Darius Nau

vertebrate paleontologist, sporadic paleontographer, bushcrafter, woodcarver, cyclist, born 359.58 ppm, he/him, @[email protected]

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

New R package for extracting and plotting fossil diversity in deep time (e.g. see below):
https://t.co/Ev4cXXxzQ2

Check out vignette to get started: https://t.co/ENkPNK5Jx1

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@CDU Gerechtigkeit für euch ist sichtlich dass kein Geld gespart wird, sondern langfristig sogat mehr ausgegeben wird, nur damit ihr Bürgergeldempfänger mehr gängeln könnt. Und das obwohl ihr eigentlich schon wisst dass diese "Grundsicherung" in Teilen verfassungswidrig ist.

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@jag110599 @TheSalikino You seem obsessed with IQ, so do you know what gave us leaded gasoline to decrease the IQ of entire generations (https://t.co/is6B1zDjAb)? Right, capitalism. It also gave us lovely treats like the Irish potato famine, the Bhopal disaster, and climate change among others

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@ausar_the @Hyper_Real2003 @PRECISETHF @TetZoo …and B: people would be bleeding to death left and right after being scratched by their domestic cats. I can say from years of very personal experience that cuts will bleed profusely and very visibly and messily LONG before they ever become even potentially life-threatening.

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@ausar_the @Hyper_Real2003 @PRECISETHF @TetZoo Unless we want to grasp at straws and say the mammoth was a haemophiliac.
If whatever scratches the Homotherium may have left on the mammoth in their first encounter had been sufficient to make it bleed to death, then A: it would have been visibly bloody, not invisible …

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@ausar_the @Hyper_Real2003 @PRECISETHF @TetZoo Infections are always a possibility, but they are certainly distinctly less likely if we don’t even see the animal suffer any injury that breaks the skin. If the mammoth was in the process of collapsing from septicaemia, then at least this was not illustrated well on screen.

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@Hyper_Real2003 @PRECISETHF @TetZoo If the explanation is really supposed to be "the second attack brought it down with such unrealistic ease, because the first attack had already injured it near-fatally with unrealistic ease", I think it does not really improve the situation.

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@Hyper_Real2003 @PRECISETHF @TetZoo Well, I certainly missed it on my first watch, I’ll try to pay attention to it next time. Even then, nothing those cats did to the mammoth in the first encounter seemed like it could realistically injure the mammoth to the extent of it being on the brink of death by the 2nd.

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@SaabGT750 @TM9380 @JosJulinGonzl20 @TetZoo @PRECISETHF I’m pretty sure that when I was ten years old I was quite easily mature enough to watch the bloody Argentinosaurus hunt in Chased by Dinosaurs or the bloody Diplodocus hunt in Ballad of Big Al…

[Joschua Knüppe @JoschuaKnuppe]

Not using technical names, especially when it's only the genus name, and no vernacular name is available, is like saying, "please pass the flavor" when asking for the salt. To use your own metaphor.
But beyond that you reveal a profound lack of curiosity and understanding of...

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@TetZoo @PRECISETHF That is a shame, though I don’t think it invalidates the criticism on this point. How come what is acceptable to show on screen is so limited now compared to the times of WWD/Ballad of Big Al/Chased by Dinosaurs, when long and bloody hunting scenes were still normal?

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@TetZoo @PRECISETHF …and did not have exceptional grappling ability far beyond what modern pantherines have, so it stands to reason that if a much larger pack of lions cannot just overpower an elephant, then 5 Homotherium also wouldn’t be able to do it to a wooly mammoth.

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@TetZoo @PRECISETHF By comparison, wolves hunting bison or lions hunting elephants are much bloodier, drawn-out affairs in which the prey item is gradually worn down through numerous injuries and exhaustion.
I’m not a mammal-person, but I think Homotherium is supposed to have been fairly cursorial…

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@TM9380 A very common issue in paleontology is that people (understandably) just love size comparisons, and will lazily just take images and scale them to length, without stopping to consider if the proportions of the image and the length estimates are consistent with each other.

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@ArtYandroid @MiloGaillard3 @IsaacWilso86956 Same way we know the giant undescribed centrum isn’t from a megalosaur or some other type of theropod.

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@Altithorax1 @TM9380 Stuttgart is a city well over an hour from the town of Trossingen (which has its own small museum, but I've never been there), it just happens to be the place that houses one of the biggest collections of fossils from there.

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@ArtYandroid @MiloGaillard3 @IsaacWilso86956 There aren't, Zhuchengtyrannus itself is pretty incomplete, and the referral is just based on provenance and size. Using the same logic we might also surmise Camp's theropod to be Yangchuanosaurus.

[Darius Nau @darius_nau]

@ArtYandroid @MiloGaillard3 @IsaacWilso86956 We also have quite a few metriacanthosaurid individuals to do the same...