On the other hand, it’s debatable if enough force would be produced between the tail blades for them to actually produce a scissor-like cut. - We get a brief bit of Gastonia foraging in a forest. It’s easy on the eyes considering most of what we’ll see of Gastonia in this program is of it hanging out in a dry wasteland.
- There’s not much to say about DG’s speculative idea of Gastonia having a symbiotic relationship with small pterosaurs (where Gastonia provides protection while the pterosaurs act as extra eyes to look out for danger).
- Now we’re introduced to Utahraptor. Hooo boy, that model…
I’m just gonna quickly sum up the inaccuracies:
- Needs WAY more feathers
- Hands are pronated (nothing new when it comes to JFC theropods)
- Skull shape is wrong (though, to be fair, it wasn’t until relatively recently that we got a better idea of its skull shape)
- Metatarsals look too long and gracile (this thing had short, stocky leg bones->)
- Belly is concave (resulting in a shallower torso than in real life). Here’s a modern reconstruction of Utahraptor (© @ Scott Hartman).
Ah, that’s much better. - For Utahraptor’s weight, I would go more with ~1,100 lbs (~500 kg or a bit less) than ~1,500 lbs. Still a monstrous raptor, though. This animal would give a polar bear a run for its money.
- ”They [Utahraptor’s teeth] were not long enough to be effective weapons. They were designed for tearing and chewing prey more than attacking.”
Narrator, have you looked at a Komodo dragon skull->? They don’t have very big teeth either, but they’re used to take down animals up to ten times the size of the lizard (and no, there’s no good evidence that they even need/use venom to achieve this either). Utahraptor had the same ziphodont teeth, except Utahraptor’s skull is arguably more robust, looking almost like a small tyrannosaur skull->, and proportionately much larger relative to total body size*. That skull and those teeth were absolutely effective weapons. Short tooth length be damned.
*Even Velociraptor had a skull not too far off from the Komodo dragon’s in length. The Fighting Dinosaurs specimen of Velociraptor had a maximum skull length of 23 cm (Barsbold & Osmólska, 1999). This Komodo dragon skull replica-> is 22.3 cm long. Velociraptor, of course, was a much smaller animal than the Komodo dragon. - So, now that I’ve talked about how horrifying Utahraptor’s jaws were, I might as well talk about its claws. Utahraptor’s hand claws were originally described as more blade-like than those of other dromaeosaurids, suggesting they had more of a cutting function (Kirkland et al., 1993). While a later paper by Phil Senter argues that these blade-like claws were actually foot claws (Senter, 2007), even paleontologists who have done work on the recent Utahraptor finds (like Angelica Torices) still say that the hand claws were better suited for cutting (link->). Sure enough, Jim Kirkland told me that several Utahraptor manus claws were found in the Utahraptor megablock (link->). Maybe Senter’s paper wasn’t completely agreed upon?
As for the hindlimbs, this is what Jim Kirkland says about them: “The new limb bones are 50 percent more massive than the same-sized Allosaurus bone.” - Supposedly the Utahraptor was found close to the Gastonia. As with pretty much every fossil find depicted in this series, is there any evidence that they actually got in a fight?
JFC admits that the Gastonia had no bite marks or gashes on its bones. Dinosaur George tells us that this is because the ankylosaur was so well protected by body armor. Later in the actual fight, however, we’re going to see the raptor attack the Gastonia’s belly and legs with its teeth and claws. But it looks like even in the unarmored regions there was no evidence of an attack or feeding. Which tells me that it could easily have been the case that the two just died or were washed up close together. - Thomas Holtz describes Utahraptor as a rather lightly built, bird-like animal. Bird-like indeed, but this was before we all knew just how heavily built Utahraptor was, hence his statement.
- The narrator claims Gastonia moved at 4-5 mph. I hope he didn’t mean top speed. Gastonia was certainly no swift, cursorial animal, but 4-5 mph is just insulting to Gastonia.
- This fight is characterized as basically speed and agility vs strength and armor. While I think this is more or less true (Utahraptor certainly would have been faster and more agile than Gastonia), Utahraptor itself was actually specialized more for strength than speed due to its build (earlier, JFC itself points out that Utahraptor had very stocky, thick leg proportions). While this is certainly not a perfect analogy, I’d liken this fight more to a big Smilodon populator (>400 kg) taking on a big glyptodont like Doedicurus (which could weigh at least 1,400 kg). A big, heavily built, robust predator specialized for strength rather than speed against a much bigger, much more robust herbivore with armor.
- ”The Utahraptor had relatively thin arms, so it cannot simply flip the Gastonia over to get to its underbelly.”
I mean…I’m pretty sure no predator this size would be able to do that lol. Utahraptor’s forelimbs do look somewhat small for its size, but that’s in comparison to other dromaeosaurids. Dromaeosaurids in general had powerful, well muscled forelimbs. - I love how the narrator explains how all the tens of thousands of man hours going into excavating, preparing, cleaning, and analyzing the fossil remains all goes into…figuring out who kicks whose ass.
- Finally, we’ve gotten to the fight.
In an earlier review I criticized how JFC sometimes uses dramatic music even when it’s not necessary. However, this time it’s done right. As the scene is being set for the confrontation, we get this rather epic rock track that, in my opinion, sets the tone of the situation perfectly. Both dinosaurs are just looking for resources to survive the drought (water and food for the Gastonia and Utahraptor, respectively), like any other animal would. But as much as you want both animals to pull through, you know that they’re about to get into a big scuffle and that only one’s going to remain standing (then again, this is JFC we’re talking about, so that’s natural). Most of all, you don’t know who’s going to come out on top, and the track playing is, in a way, suspenseful. - The tiny pterosaurs on the Gastonia’s back look like tiny azhdarchids. This family of pterosaurs was not around as far back as when Utahraptor and Gastonia lived.
That said, it looks like they actually have pycnofibers on them. Up close, there are random patches of black on one pterosaur model. I think filaments are supposed to be there, but it looks like the animators weren’t able to render the pycnofibers perfectly. As a result, they don’t look too great, but I think they had the potential to. - One other thing about the Gastonia’s pterosaur entourage. Realistically, how would parasites be able to feed off the back of an ankylosaur, where all the armor is? If anything, wouldn’t they have better luck on its unprotected ventral surfaces and limbs? Would there be any parasites and insects living on the Gastonia’s back for the little pterosaurs to feed on?
- But anyway, the Gastonia now knows the Utahraptor is present, and can smell it too. This takes away the element of surprise for the Utahraptor.
- The Utahraptor jumps above the Gastonia to the other side. Before the ankylosaur can properly react, the Utahraptor turns around and slashes the underbelly with its hand claws. I have two comments here.
1.) I’m not sure how well a raptor this hefty and massive could jump. That said, big robust animals like Spanish bulls can still leap respectably high. While Utahraptor is obviously very different anatomically from a bull, I won’t completely rule out some ability to still jump.
2.) I’m also not sure if theropod forelimbs had enough range of motion to supinate, such that their palms face upward. - Not long afterwards, the Utahraptor itself receives an injury from the Gastonia’s tail. The damage it inflicts is apparently enough to make the Utahraptor fall down for a moment, but not enough to completely put it out of the fight. Maybe now would be a good time to go look for something else to eat?
- Apparently not. To the Utahraptor’s credit, it gets a good bite in on the Gastonia’s forelimb (directly contradicting the narrator’s earlier claim that the teeth were not big enough to be effective weapons).
- ”He’s near the most dangerous anti-raptor weapon ever made.”
I mean, a tail like that would be anti-any unarmored animal, but, okay. - Okay so like, while the narrator is talking, the Utahraptor literally cuts one of the Gastonia’s hindlimbs with its foot claw. It’s not like the animators completely forgot about this either, as the Gastonia bears this laceration for the rest of the fight. With an injury like that, you’d think this would be really crippling for the Gastonia, given that one of its forelimbs is badly injured and cannot have much weight born on it.
Nope. It’s presented as if it were just some casual background event->. - Chorus: Nooooo…oooooonnnnnne…hits like Gaston! No one chops like Gaston! No one slices big theropod legs like Gaston!
Gastonia: As a specimen, yes, I’m intimidating!
Chorus: My what a guy, that Gaston(ia)!
So, the Utahraptor makes one last leap, but its leg is pretty conveniently caught between the tail osteoderms of the Gastonia. This is how the “scissors” are deployed and they cut the leg muscles of the Utahraptor. It also gets hit several times across its body, and the Utahraptor limps away and falls to the ground, too crippled to continue the fight. - ”The brain of a dinosaur is like a series of light switches: one is on, and everything else is off.”
Oh god, here we go again… - Dinosaur George then literally tells us that the two dinosaurs didn’t die in battle…
I’m so confused now.
Final verdict:A dromaeosaurid losing? What is this blasphemy? It’s pretty ironic that the most formidable dromaeosaurid featured on the show (by a huge margin) loses. Though, considering what it was up against, it was probably to be expected. This might actually be one of my favorite battles in the series. Though the Gastonia has an obvious advantage, it’s not presented as completely invincible either, and both animals deal injuries to each other throughout the fight. The Utahraptor is shown seriously injuring the Gastonia in ways that are, for the most part, rather plausible (even if they are risky). It would have probably tried ambushing the Gastonia too, which would definitely boost its chances in successfully killing such a prey item; unfortunately, it loses the element of surprise. And in the end, the Gastonia does end up winning, as you’d expect with its formidable weaponry, armor, and nearly four-fold size advantage, so it’s not like the outcome was unreasonable either. However, now I’m seriously confused as to what the show is trying to go for. The program admits multiple times that neither specimen shows signs of injury or feeding. This episode, more than any other so far, got me thinking: do they actually think this is what happened or did they just make up a hypothetical scenario based on what they saw here? Either way, that’s not a good sign for the show.
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Post by Infinity Blade on Jan 21, 2022 3:01:26 GMT 5
Ice Age Monsters Screen capture from Jurassic Fight Club. - At least we’ve finally gotten to the other Cenozoic episode in this otherwise dinosaur-heavy series. When our two combatants are a god damn lion and a bear, it shouldn’t be too bad…
…right? - The episode starts off by explaining current climate change. At least JFC doesn’t deny that.
The climate change going on at the end of the Pleistocene is a main focus of this episode, and it’s used as justification for the conflict between these two predators. Although we still have more to learn about the Pleistocene extinctions, it’s likely that both it and human hunting played a role depending on the species or even the specific population. Despite this the latter is given absolutely no attention here. - ”Giant beasts like the woolly mammoth and the giant sloth die off.”
Except on islands, suckas! - The program puts Arctodus at 2,500 lbs. While this isn’t impossible, this is getting close to the maximum size of A. simus (“Tremarctines display a wide range in body size, from gigantic (e.g., Arctotherium angustidens and Arctodus simus, up to 1,200 kg)”; Soibelzon et al., 2011). Previously, the average size of A. simus was estimated at 700-800 kg (Christiansen, 1999), with specimens approaching a tonne likely being more common than previously suspected (Figueirido et al., 2010).
- It is then claimed to have had oversized teeth and a short but powerful muzzle (hence the name short-faced bear). While the teeth would have been big due to the sheer size of the whole animal, it should be noted that the upper canines of Arctodus were significantly shorter relative to condylobasal skull length than in modern big cats, specifically the lion and tiger (Sorkin, 2006). So relative to size, they were nothing special. Also, the supposed “short face” of the bear is an optical illusion due to its deep snout and short nasals (Figueirido et al., 2010).
- According to the narrator, modern bears have hindlimbs longer than the front limbs, allowing a top speed of 35 mph in short bursts. Since Arctodus had front and hindlimbs that were equally long, it may have been able to run over 45 mph, and run for much greater distances.
As I’ve learned over the many years I’ve been on Carnivora forum, it’s an often-repeated myth that bears can run at top speeds of 30-35 mph and can run fast enough to catch up with a racehorse. But evolution does not like Mary Sues, and bears lack all of the cursorial specializations that actual fast running animals possess. What this means is that while they’re superb at wrestling with each other or large prey items, they’re ill-suited to pursue them (especially cursorial ungulates), unless over uneven or dense terrain or when the prey item is crippled. I mean, here's-> an incident where a brown bear chased a badly burned bison in Yellowstone National Park. The bison got away: no way that bear could have outrun a racehorse.
Where did this idea that bears can run at least 30 mph come from? Garland et al. (1983a) has numerous top speed figures for a variety of animals, citing numerous references and the methodology behind each particular figure. If you look at Table 1, you’ll come across a speed estimate of 48 km/h (~30 mph) for Ursus arctos. The reference cited is Breland (1963) and is accompanied by a capital S, which denotes that this figure was a speedometer reading. Decades ago, it was customary to estimate an animal’s running speed by driving alongside them and looking at the speedometer to gauge how fast the running animal was. By modern scientific standards this is a big no-no, so this figure means nothing to us. Speed figures for two other ursid species are provided; speeds of 40 and 48 km/h are attributed to the polar bear and American black bear, respectively. The former was a “subjective estimate”, while the methodology behind the latter is unknown. Yikes…
But how fast can bears actually run? The best I could find was a 2006 study which tracked brown bears via GPS collars (which does reliably track an animal’s speed). Escape speeds (the study tracked bear behavior in proximity with humans, and escaping was one of three behaviors) varied from less than 1 to 31 km/h (~19 mph) (Sundell et al., 2010). The vast variation in speed with which bears escaped suggests to me that the 31 km/h they traveled up to is very close to top speed, if not it. In light of bear anatomy, this makes a ton more sense.
Now what about Arctodus? A 2012 thesis found that Arctodus had some degree of cursorial specialization in its forelimbs, particularly certain musculature being reduced, more restricted parasagittal motion, greater stride length, and lighter distal elements (in fact, more gracile long bones in general) (Lynch, 2012). At the same time, however, it was nowhere near a highly specialized cursor. Its legs were not particularly long compared to other bears (Figueirido et al., 2010; Sorkin, 2006), it had a stiff lumbar spine (just like the brown bear), plantigrade feet (again, just like modern bears), and relatively small orbits (suggesting relatively poor eyesight ill-suited to a long distance chase) (Sorkin, 2006). So no, I think it’s safe to say Arctodus was not running >45 mph either (dear god, this ENTIRE point took up an entire page on my document). - Paleontologists: “We found a mammoth skeleton with scratch marks and Arctodus remains nearby. We also found a mammoth heel bone with a deep puncture*. We think Arctodus ate mammoths.”
JFC: “[Arctodus] was so massive it even hunted and killed giant mammoths.”
JFC be JFC.
*This is the publication that describes this fossil btw (Schubert & Wallace, 2009). The calcaneus is thought to have been bitten through by the canine of a large carnivore, either Arctodus or, coincidentally, Panthera atrox. Notice how they attribute this to scavenging as opposed to actual predation. - JFC first explains the claws of Arctodus. DG says the claws were designed for slashing meat (not really, but even so bear claws are indeed capable of lacerating), and that an Arctodus could slip its long claws between the ribs of an animal and reach internal organs (like they’re horns on the tips of fingers or something). JFC also claims the claws were 8 inches long. I don’t think anyone actually knows for sure how long this bear’s claws actually were, given how bear claws today vary in proportion and are made of keratin that rots away. For what it’s worth, The Mammoth Site sells a replica Arctodus claw-> that’s 4 inches long, freely admitting it is an estimated claw “based on other fossil evidence of the bear”. But despite everything I just said, the point remains that you don’t want to get hit by this bear’s paws.
Then we move onto Arctodus’ second weapon: its mouth (the skull reconstruction pretty bad; the cranium is way to big, the mandible way too small and shallow). Aside from the usage of psi as a unit of force, yeah, the bite of Arctodus would have been much more powerful than a modern bear’s. But at one point, DG describes the back teeth of Arctodus as meat-slicing teeth, which isn’t really true. Although Arctodus has been claimed to have had sectorial carnassial teeth (used to support a hypercarnivorous lifestyle), the modern spectacled bear – an almost exclusively herbivorous bear – has carnassials that were just as sectorial as those of Arctodus. Wear patterns on the carnassial teeth of Arctodus also show that these teeth were primarily used for grinding (Sorkin, 2006). - ”[Panthera atrox] would change everything we thought we knew about the ice age.”
Umm…no? We’ve known Panthera atrox since the 1850s. - ”Called the God Bear by some for its awesome power.”
Well that’s…new… - Right after the narrator says this, we get this nice little fail.
 - ”They [Panthera atrox] are in fact the largest cats that ever lived.”
I think even back then Smilodon populator was a contender to this title. Nowadays it certainly is, along with some other extinct cats.
In this program, it’s given a weight of 700-800 lbs (DG later states that the particular lion in this fight is 750 lbs), which I think is about right for rather large specimens; average specimens were probably closer to ~250 kg (Christiansen & Harris, 2008; Wheeler & Jefferson, 2009). - As with the bear, the claws of the lion are built up as tools that could “cut through flesh like a hot knife through butter” (as with bear claws, they can certainly cut flesh, but that’s definitely not their primary function), and the bite of the lion is stated to be much more powerful than that of its living relative (which, as with Arctodus, is certainly true). What shocks me is that it doesn't seem too far off from Arctodus in skull size, despite being the much smaller animal.
 - ”Equipped with twenty retractable claws”
18, actually. Cats have five digits on their front feet, but only four on their hind feet. I’m nitpicking, I know. - While Dinosaur George is correct that the American lion would have relied on ambush (like most cats), it actually did have somewhat longer legs relative to its size than modern lions (10% longer legs than P. leo relative to skull length) (Wheeler & Jefferson, 2009). Its morphology has even been called “highly cursorial” once (at least for a cat), and is believed to probably be convergent with the morphology of the savannah-adapted African lion, making it adapted for open habitats (Chimento & Agnolin, 2017).
- The narrator asks why these two apex predators occupied the same space, bringing up the possibility that they lived in different times. Obviously the answer to this is ‘no’, and the program addresses this question accordingly.
Of course, the real reason why these two were able to coexist was because, with different body sizes and different diets (the short-faced bear was still an omnivore), they weren’t completely overlapping for the exact same resources. - It seems that the program’s basis for the fight is just that Arctodus simus and Panthera atrox remains have both been found in Natural Trap Cave. Multiple individuals from each species of interest (bear and lion) were recovered from Natural Trap Cave (Wang & Martin, 1993), so it’s doubtful that this fight is based on any one or two specific fossils found in the cave. Literally just “we found the two in the same site so…they fought”.
- I’m now going to make myself feel better by telling you a fun fact: one of the specimens of Panthera atrox found in Natural Trap Cave was found to have a high level of flat wear on its canines. It also wore its incisors almost down to the sockets. This type of tooth wear is often seen in canids. Furthermore, the knee joint of its left hindlimb shows evidence of the cartilage having been eroded away in life. The canid-like wear on this lion’s teeth show that the lion was disabled and had to resort to scavenging (Rothschild & Martin, 2003).
Imagine if THIS were the stressed lion you pitted against the Arctodus… - ”Each animal would try to kill the other to remove the competition.”
If you’re talking about each other’s young or even sick, then sure. - ”They don’t have bite marks because they were out to kill each other for competition, not eat each other.” (paraphrasing)
Or you know, because they immediately died after falling down 26 or 28 meters. - ”The bear was actually strong enough to have actually lifted a full grown bison off the ground.”
Hmm…seems doubtful, especially if you mean completely off the ground. - We get another example of the show contradicting itself, particularly in the form of contradictory talking heads. Dinosaur George tells us that the elongated legs of the bear were for running fast. Blaine Schubert tells us that the legs were more designed for walking long distances, not necessarily for running fast. Of course, we now know that Arctodus actually didn’t really have particularly long legs for a bear (although, they do seem to have been relatively gracile).
- ”…even though this would be one heckish powerful lion…this bear would be so much more powerful that I really think it could skin the lion.”
~Larry Martin
Pretty much. - The narrator claims the bear was less strategically minded than the lion. This is interesting, not because I think it’s true (as I’m sure you figured out by now, I don’t take any of this show’s claims about extinct animal intelligence at face value), but because they’re playing with the “small and smart, big and dumb” trope here (as TV Tropes puts it, “If combined with Big Guy, Little Guy, the Little Guy is almost always the Brains and the Big Guy the Brawn.”). I think the writers acknowledged that the lion’s speed and agility were its biggest advantages, so to make it appear a little less-lopsided they decided it should make up for its smaller size with some degree of intelligence too.
- Claw retractability is brought up. I think this may or may not be a significant point to bring up between a fight between a big cat and bear of the same size, but it’s obviously small potatoes when the bear is over three times heavier. The narrator also reminds you of the lion’s “twenty” (really eighteen) claws: reminder that cats in general can also use their rear claws as weapons. Though honestly, most people don’t really pay much attention to that fact in AvA, and I can certainly see why.
- DG takes a moment to tell us how these mammals compare to the dinosaurs that came millions of years before them. He tells us how they fulfill the same basic roles in their ecosystems, and even goes as far as to compare Panthera atrox to “Nanotyrannus” and Arctodus to Tyrannosaurus. Of course, these analogies aren’t perfect, but it reminds you that this isn’t the first time the program has pitted a predator against a much larger predator that would utterly murk it.
Oh, and we get this neat bit of a young rex running next to an American lion.
 - Now we’ve gotten to the battle. By this point every other battle in this series has since become a distant memory in Awesomebro Earth’s past. All the great dinosaurs, mega sharks, and killer sperm whales are long extinct. Their bodies have long since been reduced to stone copies of their original bones and teeth or, far more often, to basic chemical elements. After millions of years of death and extinction, at a time when lions, bears, and bison now roam the Earth, what is happening?
Why, even more death and extinction, of course… - Paleo Nerd (you can easily find his reviews of JFC on YouTube) points out that it’s pretty unlikely the bison (probably Bison antiquus) would be out on its own with no other bison in sight. Not only was it likely a herd animal, but bison were everywhere at the time.
Also, in the flashback where the lion stalks and kills the bison, you can hear it growling as it charges at the somehow-still-unsuspecting bovine. - This lion is a dumbass. I’m not just saying this because I like to shit on the show just for the sake of it. Here’s the honest-to-god reason why this lion is stupid.
Animals will tend to adopt a foraging strategy that gives them the most amount of energy at the least cost to themselves. This is called optimal foraging theory->. While this model has its limitations, you can think of it as a general rule of thumb for how animals approach foraging.
How does this apply to the lion confronted by the bear? The lion has the following options:
- Submit to the bear and flee. It would suck to give up the bison carcass, but at least the lion has a chance of finding new food if it chooses to flee. It can use the energy it already got from the bison to find more food.
- Submit to the bear, but stick around at a distance and wait for the bear to finish its fill and hope it leaves scraps. It won’t get as much energy from the carcass now, but it’s certainly better than nothing. We know Panthera atrox was not above utilizing carcasses more fully when times were tough, even if it wasn’t specialized in gnawing on bones (van Valkenburgh & Hertel, 1993).
- Submit to the bear, but rip off a big piece of flesh from the carcass right before either fleeing or retreating to a safe spot where it can wait for the bear to finish (this is more of a sub-option that it could combine with either of the two things above).
- Fight the bear. To the death (as DG later stipulates). The lion is 340 kg, the bear is ~1,134 kg. The lion will almost certainly be the one who dies.
It’s not a hard choice… - After dealing with some apparently superficial damage from the lion and getting its face raked by its claws, the bear charges at the lion at top speed and lands a paw swipe right in its face. But while the lion flies back a bit and is momentarily down, it gets back up without any visible injuries. For all of the previous hype about the power of the bear’s arms and how its claws were designed to slash meat, they really sell the bear short here. This should have been enough to incapacitate the lion at the least, if not straight up kill it.
- ”The mega-lion’s skull is much thicker than the modern lion.”
Sure. - ”It could absorb a blow from a shovel to the head and quickly recover.”
Press X to doubt. - ”With the temperature rising, the mega-lion would ultimately be replaced by the much smaller cougar and leopard.”
”With the temperature rising, the mega-lion would ultimately be replaced by the much smaller cougar and [jaguar].”
Fixed that for you. - Eventually the bear pins down the lion (about time). The bear bites the ribcage of the lion, breaking ribs in the process, and rips back. It then goes to eat the bison carcass, believing the lion can’t fight anymore.
But the lion is stupid, and even this injury doesn’t ring any bells in its head to gtfo. Instead charges the distracted bear. - I just want to also say that although the bear’s injuries aren’t presented as serious, you’d be forgiven for thinking it took a serious beating just by looking at it. Even with the narration and commentary, those nasty looking wounds and the long duration of the fight give you impression that this is a hard-fought battle (more than it honestly should be).
- The lion is thrown a considerable distance after failing to reach the bear’s throat. It’s in excruciating pain and it’s clearly taking a beating.
But the lion is stupid, and even this doesn’t scream out for it to stop (and like I explained above, the carcass just isn’t worth it). Instead, “He turns to face the bear and bellows a huge roar to send a clear message, “This fight is to the death”.”
 - The bear charges and loudly roars as it does so. The lion dodges mid-air, swats its face (what does this lion have against faces?), and forces the bear to tumble and fall in a way that’s straight out of a cartoon.
- The lion then lunges at the bear again with all of its strength, apparently with enough force to knock the bear down. But this time the bear’s not even rearing on its two hindlimbs like the first time. This time it’s on all fours, as stable as it could possibly be. I can’t help but raise an eyebrow at that.
- ”The lion needed almost 40 pounds of meat a day to survive.”
Modern lions need about 5 to 7 kg (11-15.5 lbs) of meat a day to survive for females and males, respectively (Schaller, 1972). Supposedly the short-faced bear would have needed 35 pounds of meat daily to survive (this is often quoted on the Internet, but I have no idea where this comes from; the best I have is this kinda sus source->). Given that the American lion is bigger than the modern lion, but much smaller than Arctodus simus, it would definitely not need ~40 pounds of meat daily. - As the lion clamps onto the bear’s throat, the bear rakes at the lion’s sides with its claws (this time actually producing visible lacerations where they didn’t before). Once it rears back up again, it throws the lion into the trap cave…which is never seen nor mentioned until now despite all the wide shots of the landscape the battle takes place in. Talk about a deus ex machina.
- And the bear got dibs on the bison carcass and lived happily ever after.
Oh wait, I forgot that the bear is supposed to fall in the cave too because…reasons.
Final verdict:By the time I reached this episode, it became clear that JFC does not actually give a shit about basing its scenarios on actual fossil evidence. How bears and lions ended up in the trap cave is straightforward, no need to invoke a death battle. Speaking of that death battle, the best I could say is that it’s entertaining, and the narrative surrounding it may admittedly be attractive: with the last dying breath of the ice age, these two apex predators show each other what they’re made one last time. The problem is, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, that it’s so one-sided. Carnivora forum’s cat fans wish a big cat could give a bear over three times bigger than itself that much hell. And although the lion is given a reason as to why it keeps fighting, it absolutely breaks down when you actually think about it. Paleo Nerd called this the worst Cenozoic episode of the series (granted, there’s only one other one), rivaling Bloodiest Battle in how awesomebro it is. Between the fossil basis for the episode (or lack thereof) and the fight itself, I pretty much agree. And this time, JFC managed to give the awesomebro treatment not to some temporally distant, exotic-looking dinosaur…but to a lion and a bear. A mega-lion and a mega-bear, sure, but you share your world with lions and bears today, and used them as a basis for your interpretation of these mega-carnivorans. How could you think that this is a realistic depiction of them?
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Post by Infinity Blade on Feb 4, 2022 2:11:28 GMT 5
Looks like this info is outdated. There's no evidence that the extinct cats at Rancho La Brea were eating bone. Rather, this seems to be evidence that they were taking larger prey. journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0052453Panthera atrox was primarily eating flesh from fresh kills ( DeSantis & Haupt, 2014). Whoopsie. But my overall point stands. Interestingly, cougars seem to have been more apt to utilizing brittle food items like bone more than the extinct carnivorans at Rancho La Brea. This more generalist diet seems to have been a key reason for their survival. |
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Post by creature386 on Feb 6, 2022 2:37:46 GMT 5
- One other thing about the Gastonia’s pterosaur entourage. Realistically, how would parasites be able to feed off the back of an ankylosaur, where all the armor is? If anything, wouldn’t they have better luck on its unprotected ventral surfaces and limbs? Would there be any parasites and insects living on the Gastonia’s back for the little pterosaurs to feed on?
Interesting question. I've done some googling on crocodile skin parasitism. I haven't found much detail yet, but it seems like some of their common nuisances indeed go after the abs ( link). - Chorus: Nooooo…oooooonnnnnne…hits like Gaston! No one chops like Gaston! No one slices big theropod legs like Gaston!
Gastonia: As a specimen, yes, I’m intimidating!
Chorus: My what a guy, that Gaston(ia)!
HAHAHAHAHA. Final verdict:A dromaeosaurid losing? What is this blasphemy? It’s pretty ironic that the most formidable dromaeosaurid featured on the show (by a huge margin) loses. Though, considering what it was up against, it was probably to be expected. This might actually be one of my favorite battles in the series. Though the Gastonia has an obvious advantage, it’s not presented as completely invincible either, and both animals deal injuries to each other throughout the fight. The Utahraptor is shown seriously injuring the Gastonia in ways that are, for the most part, rather plausible (even if they are risky). It would have probably tried ambushing the Gastonia too, which would definitely boost its chances in successfully killing such a prey item; unfortunately, it loses the element of surprise. And in the end, the Gastonia does end up winning, as you’d expect with its formidable weaponry, armor, and nearly four-fold size advantage, so it’s not like the outcome was unreasonable either. However, now I’m seriously confused as to what the show is trying to go for. The program admits multiple times that neither specimen shows signs of injury or feeding. This episode, more than any other so far, got me thinking: do they actually think this is what happened or did they just make up a hypothetical scenario based on what they saw here? Either way, that’s not a good sign for the show. I don't have much to add. This indeed seems to be one of their more reasonable battles and its free of their usual raptor-wank (luckily, they aren't trying to be consistent in their portrayal of animal groups). The calkm before the storm, I guess, given how long your next review is. - The episode starts off by explaining current climate change. At least JFC doesn’t deny that.
To be fair, JFC has never proven to be maliciously stupid. They don't care for facts, sure, but they don't believe in conspiracy theories. Which is why we can make fun of them in a lighthearted way, at least. - According to the narrator, modern bears have hindlimbs longer than the front limbs, allowing a top speed of 35 mph in short bursts. Since Arctodus had front and hindlimbs that were equally long, it may have been able to run over 45 mph, and run for much greater distances.
As I’ve learned over the many years I’ve been on Carnivora forum, it’s an often-repeated myth that bears can run at top speeds of 30-35 mph and can run fast enough to catch up with a racehorse. But evolution does not like Mary Sues, and bears lack all of the cursorial specializations that actual fast running animals possess. What this means is that while they’re superb at wrestling with each other or large prey items, they’re ill-suited to pursue them (especially cursorial ungulates), unless over uneven or dense terrain or when the prey item is crippled. I mean, here's-> an incident where a brown bear chased a badly burned bison in Yellowstone National Park. The bison got away: no way that bear could have outrun a racehorse.
Hell's bells, at least my education on functional anatomy has given me some perspective on just how absurd this is. To become so cursorial, ungulates had to make sacrifices. Unguligrady, fused cannon-bones, that sort of stuff limits limb mobility and they wouldn't have gone that way had there been alternatives. You literally just need to hit Wikipedia (link) to see that plantigrade animals like bears are not meant to run faster than Hermes. Man, more than one page of rebuttal from your side and I still couldn't shut up (granted, I also repeated some stuff you said, but still). Let's just move on. - The narrator claims the bear was less strategically minded than the lion. This is interesting, not because I think it’s true (as I’m sure you figured out by now, I don’t take any of this show’s claims about extinct animal intelligence at face value), but because they’re playing with the “small and smart, big and dumb” trope here (as TV Tropes puts it, “If combined with Big Guy, Little Guy, the Little Guy is almost always the Brains and the Big Guy the Brawn.”). I think the writers acknowledged that the lion’s speed and agility were its biggest advantages, so to make it appear a little less-lopsided they decided it should make up for its smaller size with some degree of intelligence too.
At this point, they're caring more about party balance. I smell some guilt over having created a mismatch. Of course, as you're gonna detail later, the lion's behavior is the exact opposite of a smart animal, so, even their little balance patch is moot. I don't have more to say. After all this time spent studying, it was neat to see a review of a decent and a fantastically bad episode. Some nice juxtaposition there. |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Feb 9, 2022 21:58:07 GMT 5
River of Death Screen capture from Jurassic Fight Club. - One useful point to make with regards to this episode is that it’s based on the Wapiti Formation (particularly the Pipestone Creek bonebed, which is indeed nicknamed the “River of Death”), where teeth from an albertosaurine tyrannosaurid are known. That said, they are currently referred to as cf. Albertosaurus. This means they are not definitively assigned to this genus (Reid, 2016; not peer-reviewed). The tyrannosaurids featured in this episode will henceforth simply be referred to as “albertosaurines” (or the Wapiti Formation albertosaurine, if I need to distinguish it from other albertosaurines).
- The one thing that really sticks out about the Pachyrhinosaurus model here is the nasal horn. It might have actually been a plausible idea at the time the documentary was made, but it stopped being one after paleontologists began looking at osteological correlates on fossilized bone. Hieronymus et al. (2009) found that the texture on the nasal boss of Pachyrhinosaurus was similar to that seen in modern muskoxen, which have a horny boss formed by the bases of their horns meeting. This suggests Pachyrhinosaurus’ boss was covered by a thick pad of cornified skin, an adaptation to high-energy head-butting.
For some reason I’ve seen people say that Pachyrhinosaurus’ lack of horns (at least on its face) meant that it was a poorly defended animal. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think Pachyrhinosaurus would have turned its battering ram head against predators too. Really, a horn isn’t needed at all for Pachyrhinosaurus to be dangerous to the albertosaurines of this episode. Just getting rammed head-on by this gigantic beast would be pretty bad for your health, to say the least. Biting with the sharp hooked beak is an alternative.
(That said, this particular species, P. lakustai, had a single small horn jutting out from the midline of its frill behind the eyes. Depending on how big the keratin sheath was, maybe it could also have been used as a weapon. This shows model also lacks this frill horn.) - The feet look like they could use some work too, like pretty much every pop culture depiction of ceratopsians.
- Pachyrhinosaurus is claimed to be 4 tons. I think this is probably too high, as even the largest species is estimated more around 3 tonnes, and the other two at 2 tonnes (Paul, 2016).
- The doc then goes on to quote Lawrence Witmer saying that the structure supporting the keratinous horn in a rhino is not seen in Pachyrhinosaurus. Lawrence Witmer is actually one of the authors of the osteological correlate study I cited above, which was published only the year after JFC aired. What this means is that by the time JFC was airing, Hieronymus et al. were just waiting for their work to be accepted and published online.
It also means that Witmer is not saying what JFC thinks he’s saying. JFC says “the horn attached differently in Pachyrhinosaurus and rhinos”. The study Lawrence Witmer was involved in, and would later publish, says “the structure is not consistent with a rhino-like horn”. - The narrator asks why a huge herd of Pachyrhinosaurus would charge into a flood. Couldn’t this simply suggest Pachyrhinosaurus formed massive herds? Or at the very least, all the bodies were washed up together in a massive catastrophic event?
- At one point Pete Larson says that the braincase of ceratopsians was separated from their skull, allowing them to clash with their heads without damaging their brains. I looked at a thesis by Andrew Farke, and from one thing he wrote in it, there might be some truth to that statement. More accurately, the brain didn’t fill the endocranial cavity nearly as much as in mammals and birds, protecting the brain somewhat.
Perhaps more importantly, ceratopsids also had secondary skull roofs that would strengthen the skull (Farke, 2008). - As in “Biggest Killers” Dinosaur George claims that the albertosaurine’s teeth were made for slicing flesh as opposed to crunching bone. I’ve already addressed this in that review; albertosaurine teeth were actually also thick for crushing bone.
- DG also goes over tyrannosaur forelimb function, telling us they may have been used to hold the prey or mates during reproduction. I don’t have a problem with use in reproduction, although I certainly don’t think tyrannosaurid forelimbs were primarily or solely used for this. Given that juvenile tyrannosaurids seem to have had proportionately longer arms than their adult counterparts, I think they started out as important hunting tools, but gradually became less and less important as the animal aged (though, maybe still not completely useless?).
- After pack hunting albertosaurs are introduced, Lawrence Witmer points out that monitor lizards and crocodilians don’t exactly have the largest cerebral hemispheres, yet are capable of multiple different hunting styles. In fact, both are known to at least mob prey with more than one individual, and crocodilians have actually shown evidence of some cooperative hunting. I’ll give the episode credit for pointing this out.
The thing is, multiple non-mammalian predator species actually show evidence of some form of group hunting. Sailfish are actually known to partake in “proto-cooperation” (a possible pre-cursor to more complex group hunting strategies) while hunting, where individuals alternate attacks on prey and benefit from group hunting without specific hunting roles (like in collaborative hunting) (Herbert-Read et al., 2016). Sevengill sharks are known to encircle seals to prevent their escape, and then attack their prey all at once (Ebert et al., 1991). Hell, even f*cking arthropods have been known to attack prey in groups (Herbert-Read et al., 2016). If multiple species of non-mammalian predator have evolved some form of group hunting, I’m pretty sure some Mesozoic theropods could and would easily have done the same.
Some folks will point out that these examples aren’t the complex, coordinated group hunts some placental mammal predators exhibit, and that this is rare among sauropsid predators. But that’s not because they’re stupid; the fact that coordinated hunting has evolved at all among sauropsids tells us that alone. Corvids are exceptionally intelligent birds, and some of them are predatory, yet they still don’t hunt in packs the way wolves, lions, or orcas do. It’s not that “reptile stoopid mammal smrt”, it’s just not that much of a reptile thing.
Now, because of this I think highly complex wolf/lion/orca-style hunting is probably the least likely possibility for any of the theropods we have potential evidence of pack hunting for (or for theropods in general). Not an impossible option that we can rule out, just not the most likely one. But less complex forms (e.g. mobbing, “proto-cooperation”) are still possible. - The narrator claims Albertosaurus had more functional arms than T. rex. I don’t think this is true…
- ”It could turn about as quickly as a modern elephant.”
Which one? DG just got done talking about both animals. - DG imagines that predators may have forced the Pachyrhinosaurus to cross the flooded river. But don’t wildebeest cross rivers without predators pursuing them?
- DG: “I think predators may have forced the Pachyrhinosaurus to cross the flooded river.”
Narrator: “Albertosaurus couldn’t handle the Arctic cold because it didn’t have enough fat to insulate it.” [It wasn’t THAT cold]
Thomas R. Holtz: “Albertosaurus’ main weapon were its bone crushing, flesh tearing jaws.”
(All paraphrasing, of course)
JFC just jumps all over the place with the subject here. - The battle begins. Two albertosaurines chase the Pachyrhinosaurus to the edge of a cliff with a river beneath. One of the ceratopsians tries to book it; apparently this was the intention. But only one of the albertosaurines actually pursues it, which doesn’t make sense to me.
- When one of the albertosaurines gets into a 1v1 with a Pachyrhinosaurus, DG brings up the hollow bones of the former, as if it were a weakness (though, he does say they’re rigid and strong). We’ve debunked the “hollow bones are weak” myth numerous times over the years, I don’t think I need to do it again.
- The albertosaurine rams the Pachyrhinosaurus in the flank. This not only knocks the ceratopsian off its feet (which maybe it could do, but don’t quote me on that), but also briefly sends it airborne and flying back at least a few meters. The thing is, the albertosaur headbutts the Pachyrhinosaurus at close range, taking only one step before its head collides into the ceratopsian’s flank. Given that, I doubt the tyrannosaur would have even built up enough momentum to send this 2 tonne ceratopsian literally flying. I also doubt the tyrannosaur’s skull would even be up to the task of withstanding an impact of that magnitude, but like I said, I don’t even think it would have built up the necessary momentum in the first place.
- Oh, and it also stands around a bit as the pachyrhinosaur gets back up instead of immediately going up to kill it.
- Despite a gored leg, the albertosaurine manages to dispatch the Pachyrhinosaurus with a neck bite. In real life, the albertosaurine would not have to worry about getting gored. It might have to worry about getting a leg broken by a 2 tonne animal with a battering ram nose colliding into it, but given how the Pachyrhinosaurus attacked it here (it moved a bit upwards, then thrust its head upwards at close range), I think it would have been more or less safe.
- Then the rest of the herd is scared off the edge of the cliff and they fall into the river and drown.
- The show contradicts itself again when the narrator claims the albertosaur was not a good swimmer due to its short arms, while DG says it was capable of swimming (I agree with DG here; the powerful legs should have been enough to let it swim).
- ”Pachyhinosaurus’ frill could show color and may have reflected emotions.” (paraphrasing)
Why are you mentioning this now, narrator? - Interestingly, the second albertosaurine doesn’t join its partner for the massive feast. Presumably it’s eating the Pachyrhinosaurus it personally killed, while the other one has the rest of the herd to itself. My headcanon (which is really just me trying to give this show the benefit of the doubt) is that this was not a tight knit pair of tyrannosaurs, and that they just opportunistically banded together to take advantage of the ceratopsian herd.
- Oddly enough, the last thing the narrator says in this episode before it ends is how common Pachyrhinosaurus was relative to the albertosaur, mentioning how hundreds of the former were found, with far less of the latter. Kind of unorthodox to end an episode on that note but…k?
Final verdict:I honestly don’t think I have much to say about this episode. As is to be expected at this point, I don’t think the tyrannosaurs scaring the ceratopsians into the river is completely necessary to explain the Pipestone Creek bonebed’s fossils. If shed tyrannosaur teeth were found, it’s possible they simply scavenged on dead the bodies of the ceratopsians. At the same time, however, the general scenario depicted here also isn’t exactly implausible either. Planet Dinosaur depicts more or less the same thing (just swap out the albertosaurine with Daspletosaurus, and Pachyrhinosaurus with Centrosaurus), but I don’t remember giving it any flak for that. Also, this is going to sound weird, but I found the fight to be kind of…underwhelming. Maybe I’m just not in the right mood right now, but I didn’t find this fight to be as exciting as I did when I was a kid, and I think I can explain why. Let’s sum up what happens in this scenario: the albertosaurs chase the Pachyrhinosaurus herd, they drive them to the edge of a cliff, and they scare them off the cliff, leading to the ceratopsians falling and drowning in the river. The most exciting part of this fight was the isolated 1v1 fight between the one Pachyrhinosaurus that broke from its herd and one of the albertosaurines, and even it doesn’t last that long. I think, then, that I found this fight to be a bit underwhelming because there’s only a limited amount of actual combat between the two animals. Coming from both an entertainment and scientific accuracy (or at least, an “anti-awesomebro”) standpoint, I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. So overall, this was just kind of just another episode. But just you wait for the next episode…
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Post by Infinity Blade on Feb 9, 2022 22:01:27 GMT 5
To be fair, JFC has never proven to be maliciously stupid. They don't care for facts, sure, but they don't believe in conspiracy theories. Which is why we can make fun of them in a lighthearted way, at least. True. JFC never struck me as a "seriously harmful" type of dumb. |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Feb 13, 2022 0:49:22 GMT 5
Raptors vs. T-Rex Screen capture from Jurassic Fight Club. - We’re almost done. This is our last animal vs animal episode in this series. After this, it’s just “Armageddon”, which is just JFC’s take on the K-Pg extinction event. But believe me, JFC will definitely make it count, and not in a good way.
- The narrator briefly refers to Edmontosaurus as a monster, but its depiction in this program is anything but. It’s little better than a giant walking hamburger in this show.
- They put Edmontosaurus at 40 feet long, 13 feet tall at the hips, and 4 tons. 40 feet is a plausible length estimate for certain specimens (there were adult Edmontosaurus bigger and smaller than this), but the mass estimate is much too low for a specimen of this length.
One of our former members now runs a blog centered on paleontology, and their GDI estimate of the mummified specimen AMNH 5730 puts it around 9.5 meters long and ~3.6 tonnes (link->). But while this individual has the skeletal morphology of an adult, this is about the minimum size for adult Edmontosaurus. Some specimens could get much larger than this. A couple were in excess of 7 or 8 tonnes. But even more colossal specimens existed. According to this same person’s GDI estimates, the largest specimen, MOR 1142 (“X-rex”), could have weighed 14 tonnes. To show you the size difference between small and large specimens of E. annectens, here’s a size comparison by Matt Dempsey->.
(The smaller specimen is based on AMNH 5730, while the larger one is based on MOR 1142)
How much would a 40 foot specimen weigh? More like over 7 or 8 tonnes. - The Edmontosaurus model doesn’t seem too bad, at least compared to your average hadrosaur in paleomedia. The beak is flat (in real life, the bill would have pointed downward to form a cropping beak) and the hands are pronated but nothing too crazy.
- The narrator alludes to Edmontosaurus being better defended than meets the eye. Thomas R. Holtz and Dinosaur George mention it could run, strike with its massive tail, kick out with its legs, or even strike with its bill. So…how did it lose to like, 5 coyote-sized raptors?
- Apparently the Edmontosaurus specimen they’re referring to here is only known from the tail, but had preserved skin with small bite marks. I have no idea which supposed specimen this is. But they conclude that the bite marks were likely from small dromaeosaurids, like Dromaeosaurus.
- Just gonna sum up everything wrong with the Dromaeosaurus in this episode:
Dearth of feathers. Limited to a small feather “mohawk” on the head/neck, arms, and tail.
Skull seems rather too elongated.
Pronated hands.
The fact that it’s living in the late Maastrichtian. - Also, they way the run looks kind of wonky.
- ”…one would be more than a match for a grown man.”
George, it’s a 15 kg animal. It’s only as big as a bobcat. You’ll undoubtedly get some scratches, but unless you chicken out or let its weapons get near your throat or something, you could quite literally beat it up. I believe in you. - ”But a pack of these would be pure hell for most of the herbivores that shared their environment.”
Let me just put this into perspective. A pack of six bush dogs (which weigh 4-7 kg) was observed trying to kill a 250 kg tapir, an animal nearly 36 times the weight of an individual bush dog (Beisiegel & Zuercher, 2005). Let’s assume for the sake of the argument* that an equal sized pack of Dromaeosaurus could also take down such an animal. That would give you a 540 kg animal. In Hell Creek, that would be enough to take down creatures such as Leptoceratops, Pachycephalosaurus, Thescelosaurus, and the two ornithomimids (Struthiomimus and Ornithomimus). But even if you made this assumption, it would still not even be close to enough to take down any of the several multi-ton mega herbivores in Hell Creek, or even the rhino-sized herbivores Dromaeosaurus actually lived with.
*I’m not necessarily saying that because six bush dogs can prey on a single 250 kg tapir, an equal-sized pack of Dromaeosaurus could also take on an animal this relatively big (although, its weaponry and mode of predation certainly compares favorably to any canid when it comes to killing prey items larger than itself). Again, this was just meant to be a generous assumption purely for the sake of the argument. From what I could find about this particular case, the bush dogs took 3 hours to severely injure the tapir by biting the lower legs, so it clearly takes a lot of effort. - JFC gives us a slow but steady close up montage of one of their CGI battle stand-stills. It’s the first time we ever get to see these stand-stills so up close.
- The narrator and a couple paleontologists (Pete Larson and Thomas Holtz) go into the jaws of Dromaeosaurus as weapons. But tbh, I don’t think I ever remember a scene in this episode’s fight where the Dromaeosaurus actually bite the hadrosaur while it’s still alive (a shame, because I believe the dromaeosaurid maw was a very important, if not even the primary, weapon in killing prey both small and large). Let’s see if my memory of this episode is right.
- ”10 times their own size”
Bruh. An adult Edmontosaurus is AT LEAST over 230 times the size of a Dromaeosaurus. And that’s if we’re talking about the smallest specimens. What you are doing is roughly analogous to pitting five or six bobcats against, at the very least, a giant ground sloth (like Megatherium). At worst, it’s analogous to pitting those same bobcats against a large bull Columbian mammoth.
(Yes, I’m aware bobcats are solitary hunters. Idgaf, considering Dromaeosaurus could have been one itself.) - Now we’ve gotten to the point where T. rex is introduced. Apparently it’s been brought in here because large, deep bite marks have also been found on this Edmontosaurus tail, with T. rex being the only obvious culprit. Seriously, what specimen of Edmontosaurus is this?
- ”T. rex stormed planet Earth around 90 million years ago…”
aklsdjfgaioueglnvzsldkfjoieahfoilkdajfoiawheglkdajf - ”…the size and shape of the bite marks pointed to a raptor attack.”
Huh? Didn’t this episode already establish that those bite marks weren’t even that deep? If so, why think that they killed the Edmontosaurus? - I don’t think Dromaeosaurus could run nearly 40 mph like this episode suggests. The primary reason for that being the fact that I don’t think any animal this small would have a long enough stride length to run that fast.
- Dinosaur George’s answer to how hadrosaurs were able to be so successful and defend themselves is actually a rather reasonable one. He believes the tail was their primary weapon. He then tells us to not count out the raptors, but because they’re only 15 kg here, I will do just that.
- Now on to the fight. Realistically, once the Edmontosaurus came into view, the raptors should have just stepped aside and not even touched it.
- Okay, I was wrong, the Dromaeosaurus do bite the Edmontosaurus alive. But the visible wounds they dish out definitely come from their claws.
- ”Raptors had hollow bones like birds. Even the force of a wooden baseball bat would have broken them in half.”
Against a small dromaeosaurid like Dromaeosaurus itself, sure. Against a much bigger one, nah. - Eventually, the Edmontosaurus actually does something and stomps on one of the Dromaeosaurus with its front limbs. The damage it’s seen doing is understated (that raptor should have been utterly flattened like a pancake), but hey, it finally did something.
- ”raptors communicated using quick hand gestures.”
 - ”The skin of Edmontosaurus…was covered in small round armor-like calluses.”
You mean scales?
They claim Edmontosaurus skin was 3 inches thick. I won’t dispute what they say about skin thickness, because I don’t think anyone really knows how thick an adult Edmontosaurus’ skin was. And yes, I say this in spite of a recent paper claiming hadrosaur skin was thin. This paper studied a hadrosaur specimen with well preserved skin, and found that it had a maximum skin thickness of 3.3 mm. This is much thinner than in Psittacosaurus or in extant mega-mammals. But then they claim that these mega-mammals are similar in size to this hadrosaur. The problem is, this hadrosaur specimen was admitted by these authors to be a subadult (they also note that other pieces of preserved skin with similar thickness were found in specimens of similar age) (link->). Judging from the scale bar they present with a reconstructed skeletal of the specimen, it looks like it was ~4 meters long. Do you really think that creature is of “similar size” to adult rhinos and elephants? Not an equal comparison in the slightest. - I think five raptors have been attacking this Edmontosaurus, including the one that was just stomped on. JFC probably pulled extra individuals outta their butt, but it still goes to show you how outmatched the raptors are. Heck, the hadrosaur even clamps a leaping raptor in its beak and throws it.
- ”A three way battle is about to erupt.”
No it’s not. - ”There he’ll have the room to swing that massive tail”
These raptors have no business attacking anything that large to begin with. Period. Not that it couldn’t just stomp or kick them or do literally anything else to defend itself. But so far, the Edmontosaurus has only actually done anything to defend itself twice in this battle, all while it was being lacerated left and right. - The Edmontosaurus stops because…reasons? Even though it could literally bulldoze the raptors out of its way.
- See, JFC claims the Edmontosaurus’ tail was a potent weapon, but it never actually does anything with it. Instead it just does pretty much nothing and endures its death by a thousand cuts. And don’t give me this “there’s not enough room to swing its tail in the forest” bullshit. It swings its tail for a brief moment, so it clearly still has some room to do it. This is why people shit on ornithopods. I would know. When I first saw this, I wasn’t impressed at all by the hadrosaur and myself bought into the “hadrosaurs can’t defend themselves” myth.
- Now here’s something that I actually think was given unfair criticism in the past (*gasp*!). The T. rex is claimed to be able to feel the vibrations of the fight through the pads in its feet. While I remember people saying that this was nonsense or whatever it was that they said, this isn’t unprecedented in the animal kingdom. Elephants do just this with the thick padding of their feet (O-Connell-Rodwell, 2007). It’s possible JFC based this inference they made for T. rex on elephants. While T. rex is obviously not an elephant, we do know that tyrannosaurs had well developed padding on their feet, given evidence from footprints. In fact, adult tyrannosaurs in particular had well developed “heel” soft tissues (Enriquez et al., 2021). I don’t think it’s really that out there for tyrannosaurs to possibly feel vibrations through their thick foot padding. It’s a speculative idea, but I don’t see why it’s an outrageous one.
- ”Raptors used a variety of psychological tricks when fighting.”
- And they succeed in killing this Edmontosaurus.
Keep in mind that by the end of the hunt, there are three Dromaeosaurus remaining. Yes, JFC thinks three of these things about the size of a coyote could manage to finish off this elephant-sized beast… - Then T. rex comes along and the raptors don’t even put up a fight. They get in a brief screaming match at most, but after that they give up their meal. Just about the only thing here that’s actually realistic. It then severs the tail, and walks away carrying the rest of the Edmontosaurus’ corpse.
That tail’s actually a pretty good meal, though. It’s full of thick, massive muscles, and a GDI suggests that the tail of even a ~3.6 tonne Edmontosaurus should weigh well over half a metric ton (an order of magnitude heavier than the three raptors combined lol).
Final verdict:If I had to pick one episode to show to someone who’s never seen this series before, simply to give them an idea of what JFC is like, I’d tell them to look no further than this episode. Why? Because this episode is peak Jurassic Fight Club.This fight was basically “Gang Killers 2: Electric Boogaloo”, but far worse. At least a group of Deinonychus mobbing a Tenontosaurus has a chance of taking down this animal that’s about 10 times heavier than one individual predator (and at least there’s evidence of it eating Tenontosaurus too). But this? Like I said before, it’s like expecting five coyotes, bobcats, or caracals (take your pick) to take on a fully grown elephant. And yet those five coyotes are depicted winning here. Oddly enough, most of the episodes in JFC actually have outcomes where you could at least see the winner being able to kill the loser in real life. A female Majungasaurus could indeed kill a male Majungasaurus (all the more so if they were close to the same size). A mob of Deinonychus could feasibly kill a Tenontosaurus. An Arctodus would absolutely destroy an American lion, and an adult T. rex would utterly demolish any specimen of “ Nanotyrannus”. This…this was absolutely, positively, not a reasonable outcome. So why is “Raptors vs T-Rex” peak Jurassic Fight Club? The raptors here are the epitome of “awesomebro” (stupidly coordinated, to the point where they just made ridiculous shit up about their hunting methods). They won against something they absolutely would not have stood a chance against in real life. Even the title is f*cking stupid, because it’s never “raptors vs T. rex”. The T. rex only shows up for a moment to be a kleptoparasite, and it never fights the raptors. It’s every absurd thing you could ever imagine in an episode of JFC. *sigh, one more episode left. Maybe it won’t be so bad (I’m not sure I ever actually watched “Armageddon” in full, and if I did, I don’t remember it).
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Post by creature386 on Feb 14, 2022 4:40:25 GMT 5
- Oddly enough, the last thing the narrator says in this episode before it ends is how common Pachyrhinosaurus was relative to the albertosaur, mentioning how hundreds of the former were found, with far less of the latter. Kind of unorthodox to end an episode on that note but…k?
I've seen documentaries (*cough* COTD *cough*) bring this up as evidence that herbivores almost always kicked the rear end of carnivores under standardized AVA conditions (when it really just means that theropods were endothermy and needed lots of food). So overall, this was just kind of just another episode. But just you wait for the next episode… Boy, I had forgotten what the next episode even was when I read this first. Rivers of Death can be thought of as a Breather Episode. It's not particularly exciting, but the scientific inaccuracy isn't that extreme by the show's standards either. So, you can just sit back and recover before the next episode strikes. - We’re almost done. This is our last animal vs animal episode in this series. After this, it’s just “Armageddon”, which is just JFC’s take on the K-Pg extinction event. But believe me, JFC will definitely make it count, and not in a good way.
Oh, it was that episode. - ”raptors communicated using quick hand gestures.”
- ”Raptors used a variety of psychological tricks when fighting.”
At least their unique mix of magicks (hence, the hand gestures) and psychic powers explains why they didn't get curb stomped in the first five seconds. - The narrator alludes to Edmontosaurus being better defended than meets the eye. Thomas R. Holtz and Dinosaur George mention it could run, strike with its massive tail, kick out with its legs, or even strike with its bill. So…how did it lose to like, 5 coyote-sized raptors?
It only becomes worse when you consider that this is less than the Deinonychus who were necessary to kill the Tenontosaurus and these raptors suffered far heavier losses. Honestly, they aren't even consistent in which animal groups they wank and which they downplay. This is also honestly one of the few episodes where I just don't understand them. In all the other episodes, it's a mix of sloppiness and sensationalism, but here? Do they seriously think an Edmontosaurus was that much weaker than its fellow ornithopod Tenontosaurus? Did they chose to selectively apply the "ornithopods are walking hamburgers" trope to hadrosaurids only? And why the title? I mean, I get that their titles don't always make sense, but c'mon. Is it supposed to be the television equivalent of clickbait? Peak JFC, yes, but I'm not sure if it's representative of the narrative as a whole. If we can view JFC as a multi-episode narrative, this is the climax. It's placed relatively close to the end and all its stupid tropes (the ridiculous scenarios, the awesomebro mentality, being blatantly contradictory) reach their apotheosis. Then again, a climax IS usually the most striking and memorable part of a work. So, I guess if someone just has the time to watch one episode, this one isn't a bad choice. I just hope the armageddon episode will be the denouement of stupidity, even if I wouldn't mind more entertainment. |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Feb 16, 2022 5:15:52 GMT 5
Armageddon Screen capture from Jurassic Fight Club. - ”What was the first apocalypse like, on planet Earth?”
Uhh…narrator? You do realize there were at least four other such apocalypses in Earth’s history long before this one, right? - ”Planet Earth has faced five such extinctions.”
Oh, okay. You do.
Obviously JFC had no way of knowing this, but evidence has recently been piling up that there was actually another major mass extinction at the end of the Capitanian age. This event supposedly rivaled the Big Five mass extinctions in severity (Bond et al., 2015; Day et al., 2015; Rampino & Shen, 2019). - Okay, I gotta admit. That background of the Chicxulub asteroid slamming into the Earth they have behind their talking heads actually kind of looks cool to me. Really more how the fiery red and orange colors of the impact contrast with the blue and green around them.
- Dinosaur George explains two reasons why the dinosaurs turned out to be so successful. The first reason being intelligence and the second being their locomotory performance (compared to the other reptiles and mammals of their time). Interestingly, there is a project called the DAWNDINOS project that seeks to test the “locomotor superiority” hypothesis for early dinosaurs (as of now, it will officially end soon at the end of March). From a video about the study I saw a couple years ago (link->), the results seem to suggest that it actually holds some water. That is, luck wasn’t the only thing the dinosaurs had going for them. But I’ll wait for the actual study to come out.
- JFC discusses the faunal turnover at the end of the Jurassic. Nothing to really say about that. But I’m surprised they don’t really talk about the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event. That was an actual major mass extinction event, and it was one that the dinosaurs survived. Later on, they discuss the faunal turnover at the end of the Jurassic as “the first dinosaur extinction” or something, which is definitely not true.
- Raptors at the top of the food chain, narrator? You know what? No. I’m just gonna move on. It’s smooth sailing from here.
- As the narrator talks, we see a shot of the Camarasaurus from “Bloodiest Battle”. Only now have I just realized how deep those claw marks inflicted on it were. Dear god.
 - Some dinosaurs, like Albertosaurus, Pachyrhinosaurus, and Dromaeosaurus, are portrayed being present during the K-Pg event in this episode. In reality, these particular genera were already extinct for a few million years.
- Oh yeah. Out of all the episodes of Jurassic Fight Club, this is the only one where they don’t distort the evidence the episode is based on*. I mean, it’s hard to screw up “asteroid hits Earth and kills 75% of all life on the planet”.
*You could argue they didn’t do this in “Deep Sea Killers” either, but then again, I don’t think that was based on any particular fossil find. - The impactor is referred to throughout this episode as the Baptistina asteroid. It’s no longer thought that the Chicxulub impactor belonged to the Baptistina family. In the same year JFC aired, it was discovered that 298 Baptistina does not share the same chemical signature as the source region of the K-Pg impactor (Gaffey et al., 2008). In 2011, revised and more accurate estimates of the timing of Baptistina’s collision with another asteroid put the event closer to 80 million years ago, not 160 million as was originally thought (link->). This makes it extremely unlikely the Chicxulub impactor was from the Baptistina, as it would leave only 14 million years for it to travel to Earth (it would take many tens of millions to do so).
- DG remarks that the Yucatan would have been one of the worst spots for the asteroid to strike. This is actually true (Kaiho & Oshima, 2017).
- They go over the initial impact, tsunami waves, animals vaporizing, etc. In case you want to know just what that looks like, here you go->.
- Wait, they don’t go over the nuclear winter and all the starvation?
- At the end of the episode, the narrator explains how life recovered from the extinction event and how all life today is a product of the mass extinction. Unfortunately, they don’t have enough Cenozoic footage to use here (though they have some to spare), so much of it is footage of their dinosaurs.
Final verdict:This episode was clearly meant to have a foregone conclusion. Of course the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Or rather, most of them. We’ve actually learned some more interesting things about the K-Pg extinction event since this episode aired. I’ve listed a few examples above. Although some things in this episode might be outdated, I can’t blame them for that. A lot of the footage of the animals reacting to the extinction event are really just repurposed animations with added asteroids, flames, and saturated in a reddish-orange color (of course, I get why they did that). So yeah, not too bad of an ending to this series, I suppose?
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Post by Infinity Blade on Feb 16, 2022 5:19:20 GMT 5
Overall verdict: Hoooooooo boy…what a show… Let me make this clear first. Despite my tone throughout all these reviews, I have absolutely nothing against George Blasing (Dinosaur George). He may have been the host of this show, and said some things which I take issue with, but I do NOT dislike him. I understand that at least part of this must have just been showbiz. And honestly, from what I remember of his YouTube channel back in the day, he seemed like a pretty chill guy. But anyway, there’s so much to say about Jurassic Fight Club that I don’t even know where to begin. The way they portray dinosaur intelligence? Their general depiction of dinosaur behavior? The stupidity of some of the animals in these fights (looking at you “Nanotyrannus” and P. atrox)? The mental gymnastics needed to interpret pretty much all of these fossil finds as fights? Jurassic Fight Club is an excellent example of the “awesomebro-ism” we in the online paleontology community often mention. I could go into detail about this, but I think I’ve already spent enough time and energy on this show. Besides, haven’t I already basically done just that with my entire review? I will say that sometimes the fights can be fun to look back on just to satisfy your inner 8-year old once in a while, especially now since the full episodes are freely available on YouTube in HD. Also, some episodes aren’t quite as bad as some others (probably helps that a couple don’t focus on an actual battle between two animals). But educational? Definitely not.
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Hunter Becomes Hunted
