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Titanosaurs were the biggest land animals Earth's ever seen

96 点作者 makerdiety大约 1 年前

8 条评论

verisimi大约 1 年前
These creatures seem unfeasible from an engineering perspective.<p>From the image, their substantial head (the weight of a man?) is on the end of a six meter horizontal length (6m is my estimate, from the image). Yes, the body is a big weight, and yes there is the counterbalance of a (relatively small) tail. If I were to hold a small broom, with the brush end away from me, I am only able to do this for a short while - and yet, these creatures spent all their days like this, swaying their heads around as they go!<p>It seems to me that the tension and pain these creatures must have been in because of their design and the effect of gravity would be too great to bear. If we look at something comparable that we know exists, we see a giraffe - these are slightly unfeasible too, but they are far smaller (3m neck?) but the angle of the neck is almost upright, hence there have nothing like the force dinosaurs would have had to bear.<p>It would be good to have a structural engineer go over the numbers for this dinosaur. I would expect a breaking point would be reached, and that there is no way the long neck could support such a heavy head over such a length without failure. We are talking about flesh and bone (which is surely incredible in its way, but holding huge weight up - the head - is not what meat and bone are good for; these are not lengths of metal.<p>PS, apparently a giraffe neck is only 2m, not 3 as I guessed.
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emp_大约 1 年前
I remember one day many years ago just snapping wondering what had been the the biggest animal to ever exist on earth, and after a few searches it seems like the consensus was *NOT* a dinosaur but the Blue Whale which still exists today, still think about it from time to time. The article only discusses land animals but I wonder if the blue whale still reigns after more modern discoveries.
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KingOfCoders大约 1 年前
I&#x27;ve been following dinosaurs for 45 years and learned a lot about science. Too much that ended up in 70s dinosaur children books was wrong, but was presented as scientific facts.
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fodmap大约 1 年前
Somewhat related, I recently enjoyed reading &#x27;New Hunter&#x27; by Jack Mantell, a novel set in the Cretaceous period.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;201762017-new-hunter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;201762017-new-hunter</a>
solardev大约 1 年前
Side story about dinosaurs and AI...<p>I worked at a museum years ago, and one of the projects there was an AI chatbot for a titanosaur: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fieldmuseum.org&#x2F;exhibitions&#x2F;maximo-titanosaur" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fieldmuseum.org&#x2F;exhibitions&#x2F;maximo-titanosaur</a> (near the bottom, the &quot;Message Máximo&quot; section; the web chat seems discontinued, but you can still text him).<p>From a marketing angle, it was interesting enough: a way to bring a fossil to life, giving him a name and a personality, with signage around the exhibition encouraging visitors to text him to ask questions about his past life, diet, tail, etc.<p>From a technical angle, it was a simple system built on Google Dialogflow (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;dialogflow?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;dialogflow?hl=en</a>), a natural language parsing and no-code response tree system. This was all before GPTs really came in vogue, so the responses were all human-curated: parsed Dialogflow intent tokens in, highest matching response variants out, all edited in Dialogflow&#x27;s nice GUI.<p>But what I really liked about it was the scientific angle. There were some serious behind-the-scenes efforts to make his responses scientifically accurate yet easily digestible. That museum was a research institution as well, and had a ton of PhD paleontologists actually researching titanosaurs and other sauropods. This was a way to collect popular questions from the public, filter it through their professional expertise, and then distill that knowledge back down into bite-size chunks suitable for families and kids, all while maintaining scientific integrity. Every week or so, the team would collect the latest questions, points of confusion, etc., and then it run it by the scientists again to update the dialog tree accordingly.<p>If the project were launched today instead, I wonder if it&#x27;d be possible to do something similar with a very tightly scoped GPT that could be trained only on the scientific data (published papers, etc.), eliminating or vastly reducing hallucinations, while still giving the GPT limited room to express a personality and not be limited by scripted responses. But there would still have to be a human in the loop to vet those responses for scientific accuracy. Not sure how to best build something like that, but it would be awesome for understaffed museum exhibitions (which is most of them!), a way for the public to be able to ask the exhibition itself questions, instead of hoping a knowledgeable PhD happened to be available right then.
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philipov大约 1 年前
The caption for every image is cut off so you can&#x27;t read it...
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amai大约 1 年前
See also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Argentinosaurus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Argentinosaurus</a>
huytersd大约 1 年前
Do we have the genetic sequence of any dinosaurs at all? Are we at the point, if we pushed aside ethical considerations, we could bring one to life?
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