AHC: Get Rid of Lumbering Theropods

the challenge is to prevent Theropod Dinaosaurs from ever being stereotyped as lumbering tail draggers in fiction. Bonus points if you can have movies portray them in the modernish look before actual paleontology does
 
The Darwinian-Mendellian feuding doesn't happen and the Archaeopteryx and energy of dinosaurs is viewed more consistently?
 
Have Hollywood push it? I'm thinking a couple big budget, "ok for summer to get out of the heat" films that show speedy dinos trying to kill our heroes. What? ;) That did give us the Toronto Raptors, after all...

Edit: Didn't fully comprehend the OP. Beedok has the best then.
 
Last edited:
Prior to GCI the only was to portray dinosaurs was cartoons and stop-motion, so is the lumbering influenced at all by the practical realities of working with stop-motion? Perhaps they needed the tail to make the theropods balance on 3 points?
 
Riain said:
Prior to GCI the only was to portray dinosaurs was cartoons and stop-motion, so is the lumbering influenced at all by the practical realities of working with stop-motion? Perhaps they needed the tail to make the theropods balance on 3 points?
They didn't. The models are all on wires anyhow, or effectively nailed down. If balance was an issue, the wires could be matted out. (It's how wire fu works, & it's something Hollywood has known how to do almost since the very beginning.)
 
It's not just theropods, but all dinosaurs.

They were perceived by some as being like modern reptiles, especially lizards.

Hence you get reconstructions like these with sprawling lizard like limbs:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=sp...KUZHZFMPR0QWzlYDgCA#biv=i|1;d|U1VNNKXzst8ITM:

However the defining feature of dinosaurs is an erect posture - see skeleton pictures at http://dinosaurjungle.com/dinosaur_facts_definition.php

So I think you need a different perception from the start.

Maybe Richard Owen decides to call them dinoaves, terrible birds, nstead of dinosaurs, terrible lizards.

Now to fit Richard owen's world view of biology based on archetypes, for that to happen you need him to name the class based on more obviously bird-like dinosaurs. Which probably means you need to ship a load of Chinese fossils to London zoo in the late 1830s, and even then it's a long shot.

I expect what would happen is you would initially get the names dinoaves and dinosaurs in use, each with their own perceived characteristics, bird-like or lizard-like, and only many years later would somebody realise they are all the same class, and no sprawlers, etc
 
Sunil Tunna might be on to something here. Ornithischians might be called dinoaves, whilst Saurischians would be 'dinosaurs'.
 
Theropods which are the more bird-like species actually classified as saurischians, which means lizard hipped.

Ornithiscians, which includes sauropods like apatosaurus etc are "bird hipped"

And perversely, birds evolved from saurischians, the lizard hipped group.

See
http://dinosaurjungle.com/dinosaur_facts_classification.php

So in the ATL, we want saurischians, lizard hipped dinosaurs to be called dinoaves. Or failing that all dinosaurs to be called dinoaves. This needs to be early on, which means we need to find lots of bird like dinosaurs about 150 years earlier, and use them when choosing the names.

Maybe some ancient Chinese emperor had a thing about dinosaur fossils, collected a huge stash which was forgotten, until captured by the British early in the first opium war. The stash gets sent to London Zoo, and Richard Owen gets to work...
 
Top