Your Weekly Science Pill, Dinosaur Edition

I've been looking forward to making this post since last week, but when the time came, I sulked and avoided and tried to not do it. I figure, I need to stick to a schedule, and make a writing block afterwards. So, this week's SCIENCE!, dinosaurs are in order!

 WARNING: SCIENCE

Dinosaurs are a reptilian class that emerged in the late Triassic period (about 230 million years ago). They were a ridiculously varied group of animals, that spread over pre-continental-break Earth. There were two main orders of dinosaur -Ornithschia and Saurischia. Specifically, we will be talking about a suborder of the latter, Theropoda, but more on that further on!

Although often thought of as gigantic, most dinosaurs were human-sized or smaller. Although dinosaur fossils have been found for millennia. In China, they were thought to be the bones of dragons, used then and now as traditional medicine, and in Christian Europe, they were thought to be giants or creatures killed in the great flood. (Nice one guys)

An English geology proffessor by the name of William Buckland collected fossilised Megalosaurus bones and, between 1814 and 1824, was the first to write about dinosaurs in a scientific journal. This sparked off what I like to refer to as "Jurassic Park Mania: First Edition".

As a kid, I fucking loved dinosaurs. I could tell you the taxonomy (for those non-sciency enclined, that's the funny bit that says what the animal's other-animal cousins are) of up to a hundred different dinosaurs. My favourite kind of dinosaur?

Sans Jesus

 Raptors (or Dromaeosauridae) are a very diverse group of theropods, who varied in size from tiny, winged and fluffy to holy fuck enormous. They include the famous Archaeopteryx and Velociraptor.

Velociraptors, by the way? Looked like this:

 Real scary, Speilburg.

Also, they were the size of turkeys. The "velociraptors" from Jurassic Park were, in fact, deinonychus. Oh, yeah, and they've worked out that most theropods were feathered (and probably coloured like a gay pride parade). All raptors are feathered, yes, all were fast, intelligent and had those sickle-like claws. And some of them could fly (or at least glide). I know. I was scared for days too.


Oh, and here's the end of my SCIENCE! piece. Those raptors? Praised by The Lord of the Internet as the most terrifying thing to ever have existed?


Evolved into birds.


Those birds outside? Yeah. 


They're dinosaurs. 


They aren't evolved and seperate from dinosaurs. They are dinosaurs.


YOU'RE WELCOME.