this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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I'll defer to actual paleontologists (or anyone who drops links), but my guess is T-Rex could go a month without food easy. Most modern large reptiles typically go a long time between meals.
Edit: following the intense scholarship in this thread, I have changed my stance. T-Rex probably would not survive a month without food (or water). BUT ALSO, the entity setting the rules and betting 500 mil on it surviving is going to know that. So the Dino's getting fed either way.
I'm also no dinologist, but wouldn't the T-Rex be used to higher mix of oxygen in the atmosphere? I wonder if it would just pass out from hypoxia
I thought O2 was higher during the time of the dinosaurs? Maybe that was earlier... I don't remember when the time of the big bugs was.
You could be right... that far back it's easy to mix up which millions and millions of years you're talking about
Big bugs were in the carboniferous, about 350-300 million years ago.
Dinos didn't evolve until about 240 million years ago, and didn't take over the world until about 200 million years ago. T Rex evolved quite late as far as non-avian dinos go, only about 68 million years ago.
Unlike modern reptiles, the T-rex was warm blooded, much like their close relatives birds, so their metabolic rate would be higher than, say, crocodiles, lizards, turtles, etc. Their food needs would be way higher than cold blooded reptiles, so a month without food would be more challenging. Might survive a month if it gorged itself beforehand, but quite likely not.
I think you're right.
There are some scaling issues I think.
Achully, these days scientists believe they would be feathering issues.
I can't thank you enough for grabbing that setup.
Feathers don't mean there aren't scales as well, especially just protofeathers. Think pangolin?
I set up a scaling joke. While I appreciate your pedantry, I hope you enjoyed the jokes.
Oh, the joke was fantastic, thank you. I'm just legitimately interested in how feathery dinosaurs were at various points.
Growing up in a fundie house... I hope everyone is interested in how fabulous dinos were.
Dinosaurs were not reptiles. Reptiles already existed when dinosaurs evolved and there are completely different evolutionary lineage.
I'm just copy & pasting Wikipedia;
But reptiles is more a culturally based category than a strictly defined biological class, so you might prefer a definition that excludes dinosaurs, and that's fine. I'll admit, it seems odd to class birds as reptiles, and strictly speaking if you exclude birds you should exclude dinos too.
Here's the thing. You said "dinosaurs are reptiles."
Are they in the same class? Yes. No one's arguing that.
As someone who is a scientist who studies dinosaurs, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls dinosaurs reptiles. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing.
If you're saying "reptile class" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Reptilia, which includes things from snakes to turtles to lizards.
So your reasoning for calling a dinosaur a reptile is because random people "call the scaly ones reptiles?" Let's get fish and pangolins in there, then, too.
Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A dinosaur is a dinosaur and a member of the reptilia class. But that's not what you said. You said a dinosaur is a reptile, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the reptilia class reptiles, which means you'd call microraptors, jackdaws, and other birds reptiles, too. Which you said you don't.
It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?
U got me there, unidan
Seeing this copypasta breathes life into my old bones
What I also find interesting is that the nearest extant animals to birds are crocodilians. Both belong to the archosaur clade, even if there's around a 240 million years gap between them.
As you say, birds can be classified as belonging to reptiles under the cladistic route, but they're quite radically different to the reptiles that live today, so are seen as not really reptilian. It's not surprising, seeing that the link between crocodiles, true reptiles in all senses, and birds were the dinosaurs, who disappeared 65 million years ago. A whole lot of evolutionary change in that time.
Depends on how pedantic you want to be regarding the term "dinosaur" Dimetrodon and plesiosaurs for instance are reptiles but if you buy a pack of plastic dinosaurs for your kid the odds are damn near 100 percent those are gunna be in there. Not applicable to the T-Rex I know but it's like the whole debacle of "what counts as a berry" thing. Like sure a blackberry is an aggregate drupe but it is culturally a valid answer to "what's your favorite berry?"
That is not even a little true. If it was your phylogeny would mean crocodillians aren't reptiles.
It isn't my philosophy, it's sciences. What do you want about?
It is your phylogeny (not philosophy), you're proposing a different phylogeny than science does.
Archosaurs, such as crocodillians, diverged from a common ancestor BEFORE birds/dinosaurs did, from other reptiles.
In order for what you're saying to be true, we'd have to exclude crocodillians from being reptiles. No standard definition would not include crocodillians as reptiles. In modern taxonomy, we use what are called monophyletic groups to determine relatedness. Because of this, birds and all dinosaurs fall under the clade archosauria, and are therefore reptiles.
In essence, what you're proposing would be like saying "Your cousin is a reptile, but not your brother"
Yeah! Keep up the good fight and fuck paraphyletic groups.
I'm not sure it would be possible for such large animals, they require a lot more energy to keep the heat up due* to larger skin surface.
I could be wrong though, happy to be corrected.
Square-cube law would be in effect - for large animals, things that scale with mass or volume outpace things that scale with surface area. Though what result that would have in this case I can't quite puzzle out.
What about water
Now you mention it, the rules don't say that you get water.
And, it only says you get food. It doesn't explicitly say that the T-Rex doesn't. You could argue it wouldn't be a fair fight if he didn't.
What about water?
I changed my mind and edited my comment.