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
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.
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
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.
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.
A pound is actually not a unit of force. At least not in the US Customary System nor in the British Imperial System. They both are defined as units of mass. Both systems define the standard pound as the "avoirdupois pound", a unit of mass. The US Customary System doesnt even include a unit of force.
"Pound-mass" comes from the "English Engineering Units" which differentiates between pounds-mass and pounds-force.
"Pound" is not a unit of force in any current system. Its the standard unit of mass (slug is also a unit of mass but usually not used). Feel free to provide any source that states that pound is a unit of force.
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.
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.
The dino would need to be even lighter if the earth was heavier because the force of gravity would be higher, but in general differences in gravity across the earth's surface amounts to a rounding error. For example, you're probably looking at 2000 ish miligal from the top of a tall mountain to sea level difference in gravity, or .02m/s^2 difference.
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.
The article you linked to does not mention at any point that LBS is a mass, or at all uses the word mass at any point throughout. In fact, it breifly at the end mentions "1 lb=0.45359237 kilogram" as well as "1 Newton=0.224809 pound force" which could indicate a difference between LBF and LBM distinctions.
It's commonly understood that you will weigh a different amount of lbs on the moon than on earth. Because it isn't a mass. It's a force of gravity.
There is also evidence in the form of lbs/in^2 being a common measurement, which would be completely nonsense in the context of mass.
Alright, lets look at the US Customary Units and their definitions. Here is the section called "Mass and Weight". As you can see, everything is defined in metric units of mass. You won't find even pound-force to be part of the Customary units. I couldn't find any source saying that pound (not "pound-force") is a unit of force. However, there was an agreement (I think in 1955) to define the pound in kg.
it breifly at the end mentions "1 lb=0.45359237 kilogram" as well as "1 Newton=0.224809 pound force"
That basically implies that lb (pound, imperial unit) is a unit of mass and "pound-force" (non-imperial unit, part of the British Engineering Units) is a unit of force. Thus, pound (on its own) is a unit of mass, right?
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)
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.
Woah - I had never heard of the Hatzegopteryx. I spent some time today watching videos of this guy today (and its relatives, Quetzalcoatlus and Argentinosaurus). They are really cool.
I know that there is a lot of arguments about what dinosaurs actually looked like - I hope that in the videos they make these guys scarier than they actually were... This video is especially: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYniD_MQ7Rg
Personally, this style (from a great PBS Eons video) is my favorite interpretation:
I am going to be that guy and point out that pterosaurs were not dinosaurs, unless you consider primates to be squirrels cause we are distantly related. Also fun fact pterosaurs may have had a type of feathering which either means that the ancestors of both dinosaurs and pterosaurs had feathers or it evolved at least twice. And on a similar thing of body coverings, stem mamals/proto-mammals had fur before the dinosaurs ever evolved.
I am going to be that guy and point out that pterosaurs were not dinosaurs, unless you consider primates to be squirrels cause we are distantly related.
Ah, thank you for being that guy! Now I know 😄
Also fun fact pterosaurs may have had a type of feathering which either means that the ancestors of both dinosaurs and pterosaurs had feathers or it evolved at least twice. And on a similar thing of body coverings, stem mamals/proto-mammals had fur before the dinosaurs ever evolved.
Can the feathers and fur (or their impression) be preserved for millions of years in some types of fossilization? Or is the presence of these concluded from the bone structures, fossilized skin, or other not so direct pieces of evidence? And, is any direct evidence of color preserved? No pressure to answer, I am just wondering out loud.
On the preservation thing, it depends but it usually comes down tp either skin impressions, soft tissue fossilization, or imprints kinda like fossil footprints. You were basically on point with your guess. But yeah this type of evidence is varried and highly temperamental in how we find it.
I think the only thing that preserves worse are soft bodied organisms like jellyfish. But yeah if ya want to learn more on this shit PBS Eons on youtube is a pretty solid start.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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].
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.’
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.
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
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.
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
While the species was identified in the 1970s, the archaeological community didn't announce it to the general public until 1991. This means that when Michael Chrichton was writing the novel, presumably in 1988-1990, he wouldn't have known about it. The novel was published in 1990
Yes, this birdy certainly looks like a person in disguise, almost also because of the size. Watching this at night in a forest will put your balls in your throat.
Oh man, this movie had such an impact on a couple of generations of Scandinavians. I've talked to multiple folks in the BDSM community who had their sexual awakening to the scene where Ronja is tied underground by the small elf people.
As a small mammal compared to that my evolutionarily developed survival instincts must be off. I want to befriend it. I assume it wants to eat children though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
I'm sure they're great. I'm not gonna lie though, I'd be slightly frightened if one was on me. But I'm from NNA, so there's nothing quite that big here.
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?
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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,)
