The biggest dinosaurs couldn't sit on their eggs
49 points by BiraIgnacio 4 days ago | 16 comments
  • niwtsol 3 days ago |
    I would love to know the day-to-day ins and outs of being a archaeologist in today's world. A glamorous edition is "the fly around the world to exotic places to find fossils", but I'd love any good books or blogs that talk about the nitty gritty details I wouldn't expect or even know to look for.
    • stevage 3 days ago |
      You mean paleontologist. Finding new fossils is a tiny part of their work. Mostly it's analysing existing fossils, general research and teaching.
    • jonah 3 days ago |
      Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week - https://svpow.com - is one that shows up on Hacker News from time to time. (There's much more to it than the title might suggest.)
    • georgeburdell 3 days ago |
      Not a paleontologist but my 2 sons went through a dinosaur phase not long ago. It seems like the vast majority of known dinosaur samples come from the northern rockies.
    • peterm4 2 days ago |
      Echoing sibling comments to add that I know for a fact that archaeologists get rather upset about being mistaken for palaeontologists.
      • AlotOfReading 2 days ago |
        There's a fair bit of overlap and people who work in both, but yes, they're distinct specialties. I wouldn't say upset though, except in the sense that grocery store clerks are upset by "if it doesn't scan it's free" jokes.
      • ASalazarMX 2 days ago |
        Archeologist: I am currently working at an archeological dig in Egypt.

        Nobody: Were there a lot of dinosaurs in Egypt?

  • dearing 3 days ago |
    As a complete layman, I wonder if it's not how adaptive life is and instead how infectious survival is.
  • protocolture 3 days ago |
    Very Sad.
  • femto 3 days ago |
    Same technique as Australia's bush turkey.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megapode#/media/File:Brushturk...

    A more direct link than a crocodile, as birds came from dinosaurs.

    • usrnm 3 days ago |
      Afaik, the modern view on birds is not that they came from dinosaurs, but they are dinosaurs, the only kind that survived.
      • ghaff 2 days ago |
        That's probably a bit pedantic. Whether you draw a magic line with dinosaurs on one side and (avian) dinosaurs/birds on the other or just say that birds continued on from the avian dinosaur clade is pretty definitional.
  • kazinator 3 days ago |
    Consider that the bigger the egg, the smaller its surface-area-to-volume ratio, and so the easier it hangs on to heat, and so the smaller the temperature differential that is required to keep it heated.
  • code_biologist 3 days ago |
    Related only topically, a 1hr YouTube talk I enjoyed a lot: "Hatchling T. rex and the Evolution of Vertebrate Parental Care" by Nick Longrich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd0dR2n9hLA

    He's a paleontologist and the talk starts with some pretty interesting statistical analysis aiming to estimate T rex clutch sizes (66 eggs) and hatchling weights (1.5kg) as well as T rex parental care. It ends with looking at evolutionary history trends in increasing parental investment in radically different animals.

    He talks a little slow, so a little playback speed bump won't go amiss.

  • novia 2 days ago |
    Would we be able to tell if they had big swinging bellies like cats?