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“Hey, isn’t that Dave’s skull?”
“Can’t be, I just saw him this morning. Sure looks like him though. Weird.”
There are still a few of them in government.
I suddenly feel very small, but also the load off my shoulders lifted.
There are fossilized humans. Fossilization really doesn’t take that much time, geologically speaking; it just requires very specific conditions.
About how much time are we talkin here?
Where are the bodies?
Where’s Rachel!?
Where are the other drugs going?
I don’t know, swear to God
For some reason, I don’t entirely believe you. Might be the whole God of Madness thing. You turning back into Jyggalag anytime soon? I’d like to know when to short the shit out of the entire market.
Human species before H. Sapiens
Homer Sapiens?
No homo, but the H is for homo
I know there’s some animal fossils in New Zealand that date back to its colonization by the ancestors of the Maori, so about the 1400s. Though I don’t know if they are partially or fully fossilized.
Your teeth can fossilise while they’re still in your mouth. We call it tartar.
Also makes you wonder what fossils they mean, of the same species or then already extinct ones.
Because according to a quick Wikipedia search the oldest hominid fossils (?) are something like 7 millions years old
That’s much much shorter than dinosaurs where around but hey " hominins are around long enough to unearth hominin fossils"!
Birds are considered to be dinosaurs. Birds exist now. We are finding dinosaur fossils now.
That’s what the XKCD that was posted says. Mostly.
OK, now I’m imagining dinosaur archaeologists (monocles and brushes, not bullwhips and quips).
There’s always a relevant xkcd
The popup text on that one is quite funny.
Any idea how to access the pop-up text on a phone?
It says:
Sure, T. rex is closer in height to Stegosaurus than a sparrow. But that doesn’t tell you much; ‘Dinosaur Comics’ author Ryan North is closer in height to certain dinosaurs than to the average human.
😂
As a tall person I feel cooler now
On my android, I just long press on the image, and it appears at the top of the popup menu
It is more chronologically accurate to show a t-rex being hit by a car than it is to show a t-rex eating a stegosaurus
I said I’m sorry. But if you’re going to let your T-Rex out at night you should at least put a reflective collar on it.
Hi, I was just calling because I live down the street from you, and your daughter come to my house today and she kick my t-rex.
Your daughter come to my house today, And she come on my property and then she kick my t-rex. And now my t-rex needs operation.
How cruel.
My T-Rex ist mostly armless
That would be a knee slapper if I could reach.
We don’t know you
The only interaction I’ve seen between a T-Rex and a collar is that one scene from The Lost World. Based on what I saw there, I have to assume that collars wouldn’t really work for them.
This is the comparison I was looking for. It’s great to explain that media shows them together but untrue, it is a totally different idea to explain the staggering time difference between the two.
You made me scroll up to the picture again, looking for a T-Rex or a car
And people mocked me for my human-tyrannosaur slashfic on ao3. Well, who’s laughing now?
I don’t remember that episode of the Flintstones
Is it a self-driving car?
This is only mind blowing because popular media likes to show every dinosaur at once. Like there’s a lot of things depicting stegosaurus fighting T-Rex; but these animals never would have met. They’re from entirely different periods.
How dare you suggest DinoTrux lied to us!!!
If gasoline is made from dinosaurs, what did the Dinotrux run on?
The blood of their enemies!!!
Drugs.
Jurassic drugs!
DinoTrux drove the earth for such a long time BP Oil® existed while DinoTrux drove the earth.
You can tell because non of them has feathers.
We live closer to the time of T-Rex than T-Rex lived to the time of Stegosaurus.
67 million years separate us from T-Rex.
83 million years separate T-Rex from Stegosaurus. (150 million years between us and Stegosaurus)on a similar note: When cleopatra lived, the pyramids were already ancient
Cleopatra lived closer to t-rex than us
You were born after cleopatra died 🫠🤑👻
Follow me for more Greece facts.
Technically correct, just as yesterday was closer to the formation of the moon than today is.
Only if we assume they can’t be ressurected
Woah
how? cleopatra was born in 69 BC, last trex died around 65 million years ago
What i meant is that cleopatra was closer in time to t-rex than we are to t-rex
There were still mammoth when the pyramids were being built.
This makes me wonder if there is any possibility that someone who worked on the pyramids knew what roast mammoth tasted like. I suspect the possibility is 0 due to geography, but maybe someone got sick of being cold and happened to be an architect?
There are people around right now who know how roast mammoth tastes.
Wtf 🤯
This meme made me gasp loud enough that my girlfriend was worried something was wrong.
Then I had to explain that I’m 41 years old and was just shocked by a dinosaur fact.
To be fair, things can fossilise very quickly given ideal conditions. Still dinosaurs reigned for a lot more time than mammals and frankly nature is still feeling the loss in certain ways.
https://www.americanforests.org/article/the-trees-that-miss-the-mammoths/
Another fun fact (dino facts are the best facts): There are more “dinosaur” species alive today than there are mammal species.
11,000 bird species alive today (approx)
6,000 mammal species alive today (approx)And their all bats.
Who is “they” and why do they have “all bats”? Also, what’s an all bat?
On a more serious note, I didn’t know most bird species were bats. That’s wild.
Also, my favourite fact is we know almost nothing about dinosaurs from jungles and mountains. Most of our knowledge comes from wetland and oceanic creatures because of the way fossils are formed.
Forty-one?! You’re practically a fossil!
Also, water you are drinking has probably been peed by dinosaure. Several time. But probably not peed by a human.
Second relevant xkcd of the comments https://what-if.xkcd.com/74/
guzzles water
Does getting buried in pumice count as becoming a fossil? Because Pompeii was only a couple thousand years ago.
From wikipedia: A fossil (from Classical Latin fossilis, lit. ‘obtained by digging’)[1] is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age.
Answer: yes. It does count. Specifically carbonization.
Personal take: when I think of a “fossil”, I think of the stereotypical mineralized bones. Like the T-Rex in the museum of natural history that most people have seen from various movies and TV shows. Thinking of human and human predecessor bones as fossils is just weird to me.
Is Pompeii from a past geological age?
2000 years ago doesn’t seem important on geological time scales.
Okay so even though I read all this last night, I somehow missed the “2000 - (-2000) years” thus making the current geological age around 4000 years, and technically Pompeii would not count in the strictest definition. That said, had it happened 4,000 years ago, absolutely nothing would have changed. All the stuff would still be carbonized.
Also from Wikipedia in the (geological age) article: An age is the smallest hierarchical geochronologic unit. It is equivalent to a chronostratigraphic stage.[14][13] There are 96 formal and five informal ages.[2] The current age is the Meghalayan.So again the answer is “yes it counts” but my personal take is “it feels weird to consider 4,000-10,000 ago multiple different geologic ages”Reading through Geologic time scale, it defines an age as equivalent to a chronostratigraphic stage, which it says are normally millions of years. But you’re right, interestingly the current Meghalayan age only started 4,200 years ago.
It seems all the recent ages are only a few thousand years each (until 2018 the last 10,000 or so were one age, but this was split in three in 2018).
After all that reading I still didn’t really understand how they decided that this was a new age.
But anyway, I agree there isn’t going to be any difference between 2,000 and 4,000 years so we might as well consider Pompeii fossilised even if not strictly true under the definition. I’m just surprised we consider anything within human history to be a previous geological age, but it seems we do.
Well, there are human fossiles aswell and we have been here for a pretty short time.
Speed running fucking it up too
Well, there are plenty of hominid fossils and we humans are plentiful.
[off topic]
The Gryphon’s Skull is a fun read. Two Greek traders, circa 300 BC, discover a dinosaur fossil…
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-gryphon-s-skull-harry-turtledove/8156325?ean=9781612421421&next=t
If you like fun but also well-researched stories about people living in pre-modern times, you might also enjoy the weird medieval guys podcast :) They actually did an episode on fossils recently. Another funny story they mention is the one of Johann Beringer’s “Lying Stones”.
