• ShaunaTheDead@fedia.io
    1161·
    10 months ago

    It’s odd that razor sharp teeth is kind of the gold standard for a scary animal, but honestly, getting swallowed whole and slowly digested by stomach acid sounds so much more horrific. I’d so much rather a T-Rex eat me than that.

        • Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          14·
          10 months ago

          Not necessarily! Could be juuust strong enough to sear the exterior of your body and slowly dissolve you over days.

          • anivia@lemmy.mlEnglish
            4·
            10 months ago

            If it was that weak it you would drown long before being dissolved

            • DrRatso@lemmy.mlEnglish
              10·
              10 months ago

              Probably not enough volume to engulf you and make you drown. Usually stomach acid is strong enough to irritate but not dissolve a whole prey, so those two are out. However accidental inhalation and fumes might be a motherfucker and getting it into the eyes would be horrendous.

              Two possible scenarios:

              • Suffocation due to a lack of oxygen.

              • Crushed to death by the stomach. It is conceivable that this baby (slaps roof of the dinosaur) can crush large prey to death in the stomach and grind it to small bits by having an especially strong muscle lining.

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      44·
      10 months ago

      If it’s any consolation, you would suffocate long before any stomach acid got to you.

    • Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      21·
      10 months ago

      I recall reading a meme about the ocean being bullshit, something along the lines of “the most common way to die on land is something making your blood fall out”.

    • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      7·
      10 months ago

      I dunno, can the stomach digest you, or smother you, before you pull out a knife and slice your way out?

      I feel like “being comped to death” beats “swallowed whole” on the total chance of dying.

      • groet@feddit.deEnglish
        12·
        10 months ago

        The stomach isn’t like a big cave with a pool af acid in it. It is compacted by muscles around it so if you are swallowed whole, you would have to fight against those muscles to even be able to move at all. If your arms are above your head it’s likely you would die before you are able to move them to your hips to draw your knives. If they are at your hips, good look moving the knives to point outwards. Also the stomache is lined with thick mucous to protect it from sharp objects… Also it’s completely dark and disorienting.

        It’s almost certainly you’d drown, suffocate and get crushed VERY quickly after getting swallowed alive.

        • SeabassDan@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          10 months ago

          You can blame the Magic School Bus for my incorrect perception of how the stomach works. I know they cleared things up at the end, but as a kid I remembered only the adventures.

        • nonfuinoncuro@lemm.eeEnglish
          3·
          10 months ago

          The stomach isn’t like a big cave with a pool af acid in it.

          Unless your predator has been eating a lot of air or drinking a lot of soda/beer. Although one burp would quickly get rid of all that headroom. And the CO2 from carbonation would quickly suffocate you as well as it’s heavier than air.

    • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      633·
      10 months ago

      Well, that sounds like a lot, until you realise that mfking seagulls can eat rabbits.

      Your link mentions them weighing “a quarter of a ton”. Now, idk what “ton” theyre using there, but a quarter of a US ton would be “only” 226 kg. That’s ~500lbs.

      I’d like to remind everyone that a reality TV-show called “My 600-lb life” exists.

      So regarding hypothetical horror scenarios, I’m not too fussed about the overgrown seagull as much as I am about the feathered 4000-8000kg monster with a skull almost the size of an adult woman running at me at 70km/h.

      • jabathekek@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        55·
        10 months ago

        Here’s another comparison picture, though I’m not sure if it’s valid or not. Looks cool, regardless.

        • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          103·
          10 months ago

          A giraffe weighs about a ton.

          Those are very big animals indeed, but also, tve flying one can’t be too thick, or it wouldn’t fly.

          Think of the difference between a cat and a visibly similarly sized bird, like a crow or smth. The crow would have barely any mass and you’d be able to crush it’s fragile body quite easily.

          A cat on the other hand, has a lot of weight, comparatively, and doesn’t rely on any limbs to fly, leaving them open to be weapons. Each limb hides a handful (hehe) of razors.

          I read about these mega-birdos before and iirc, they too have hollow bones?

          Size is scary, and birds can be mean as fuck, but it’s pretty fragile. Think of what a good whack with a baseball bat on one of those limbs would do.

          And then think how much it would damage a T-rex or equivalent non-flying animal. Not even a bruise.

          Large pterosaurs needed strong limbs to get off the ground, but thick bones would have made them too heavy. The solution? A pterosaur’s wing bones were hollow tubes, with walls no thicker than a playing card. Like bird bones, they were flexible and lightweight, while strengthened by internal struts.

          https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/pterosaurs-flight-in-the-age-of-dinosaurs/how-did-pterosaurs-fly

          I reckon if you gave me a bit of armor of some sort, a good knife and a baseball bat, I could take one on.

          I’m joking. Semi. I know I’m probably dead wrong in that but I have a hard time imagining their fighting tactics. Although some modern birds pierce things with their beak, and if that stomped on me, it’d still weight the ~230kg, and then proceeded to peck furiously?

          I don’t think protective biker gear or a baseball bat would help much, and I’m not too fit rn, so my roly-poly skills are a bit rusty.

          • tubaruco@lemm.eeEnglish
            9·
            10 months ago

            they would be able to run up to you (at probably about the same speed as a giraffe, but whats important is that it would be faster than you), and then peck at you, and if you dont get impaled by its beak, then it would probably stomp and kill you anyway

            i dont think any amount of armor can hold 230kg without deforming heavily, though i could be wrong

            • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
              31·
              10 months ago

              i dont think any amount of armor can hold 230kg without deforming heavily, though i could be wrong

              I think it’s more about the pressure.

              But I can definitely endure a pile of soldiers jumping on top of me (get your mind out of the gutter we had our clothes on), and the total weight was definitely more than 250kg. It wouldn’t be distributed as evenly though, because the weight would be distributed in a smaller area.

              I wouldn’t bet anything on a fight between me and one of those, but if I had to battle one to the death, either one of these or a t-rex, I’d choose one of these.

              My logic is that if it just tries gobbling me up (as birbs and snakes tend to do), I could just slice it open from the inside (realistically I would be crushed probably and unable to do that but it sounds badass so I’m going with it).

              Dodging the pecking while armored really well in proper biker gear would be a bit like fencing, as you’d have the baseball bat to crack the beak/bill anytime it missed/glanced.

              Is definitely imagine humans being more nimble, so I wouldn’t run, unless there was some forest or something to run into.

              I’m pretty sure you can get driven over by a the wheel of a car in proper biker gear and be relatively fine. And even small cars weigh 4x what this birbski does.

              But again, I wouldn’t want to and wouldn’t place a bet on myself, I’d just prefer fighting one to fighting a t-rex, which I’d probably have a hard time taking down even armed with basic infantry weaponry. (Meaning like 7.62)

              • daltotron@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                10 months ago

                I would think that it would be on the easier side to survive an attack from this thing, maybe, but harder to beat it in a fight, as any present danger that you pose to it can kind of just be circumvented by it choosing to fly away and then hit you when you’re unawares. So I think hunting strategy would probably play a pretty big factor in this as well.

                It depends on how this thing attacks prey. If it’s a bird of prey, I’d kind of assume that it would dive prey and scoop it up, rather than landing and then attacking it’s prey, and it’s much harder to dodge a large bird than it is to kind of, fence away chicken-like pecking, as you’ve kind of described here. Much like how pelicans dive bomb surface fish.

                I think it’s also probably more likely that this thing would snap at you compared to pecking, which is probably going to be harder to dodge, depending on how much it opens its mouth, and what angles it tries to hit you at. Vertical snapping is pretty ineffective at hitting vertical targets like humans. I’d imagine it might be pretty capable of flesh wounds, though.

                I agree that you can probably survive being stepped on by this thing, but some of the artists’ renderings have claws, and in combination with the pressure and even just the size and probable strength of this animal, I’d imagine it could hit you with a pretty large gash, which might kill you without medical attention. Let’s also consider that, even though you can experience a car rolling over you, and cars routinely weight more and spread their force over a similar surface area, a better analogue, along those lines, might be if we dropped a car on you, tire-first. If this thing decides to step on you, it’s not putting down just 250 kg, it’s putting down 250kg, plus momentum, plus muscular force.

                So, overall, I’m not quite as optimistic of your chances as you seem to be.

                • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  10 months ago

                  I’m not really too optimistic, I’m just depressed and haven’t got much to live for, so I haven’t much to fear.

                  That being said, I do think I would lose yeah, but how glorious would it be to win?

                  Now to the theory. Do we actually know it was a predator? Modern birds of prey all have either very strong, crooked, beaks and/or talons. These have very long, toothless beaks. Personally, I think it more likely they were a beast that scavenged and used opportunities (much like a seagull), instead of actually hunting prey.

                  If that is the case, then they wouldn’t be optimised for fighting. You make a good point in that killing one might be hard because it could so easily get away. Buuut… unlike modern birds, these use all 4 limbs to support themselves while on the ground. If you managed to a nice blow with a baseball bat on it’s forelegs while it’s on the ground? It might not be able to take off again, or even walk around properly.

                  Like… even if you dislike/fear birds, how many people arr afraid of being “bitten” by a seagull?

                  Literally toothless.

                  I’m not sure if there are theories to how this species hunted, but I looked for reference in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus this article about (I presume) a different massive pterosaur.

          • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7·
            10 months ago

            I know I’m probably dead wrong in that but I have a hard time imagining their fighting tactics.

            It could swoop down, pick you up, lift you a few hundred feet in the air, and then drop you.

            • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              10 months ago

              That could be a reasonable tactic. Although in this hypothetical I’m a semi bad-ass (as they’re behaving unnaturally as well by focusing on me no matter what), and I said I’d need a knife, a bat and armor. This is where the knife part would come in handy, perhaps.

              I believe it probably could pick up a person but still, a slightly larger than average person would be almost half the mass of it.

              But I’ve seen an eagle pickup a goat and use that tactic…

              But eagles are not quadripeds, unlike this thing, and this thing would try to carry me it’s mouth, not in it’s talons.

              In an action movie it’d pick me up and fly, but I’d manage to stab it before we’re too high and I’d fall down into some trees. Depending on the category, I’d either suffer a few broken ribs or I’d land on a tree branch and make :O this face as I hit my balls.

            • John_McMurray@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              10 months ago

              If they could do that, they wouldn’t need hollow bones to fly. They could have strong bones and also fight on the ground effectively, while maybe losing the ability to pick up an additional 250 lbs, if they ever had it.

          • leftzero@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
            6·
            10 months ago

            mega-birdos

            Pterosaurs weren’t birds; they weren’t even dinosaurs.

            I reckon if you gave me a bit of armor of some sort, a good knife and a baseball bat, I could take one on.

            Yeah, try that with a cassowary. Or even an ostrich or an emu. Australia lost two wars to emus. (Again, pterosaurs weren’t birds, but since you’re using birds as a comparison…)

            • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
              7·
              10 months ago

              No, they’re not even avians, I know that. I thought the use of the word “birdo” implied a degree of me not being entirely serious.

              You know what emus and ostriches are though? Flightless.

              An ostrich can be half the weight of one of these things.

              They’ll maul you.

              And again, a hypothetical scenario where I had to pick between what is essentially an overgrown seagull vs a turbocharged ostrich of 100 times the ostrich’s size (t-rex).

              Like one of those “who would you rather fuck” hypotheticals. Entirely made up and unrealistic, but I can still have a preference.

            • marcos@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              10 months ago

              Again, pterosaurs weren’t birds

              The closest thing we have around are bats. But bats are weirdly peaceful and most people have no idea of how well they can maneuver.

          • jabathekek@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            4·
            10 months ago

            Canadian Geese [can’t] break bones because of how powerful their wings [aren’t-ish-kind-a-sorta] and they’re an eighth our size. Imagine one three times bigger lol (3x bigger roast). Sure their bones are fragile, but the muscles that are attached to them sure ain’t [not].

            • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
              6·
              10 months ago

              https://www.countrylife.co.uk/out-and-about/dogs/curious-questions-can-swan-really-break-arm-190943

              The good news is that you can rest easy. Birds that still retain the power of flight are essentially built for lightness rather than solidity, and while a swan can whip up fantastic wing tip speed its bones are too light for there to be any serious heft behind their blows.

              'It’s a myth that they will break your leg or arm with their wings,’ John Huston of the Abbotsbury Swannery in Dorset told the BBC a few years ago. ‘They are not that strong and it’s mostly show and bluster.’

              • jabathekek@sopuli.xyzEnglish
                5·
                10 months ago

                Well heck and hoopa dang cannit. Thanks for clearing that up for me lol, peace is an option (by ignoring them)!

                • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  3·
                  10 months ago

                  It’s a very persistent myth.

                  And swans/geese are friggin scary when they flab about and hiss.

      • brbposting@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        112·
        10 months ago

        Sharing tracker free link (junk at end deleted) to that since I prefer ’em. +(Piped mirror)

        … oh wow I’ve seen that, absolutely wild. Is that seagull-doctor recommended behavior? Wonder how long it took that bird to fly again.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        10 months ago

        Yeah, but a rabbit sounds like the kind of thing you expect to get eaten by a bird. A goddamn horse is not!

        • Grass@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4·
          10 months ago

          Maybe an eagle or hawk or something. Learning seagulls can do this blows my mind like your popular uncle that turns out to be a serial killer cannibal.

          • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zipEnglish
            5·
            10 months ago

            They know no shame… there is a video of a pelican trying to eat a seagull at the beach. Just swallows the thing and it only gets away because it struggles so much in its neck

      • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
        3·
        10 months ago

        Imagining the feeling of having an entire fucking rabbit stuck in my throat isn’t something I wanted but I’ve now thought about. Thanks. I’m going to drink some water.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        Ok, but the fact that humans can pack on enough fat to weigh 4x what is a not uncommon healthy weight for an adult or 3x what is healthy for among our larger adults is irrelevant. 250 lbs in a healthy adult human would be well into outlier territory. Like I looked it up and at 6’11” healthy weight by bmi is up to 230lbs. And sure could a 6’11” person theoretically get into bodybuilding, yes, but at that height your body is already struggling against itself and you’ve gotta watch your back because it’s already not having a good time

        • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          10 months ago

          Yes?

          2000 lbs =906kg

          1/4th of 906 = 226.5.

          Or if you want to skip that, just 1/4th of 2000 = 500, which I say is the weight in lbs.

          • Scubus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            Ah, missed the “quarter of” bit. Thought you were saying 1 ton = 500 lbs. It’s all good

    • MrBusiness@lemmy.zipEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      Ya see, this i don’t mind getting eaten by. But OP’s pic looks like some sort of eldritch horror that would have me spiral into madness before devouring me.

      • Varyk@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        Thank you for the perfect complementary comment, sincerely,.

        Haha, I actually laughed out loud.

        You’re entirely right.

        I love the different interpretations of concept artists, whether they’re galactic or paleontological or whatever, it’s always fun to see the differences between what people come up with.

  • Zerush@lemmy.mlEnglish
    57·
    10 months ago

    Nowadays the most dangerous birdy is this one, capable of gutting you with a kick and they don’t hesitate to do so either.

        • Zacryon@feddit.deEnglish
          172·
          10 months ago

          Kilonewton? That would be a force and not a mass. For mass the standard unit is (kilo)grams.

          • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.todayEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            LBS is Imperial Pounds which is a measure of Force and not Mass. That is why your LBS fluctuates based on gravity but your mass doesn’t. So they are correct.

          • Aux@lemmy.worldEnglish
            79·
            10 months ago

            Weight is a force and it’s not mass. Weight is measured in Newtons.

            • HopFlop@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
              81·
              9 months ago

              We are not talking about the weight force here. We are simply converting pounds-mass to kg. If you dont believe OP meant the mass (whicg Im sure he certainly did) then aks him but when saying something weighs a certain amount then one is usually referring to its mass.

              • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.todayEnglish
                1·
                9 months ago

                We were actually talking about Force, though. Pounds is a force, not a mass. I am OP and I meant force because I’m assuming the animal lived on earth. If I wanted to specify mass then I would have used Slugs, the Imperial unit for Mass.

                • HopFlop@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
                  1·
                  9 months ago

                  Could you provide any source that states that a pound is a unit of force? Because the American National Standard Institute (here), aswell as Wikipedia and numerous other sources claim its a unit of mass.

                • HopFlop@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
                  11·
                  9 months ago

                  Did you take into account that earth was heavier millions of years ago? Also, you would have to specify where on earth it weighed that amount.

                  Anyway, pound is an imperial unit for mass, just like slug. The “pound-force” is not part of the imperial units, jut rather of the “English Engineering Units” that differentiate between pound-mass, pound-force, pound-foot and others.

                  “Pound” is not a unit of force in ANY system. If you really meant force (I doubt that) you should have used lbf. Anyway, noone cares how many Newtons of force the earth exhibited on that animal, all the metric-using people in this thread are interested in its mass. All scales used to weigh something display kg (or pounds), so units of mass.

              • Aux@lemmy.worldEnglish
                39·
                9 months ago

                No, we don’t refer to mass when weighing something. Measuring mass is quite hard, measuring weight is simple - just use scales.

                • HopFlop@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
                  52·
                  9 months ago

                  In both the British Imperial System and the US Customary Units, a pound is a unit of mass, defined as 0.45359237 kg. In fact, all the definitions in the section “Weights and Masses” of the US Cusomaries are defined in either kg, g or mg.

                • Zacryon@feddit.deEnglish
                  31·
                  9 months ago

                  If you use a scale, the force acting upon the mass is calculated out such that you get a mass displayed.

            • Zerush@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              9 months ago

              Agree. The error is in the imperial system, there isn’t a difference between weight and mass. The Weight depends on the gravity but the mass not. 240 Pounds Weight on Earth are on the Moon 40 Pounds Weight, but the Mass is still 240 Pound. Because of this in the SI system for the Mass is used kilogramm and for the Weight Newton (old kilopond)

          • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
            49·
            10 months ago

            But weight is gravitational force not mass. These are deeply related but not the same because us customary is based on pre Newtonian measurement systems

            • Iron Lynx@lemmy.worldEnglish
              151·
              10 months ago

              If you say that something “weighs” something, that’s a description of mass, not weight, because the wording is from before a time when it was understood that mass and weight are different things.

              All has been said that needs to be said, bloody pedant.

              • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
                5·
                9 months ago

                I was mostly just joking. Of course we use lbs as pseudomass. Fuck, we’ve moved to lbm vs lbf in America because mechanical engineers must be stopped and metricated by force if necessary. We’re a spacefaring species that’s advanced enough to have planetary gravitational maps, of course mass is what we should be using. But also weight as force is just kinda funny to use outside the myriad times you actually need to in engineering

              • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.todayEnglish
                12·
                9 months ago

                Specifically LBS is a force, though. Imperial Pounds is not a mass measurement, so converting it would be a better equivalent to Kilonewtons.

            • BluesF@lemmy.worldEnglish
              164·
              9 months ago

              This has the energy of an 11 year old who just learned what weight is in physics

              • blujan@sopuli.xyzEnglish
                13·
                9 months ago

                Or a middle school physics teacher that barely knows what they’re talking about.

  • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zipEnglish
    27·
    10 months ago

    This must be a poor reconstruction, no? how could this possibly fly? Tiny wings and a massive imbalance with like 2/3 of the thing being neck and head?

    • Anyolduser@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      29·
      10 months ago

      There’s a little of both in play here.

      First, the whole black and white part of the illustration is a neck flap that may or may not have existed. It makes the neck look super thick, but it was just the artist’s interpretation.

      Second, penguins. Pterosaurs have big, hollow heads and skeletons that look like they should have flown. The same can be said of penguins.

      • Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        4·
        10 months ago

        I recall reading something about a similar Dino that didn’t so much fly and ran and glided instead. I wonder if it’s similar to what this big boy did.

      • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zipEnglish
        3·
        10 months ago

        But penguins are flightless birds? I could imagine the big guy being a flightless bird with vestigial wings, like ostriches.

        The strong head, small body with all four extremities being used to stand seems more evolved for walking to me (I know next to nothing about fossil reconstruction though)

      • Umbrias@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        Well hollow bones in birds aren’t for flying but for breathing purposes so your second point isn’t exactly right.

    • marcos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      10 months ago

      Almost the entire weight of the animal on the drawing is between its wings, and by that human there, there are more than 10 m of wingspan. Many small aiplanes are smaller than it.

      Pterosaurs had a very unusual body shape that is nothing like birds.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      10 months ago

      you can make anything fly if you strap a big enough rocket to it.

      S’why I never understood the expression ‘when pigs fly’. Like… do you really want me to abuse a pig?

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        Just look at the F-117A. That thing has the aerodynamic profile of a school bus made of cinder blocks. It “flies” because it goes fast enough to just about hit escape velocity.

        • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          The F117a isn’t actually that bad. It’s very unstable, mind, but it’s not relying on brute force for lift.

          It’s not fast at all. Its slowness is a design feature since going fast reduces stealth- by generating more heat in the exhaust and more noise. It also means the engines can be smaller which reduces the size of the engines (which, the fans are a nice flat surface to generate returns off of,)

    • gibmiser@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      10 months ago

      My very quick research leads me to believe they have very little skeletal remains that they used to guess what this guy must have looked like. I could be wrong