Got 3 ads in this one video, keep up the good work, Polaris. I'm really glad the algorithm picked your channel up, you are my favourite youtuber that talks about this sort of content.
while looking at this video i just realized something about dinosaur paleoart. The modern birds like chickadees/robins and countless other small birds have dark almost pitch black looking eyeballs. And archasaurs like crocodiles and aligators have darker eyes too. Yet you also get creatures like hawks that have clearly defined pupils. I am mostly curious would dinosaurs have pupils?
Like birds, dinosaurs where insanely diverse in their biological structure so it's possible some had eyes like songbirds and crocs and others had eyes more like (modern) raptors.
Dr. Polaris I'm going to start showcasing your channel on my Instagram. I have less than 100 followers, and most of them are young people but knowledge is power, and dinosaurs are awesome
Another excellent video on dinosaurs I had little knowledge of. You have your well thought out Alter Earth series, but I wonder: The end Cretaceous extinction occurs, but mammals do not evolve to dominate the planet. Who are the candidates to replace the dinosaurs, pterosaurs and sea reptiles?
3:17 Why is there a human skeleton mounted like that in there? I get it maybe for a size comparison, but it looks like a guy on acid trying his best to impersonate a theropod.
How about covering the stegosaurs in the near future? They had a ton of genera in the late Jurassic, but seemed to fall off a cliff in the early Cretaceous.
Noasaurs actually survive into modern times in Madagascar and Australia while their Abrlisaurid cousins are extinct. They are not exactly common but remain as specialised carnivores and piscivores.
Bizar animals indeed. They almost start to look like some of the Triassic proto-dinosaurs again (i.e. dinosauriform archosaurs). I can see why classification of incomplete remains was somewhat problematic. They're like Dromaeosaurs, and Ornithomimosaurs, and generic Coelurosaurs, all in one somehow. As to Masiakasaurus and its goofy teeth, it's interesting to speculate on what it used those for. I think the idea that it hunted small, burrowing prey is not at all far-fetched. Most small animals would indeed burrow, including reptiles, mammals, and some birds. Its skull doesn't look very robust; fenestration is pretty significant, especially in the antorbital. But the eye socket is also quite large. Perhaps it relied a lot on its sense of smell and sight, which, again, might have aided in locating and pinpointing fast moving, small prey items in holes or burrows in the soil. The portruding teeth are so weird that it almost seems as if that's exactly what they were being used for. The slender head entering into burrows, and the teeth allowing it to grab hold of animals in tight spaces. Or maybe scraping insect larvae out of tree trunks. I mean, we really don't know at this point, and I'm not sure what other (small) animals coexisted with Masiakasaurus. You'd have to reconstruct its ecosystem and the many animals that lived therein to get a better idea of the possibilities. The fossil record is so fragmentary though; what wondrous worlds must be entirely lost in time by now..? No matter how much we discover and learn, there will always remain that mysterious aspect, like a formless shape in the fog. It's almost poetic, or romantic, and it draws us in, and we want to give it a name and come to know about it, but the deep past is like a bunch of grapes, hanging just beyond our reach. No matter how much we stretch our arms, there's an element to it that will always elude us; always slipping through our fingers, and we cannot obtain it or grab hold of it. These fossils are mere windows into the past; glimpses and echoes, beautifully distorted, wonderfully bizar. Hmm.. sorry, got a little bit carried away there lol.
When I can't sleep at night, I watch Dr Polaris and relax. I soon fall asleep and sometimes dream of dinosaurs. Dr Polaris I'm not calling your videos boring, in fact I find them very interesting, it's just that your voice is so soothing and the images you use are relaxing too. Like a paleo David Attenbrough
Haha yeah, I grew up playing Wrath of Cortex on the PS2 and have always thought it had a great soundtrack. Arctic Antics just fit perfectly for intro music.
Noasaurids survived the Jurrasic. So, they all died out then? No, they survived to the end. Asaurids survived then? Noasaurids survived, there were no Asaurids! There weren't any but they survived? Noasaurids, Noasaurids, not Asaurids! I didn't mention Notasaurids but did they survive too? Oh, I give up!!
i know this is about the dinosaurs but just immediatly what caught my attention was the random human skeleton in the deltadromeus display lol, what drugs were involved in putting that there just to show the posture.
Love that you cover so many little known dinosaurs, I can say without a doubt you have some of the most comprehensive content for lots of the animal groupings you cover on this platform.
*Dr. Polaris*: have you considered modern pterasaur sightings as ancient biological UFOs that evolved to mimic the pterasaur before they got wiped out at the end of the Cretaceous? I propose they are insect-based and simply outlived the creatures which they learnt to mimic. Problem solved. Sea monsters and giant wurms etc. would be the larval stage of other biological UFOs. They would have evolved on the continent of Antarctica as it drifted over the South Pole.
Mashikasaurus' teeth look like they could be used for pecking fish out of water. presumably after chasing them. Though I love the image of them pulling their pray out of dens. 👍as always. More Noasaurids please their interesting, their speed does imply flocking ,especially in herbivorous spices
4:18 Is it just me, or does the sllhouette representation of the human female look rather odd? Which subspecies of hominid has those long protrusions at the heel? But seriously, if it is there for scale, why is she wearing stylettos?! lol
I'm curious, would these dinosaurs have had feathery integument? 'Cause looking at the group they belong to + relatives, they look like (to my limited research at least) to have likely been scaled and lacked feathers. However, a lot of the artwork in this video shows them with feathers, but it's still very 50/50 in reconstructions, and as I'm using these critters for a spec evo project, I'd like to know your thoughts on this!
As much as a viscerally dislike the idea of dinosaur feathers I have to admit they are most likely valid and these dinosaurs really look like naked chickens they probably need feathers. Has any research on that been done?
Speculative ones based on well known anatomical features that identify the fossil animal as part of a distinct family. Those vertebrae possess typically noasaurian traits and judging from their relative size we can get a fairly good (though far from perfect) idea of what these animals were like in life.
A great many Limusaurus fossils are found crammed together in deep circular pits along with the remains of other animals (including Guanlong). It is suggested that these pits are the footprints of a gigantic sauropod which churned up the mud as it walked by and created a series of lethal traps for smaller animals. Google “dinosaur death pit”.
