• ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    “I like my imagination more than I like learning about nature”

    Feathers are fucking rad and I can’t wait for more weird critter traits

    • CidVicious@piefed.zip
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      5 hours ago

      Fun fact, they’ve done studies searching for pigments and found that dinosaur eggs, at least, were colorful like modern bird eggs.

    • cattywampas@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      I am saddened that we will probably never know about not only all the cool colors and feathers that dinosaurs had, but also the various fleshy structures that they also probably had.

      • Klear@quokk.au
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        6 hours ago

        We do, actually! Recent research proved there are melanosomes in some fossils/imprints, which were previously thought to be bacteria. This gives us a fairly good idea of the colouring of certain species. Check out this sinosauropteryx:

        I highly recommend reading the book Dinosaurs: New Visions of a Lost World. It’s fun to read, has amazing illustrations and was written by one of the people who discovered this.

      • Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club
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        5 hours ago

        Well, no, not that fast due to it’s size & weight of the head, but maybe having it’s eyes closed while moving the head to not tax the brain too much (that chicken bobbing was a solution to allow the brain to be smaller & more efficient bcs the effort to simply stabilise the head & process only the image/objects in 3D space while only those objects are moving is way simpler & more efficient than calculating the POV’s movements & accounting for those in real time too - it’s why hunting predators usually have large brains, if you miss data at high speeds you’ll just run into a tree).

        • TrousersMcPants@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          This doesn’t make any sense when you consider that birds hold their heads still while flying and are very good at spotting things on the ground while doing it. The reason I know for why birds bob their heads is that they can’t move their eyes in their sockets. So they both their head forward the same way our eyes will jump from position to position rather than move smoothly, it minimizes the blur you get from rapid movements.

          • Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club
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            2 hours ago

            When flying all objects are fairly far so it’s like their POV isn’t really moving (it’s not a yes/no, it’s by how much).
            (A stupid example: you can read big road signs while shaking you head but not as easily from a paper in front of you. The movement of your head is smaller relative to the sign. Or why when taking pics of the stars it doesn’t matter if the exposure is 12+h even if Earth has moved so much around the sun in that time.)

            On the ground the distances are a lot smaller & more relevant. So chickens stabilise their had in fixed spots as much as possible (and “don’t look” while bobbing).

            If they bobbed their had bcs of their limited eye socket movement (they can move them a little, some species a lot) they wouldn’t do it when not changing the direction of where they are looking.

            (It’s prob also why you can hypnotise a chicken in a second with one move of your finger but not eg a parrot with more brain buffer.)

            But we all do it, humans (prob mammals) have this trick when you “lose time” when calm & moving the eyes and/or head from one object to another. We don’t perceive it as such unless you look for it (you don’t remember the details of the panning even when you know it took you a few tenths of a second - but you do when eg playing sports). A bit like you stop processing your nose in your fov. Or how you don’t really remember having your eyelids closed when blinking.

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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      6 hours ago

      Anybody that’s grown up around chickens knows how terrifying a territorial rooster can be.