I would most definitely take a job at Jurassic Park, IF I got to make recommendations that would be actually listened to and wouldn’t be fired for swearing. The job of a veterinarian should not be to do what you are told by your employer, it should be to solve problems and advocate for the welfare of the animals in your care.
The Tyranosaus get’s enrichment, the sauropods get enrichment, the stegosaurs get enrichment, everybody gets enrichment.
We are not feeding Jurassic carnivores meat from mammals which they are likely ill-suited to digest and metabolize. We know aquarium fish, which are not adapted to eating mammals, develop cardiac and fat distribution problems if their protein is supplemented with beef so let’s aim for a slightly more ‘natural’ diet of bird and reptile proteins (crocodile, anyone?)
Like, seriously, let’s not train a prehistoric reptile, brought back to the modern world with no parents to teach it about food, to see mammals as a source of food. It shouldn’t have any innate instincts to do so, so lets leave well enough alone.
In fact, let’s not give them live prey at all. I think not training the dinosaurs to hunt is probably a good idea.
Lets get somebody who knows what they’re doing to design enclosures so we can see the animals, and give them enough space to not go stir crazy.
While we’re at it, the enclosures for larger animals can have more safety features – bolt holes for humans that the biggest critters can’t fit through, honestly we even have these in livestock handling facilities, it’s not that hard!
We are not going to introduce DNA from modern species which are potentially parthenogenic
So, so much quarantine.
Some modern reptiles would need to be kept in order to seed the local environment with suitable microflora and microfauna for the dinosaurs to pick up. You might have cloned a dinosaur, but I’d bet dollars for donuts you didn’t clone it’s intestinal flora!
Quarantine again. Nothing is getting off the island, and ideally nothing from visitors is contacting anything in the exhibit.
Ian Malcom has to walk around being opinionated about everything, and suitably paranoid.
The roof of every building gets an evacuation point for a helicopter.
The stegosaurs get extra treats.
(Image reads: #there would be fewer catastrophes #and boring movies #but I’m here for this)
Oh no no, we could have the best movie ever.
We just need a really good, enthusiastic, Steve Irwin type character who just thinks these dinosaurs are wonderful, let him do whatever he wants, and make Ian Malcom follow him around.
Tyrannosaurus was not the most dangerous animal in the park. Having imprinted on its handler since infancy, the creature maintained a docile temperament all the way to adulthood, and indeed seemed to prefer feeding from its designated trough to pursuing prey. Its interactions with staff and guests showed at most a mild curiosity, and the only real terror the beast inspired was when it snuck up on trainers to sniff their hats.
The raptors were not the most dangerous animals in the park. Hollywood had greatly exaggerated their size, first of all, and while they had a mischievous streak (one individual in particular was fond of stealin zookeepers’ wallets), they were far from the hyper-intelligent murder lizards everyone expected. Their intelligence was less of the predatory sort and more the comical intelligence of a corvid, devoted mostly to play and caring for their fellow flock members.
The mosasaur was not the most dangerous animal in the park. Though it held no loyalty to the zookeepers, it had taken to training well enough, and would dutifully move to a specific section of the tank when signaled, giving the keepers space to carry out any business they needed to accomplish in its tank without fear of harm.
No, by far the most dangerous animal in the park was the Struthiomimus. Everyone expected it to be easy – what were these animals in pop culture beyond being fodder for the carnivores? Surely the bird-mimics couldn’t be much of a hassle. Sadly, they weren’t just any bird mimics.
No, in temperament, the Struthiomimus mimicked a swan.
Highly territorial and vicious to the bone, more keepers had suffering brutal beatings by the struthis than had been hurt by the rest of the park’s fauna combined. And when they learned to chew through the fences…
Well, let’s just say the Tyrannosaurus never experienced a more terrifying day in her life.
my friend left her window open in her bedroom and came back to find this
look at his self-satisfied little face, the cheeky shit
motherfucking australia
if there was a post to describe australia, this is it
wait.
you mean to tell me this isn’t even a pet bird?
that in australia, you have wild birds that just fly from house to house with the express purpose of fucking shit up?
fucking HELL australia, what is wrong with you?
wake up australia
That’s what birds do
They fly around and fuck shit up
Do you have some kind of mysterious nice birds in your weird foreign country
Do birds in America and England fly into your house and make the bed and tidy up the living room a little bit
It’s cold here, so they just bounce off the windows and lie there and twitch spasmodically while you look for the shovel.
Basically hurling themselves at windows is the worst thing birds do
yeah man a kookaburra literally flew into a classroom at my high school and just sat his smug ass down on top of the desk for a good 20 minutes
why has nobody mentioned the fact that in australia there are 3-4 months a year where everybody just accepts that they’re going to get attacked by magpies. It is literally called “swooping season” and these birds will fly down to peck your fucking face, and people get their eyes ripped out and shit, it’s fucking brutal.
My teacher had to go to hospital and have surgery because of swooping season. It was in the parking lot of school and all the kids would do a mad dash towards the car as the magpies tried to kill us.
no but when you’re 12 years old and riding your bike like mad on the way home from school with an icecream bucket on your head with like branches and shit sticking out if it to scare them off and none of this is considered strange
what the actual fuck australia
I am pretty sure all of these Australia stories are a massive, globally-spanning trolling effort, and only the people who have visited the country are allowed to be in on the joke.
Nope.
Went there.
Parrots tried to take our car.
Came home IN A FUCKING HURRY.
Interesting thing about magpies – they’re not great at identifying individual humans visually, but if you make yourself identifiable in some way they’re usually open to reason. We used to have some very aggressive swoopers in our back yard – as soon as they realised that the humans *inside* the fence never bothered them and were the source of the delicious compost heap, they turned into flying black and white guard dogs who would viciously assault any passing stranger but never bothered anyone inside the yard. Several times they swooped at us when we approached from outside, then when we walked into the yard they would pull up and act incredibly apologetic like sorry ma’am I had no idea it was you I would never please don’t stop stocking the food pile.
There was another little group of magpies in the park who would attack any solo pedestrian but never bothered anyone walking a dog or pushing a pram, because apparently those were identifiable traits indicating a non-threatening human. In the spirit of inquiry, I started going out of my way to be polite to the magpies – carefully walking a wide arc around them when they were on the ground, etc – and emitting an identifiable call of ‘hello birdie’ before swooping season started.
I spent the next ten years crossing that park at least once a day and as long as I turned at the first flutter of wings and said ‘hello birdie’ to the magpie waiting to attack as soon as my back was turned, I was fine. Every time, the magpie would stare at me for a minute and then fly off to harass some other pedestrian because apparently the magpies and I, we were cool.
Parrots are a lot less open to negotiation, and the little bastards travel in flocks. Beware the parrots.
What the fuck
@commanderholly holy shit has Ross ever told you this stuff?
This post gets more hilarious every time it comes up on my radar. There’s a whole paragraph on the Australian Magpie wiki page about swooping, and what does (and does not) work, along with a picture of a person wearing an anti-magpie modified bike helmet. And of course, Youtube Videos
I think we should stop using “chicken” as a word for “coward” because have you ever met a chicken? Chickens ain’t scared of shit. Chicken is ready to throw down at all times.
See those feathers? The skeleton they found was so well-preserved that scientists were able to examine the pigment cells in the feathers and compare them to those of modern day birds.
And they were able to do this with such accuracy that they know the coloration of this dinosaur. In life it looked something like this.
It just baffles me that we know the color patterns of an animal that has been dead for 161 million years
They found a prehistoric chicken that wears adidas swear pants my god
slav energies have resonated for millions of years, and this is proof
this is primarily an obnoxious ad for the enamel pin above (pre-order it here, folks!), but I’m gonna use this opportunity to compare Velociraptor to modern descendants, and see how it stacks up!
Velociraptors & cassowaries evolved hypertrophied claws for entirely different purposes – the ‘slashing, killing claw’ of the Velociraptor is a myth, but modern-day cassowaries have the Real Deal, a ice pick-like weapon on their second toe that can grow to 5 inches.
“The inner or second of the three toes is fitted with a long, straight, murderous nail which can sever an arm or eviscerate an abdomen with ease. There are many records of natives being killed by this bird” – ornithologist Ernest Thomas Gilliard
notice how the cassowary has a straight dagger, while Velociraptor has a hook? modern equivalents to Velociraptor’s hypertrophied claw are eagle talons, used for gripping prey & maneuvering in trees. because it was a terrestrial runner, Velociraptor held this tool off the ground to keep it razor-sharp, but modern birds-of-prey (given the luxury of flight) have transformed ALL their talons into the famous Velociraptor sickle claw!
tl;dr turns out the group aves used the last 66 million years to advance their weaponry & out murder-bird their ancestors (sorry Velociraptor!)
interesting update!! another modern analogue exists, in the Seriema
though they can fly short distances. Seriemas prefer running from danger. they are the closest living relative to the flightless Terror Birds, which preyed upon proto-horses in the Miocene! the red-legged species is used by farmers to guard property against wild animals & human intruders & DEAR GOD you can easily see why:
Seriema feet are not used when capturing/killing prey, but the raised claw is apparently involved in intraspecies conflict, wherein two Seriemas will rear up & kick at eachother, flapping their wings to maintain balance
SO was Velociraptor’s claw used for arboreal maneuvering & RPR (raptor prey restraint) like an eagle, or intraspecies fighting like a Seriema? unfortunately they are quite dead, so we’ll never know (though I’d put money on it being a multipurpose tool!)
Reblogging for birb foot science!
Well, that’s a horrifying thought, Velociraptors hopping around in trees to jump on unsuspecting prey. I mean, even if they were only about turkey-sized, that’s still a pretty impressive thing to have coming at your face with several feet of falling momentum behind it.
Also, please watch this furious modern dinosaur scream at and try to frighten a car.
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 