25 June 2010

What is the Best Dinosaur?

Posted by Ryan Anderson

This is the funniest, most well-informed rant about dinosaurs I have ever witnessed (warning, NSFW language). I was a dinosaur freak as a kid, and I still remember a ridiculous amount about them. Can I just say how much I loved watching him shoot down people who thought plesiosaurs and pterodactlys were dinosaurs? Everything he says is correct except for one thing: Brontosaurus was (I believe) either a diplodocus head or a model of a head (no skull was ever found) on an apatosaurus body.

This picture of a Utahraptor is a combination of the scale drawing and artist's rendition on Wikipedia.

His rant about raptors is almost correct, but the velociraptors in the movie are actually a bit smaller than the real-world Utahraptor, which he mentions in passing. Deinonychus was about 4 feet tall, and was awesome until Jurassic Park came along. And yes, the real Velociraptor was about the size of a goose. Around the same time as the movie, a novel called Raptor Red came out, about a Utahraptor. I loved that book. It was written by a paleontologist (Robert Bakker), and brought the cretaceous to life for me.

Anyway, my vote for best dinosaur is the Utahraptor. Intelligent, social, fast and strong, and the real inspiration for the “velociraptors” in popular culture. Also? Probably warm-blooded, had feathers, and is closely related to birds.

What’s your favorite dinosaur?