Shoot, best dinosaur? That's a tall order.
I'm a little torn on how one would qualify that.
Well, I'm disregarding any herbivores because salad is lame.
As cool as the tank-like
Ankylosaurus or the mind-blowingly massive
Argentinosaurus is, it's out.
Triceratops is way cool and whose skull likely made it a very avid survivor, but it's still just walking food.
Pterosaurs are not even dinosaurs, so the 36 ft wingspan flying giraffe that is
Quetzacoatlus is also out.
So, moving outside
Sauropods and
Ornithischia, let's go to their predators, the
Theropods.
So, it's easy to go for
T.Rex, but that's more a popularity contest, although it's easy to make it boss. Even though the
Carcharodontosaurus is bigger and the
Spinosaurus probably above all, I'd give it cool points. T. Rex might lose this one to, being an opportunistic carnivore, which made it a part time scavenger, but it looks like the Spinosaurus ate mostly fish, and that makes them a pescetarian and I will not suffer that in my house. Given that the Tyrannosaurus is just a tiny bit smaller than the Carchardodontosaurus and the
Gigantosaurus, but we have more and better specimens, we know a little more and can prematurely assume they were better at surviving. Judging by the skull of a T.Rex, it looks like they have exceptional binocular vision along with an extensively big olfactory section, that they'd be able to smell in stereo. I'd put it in the solid running. Oh, did I mention it's bite is estimated up to 57000 newtons, with some estimates up to 235,000 newtons.
What? Yes.
But bigger is not necessarily better, so let's go smaller.
The
Maniraptorans get major points for being the ancestors to the
Dromaeosauridae raptors, which I will address later, but also Avialae clade that survived the KT event and still exist abundantly today and provides very compelling examples of evolving traits, linking dinosaurs and birds. They gave us awesome animals like the Eagle and Peregrine falcon, intelligent animals that have awesome group names like the Gamble of Ravens and the Murder of Crows, tasty animals like the Chicken and the Turkey, and interesting animals, like the vulture which literally cleans itself by pooing on it's legs. Massively significant and came to dominate the sky. Since I'll be addressing Dromaeosauridae Raptors later, I'll nominate the big dino-bird transitional species:
Archaeopteryx. The Berlin specimen makes one sweet tattoo, also.
Moving on...
Dilophosaurus? Get out of here; there's no evidence it spit poison.
How about Jurassic Park favorite:
Velocipraptor? Yeah, straight out. But Arch, you'd say, they were so cool in Jurassic Park? Yeah, the Dilophosaurus was cool, too, but it was a bunch of lies. The velociraptor is covered in feathers, which is not necessarily a bad thing and I totally let the maniraptorans slide on that, but it's about the size of turkey with a long tale. Nice try, but you're out.
Now, if you like the Velociprators in Jurassic Park and accept they never learned how to open doors and that enterprise software is not so easily navigated by a child because they know "Unix," we're going straight to my favorite dinosaur.
The
Deinonychus. This is the dinosaur that the Velociraptor was based on. This one is straight up big enough to kill you and your family. While theorized to have feathers, no actual evidence has been found (unlike the velociraptor, where we found quills knobs in the bones). So, it can still look wicked cool. And even if it does have feathers, there's a theory that it would use it to stabilize itself in the air as it hooks it's eponymous claw into it's very large prey and shreds it apart.
Scientists thought for a bit that it had a weak bite, but some ancient Deinonychus saw that was totally lame and so it left teeth marks in the bone of a Tenontosaurus, showing it could break through bones and giving us an estimate of a bite force of 4100-8200 Newtons. Yeah, that's more than any carnivorous mammal.
Sure, the
Utahraptor is bigger, but whatever.
So, given the nebulous qualifications of "best," I submit to you Archaeopteryx, Deinonychus, and Tyrannosaurus.
I apologize if I got some of my facts wrong, or strayed too close to "favorite" territory.
Sstavix wrote:Favorite Calvin and Hobbes quote?
Another big question. So much goodies, but also hard to pin down your favorite strips to just quotes.
Calvin, the cruel and vengeful God? The raccoon baby? All the Spaceman Spiffs? Dino in a jet plane? But, here's a couple that stand out well on their own.
Well, to credit my avatar, one of the Tracer Bullet quotes that's always stuck with me:
"
I've got eight slugs in me. One's lead, and the rest are bourbon. The drink packs a wallop and I pack a revolver."
"I came from Sears? No, you were a blue light special at K Mart. Almost as good, and a lot cheaper."
"What fun is it being 'cool' if you can't wear a sombrero?"
"I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information."
"How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol hordes got bored?"
And who can't end the list with:
"
It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy…Let’s go exploring!"
I'm sure I'm missing a bunch, but there's the incomplete list.
