This photo looks like it could have been taken millions of years ago

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was about 2:00 am deep into the Wikipedia rabbit hole and found myself reading up on Cassowaries which lead to a Google image search.

I don’t know if it’s just me but this photo looks like it could have been taken millions of years ago. Especially the little guy on the right - he looks like a baby velociraptor.

Like (I think) most people, I’m pretty obsessed with dinosaurs and pre-historic creatures. It sucks trying to picture what things looked like millions or even just 10 thousand years ago.

The angle of the photo, the thick foliage and the chicks cheeky looking faces just makes me feel like I’m looking at a photo that someone with a time machine took.

2

Add some teeth and little arms, and you’d have it. Especially with the tree-ferns (or similar) in the background.

I like it!!

3

And those are just 'lil babies – the big guys have their own fascination – particularly since cassowaries are big and fierce enough to attack humans, dogs, and other animals.

And the resemblance between cassowaries and emus and their dinosaur relatives is more than just superficial. In fossilized samples of soft tissue found within dinosaur fossils, "… researchers found features that resemble red blood cells. Tests showed that they have a similar chemical composition to the blood of an emu (a bird thought to be a relatively close relative to dinosaurs).

Thanks for the pic, from someone who has watched Jurassic Park approximately 5,873 times. :slight_smile: Either one of those chicks looks like something that Wayne Knight (Nedry) might encounter on a dark and stormy night in Jurassic Park!

4

When my budgies were babies I called them budgiesaurus because they looked like little dinosaurs :slight_smile:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/56821557@N06/31348239792/in/dateposted-public/

Oh and I also watched Jurassic Park a bazillion times as well! I saw it 17 times in the theatre and then saw it 2 more times when it came out in theatres a couple of years ago.

5

I thought the one on the left had an amazing green Joker-esque coiffure, until I realized it was just a leaf.

6

The large flightless birds (ratites) are the most dinosaur-like of modern creatures. Cassowaries, Rheas, Ostriches and Emus are all very cool to see running or for that matter just see at all.

7

Aren’t all modern birds equally close relatives to the non-avian dinosaurs? And of course, the qualifier is needed, because birds are themselves dinosaurs.

8

Yes.

If that was in response to my post, I was just channelling my inner 5 year old self and think the large ratites look like dinos. Hell, I’m pretty sure ratites are even that closely related in the latest round of classifications. They break up into Cassowaries & Emus and then Rheas and Ostriches as a 3rd family.

9

All extant birds are equally close to dinosaurs since they all descend from the same ancestor, which was a dinosaur.

10

It was in response to wolfpup, who called the emu “a bird thought to be a relatively close relative to dinosaurs”.

11

Actually that was a quote from the article, not from me, and my omission of the closing quote made it ambiguous as to where the quote ended. The more scientifically accurate statement is that the dinosaur cellular structures discovered a few years ago appear to resemble those of the emu:
Furthermore, we observe structures consistent with putative erythrocyte remains that exhibit mass spectra similar to emu whole blood.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8352

12

I don’t know, that’s pretty clearly a color photo.
:slight_smile:

13

And the one on the left is whistling Beatles tunes.

14

Ha, we affectionately call them ‘murderbirds’ in our house. It’s our favourite thing to scare the tourists about. Spiders are old hat.

15

Here are photos by me of a grown-up emu and a cassowary. Those creatures look just as weird when fully grown.

16

Better link to the image and, yes, it is striking.

Deep ocean fish like the deepsea lizardfish also look ancient.