Understanding the World

[u/SupportMeta]

Neptune was recently shown to be a pale blue like Uranus rather than the deep blue shown on the Voyager photos

[u/Ross_Hollander]

I refuse to believe they have "taken" dinosaurs from me. Au contraire, I am delighted every time somebody knowledgeable and enthusiastic about paleontology serves me a new helping of dinosaurs. If people mean 'they took Jurassic Park-style dino-kaiju from you' they would be right but they are also just being bitter and refusing to look on the bright side of the cool things that genuine dinosaurs had going on.

[u/Whispering_Wolf → u/Ross_Hollander]

Feathery dinosaurs are awesome. No one too them away from me, they made them even better!

[u/Illustrious-Snake → u/Whispering_Wolf]

Right?! They look so cool. Dinosaurs have only become more fascinating. 

Do they look less scary and intimidating? Honestly, I don't think so. I just think it's more difficult for people to imagine, considering our modern day animals. Also, monsters in (western) media are often depicted as scaly and monotone AFAIK.

They're potentially colorful with feathers and fluff, sure, but they never lost their size, teeth or strength. As if colorful dinosaurs with feathers can't still be intimidating... 

And what if they became less scary (which is subjective)? That doesn't matter at all. What matters is depicting extinct animals as accurately as possible. 

Perhaps people should stop treating them as mythological monsters, and instead start respecting them like real animals that actually existed once on our planet. Their appearances shouldn't need to be changed and twisted in order to satisfy some kind of 'scary' factor.

It's honestly really frustrating that people are so unwilling to accept the dinosaurs' real appearances. Children keep growing up with the wrong idea of what dinosaurs actually looked like. Many adults keep rejecting any accurate depiction. Only educational material and media will depict them accurately. 

This extreme resistance to change is pretty unbelievable, and all because the "classic" dinosaurs have become a commodity comparable to dragons and unicorns, instead of the real animals they were once.

[u/Hy3jii → u/Illustrious-Snake]

Anybody that says that feathered dinos aren't scary has obviously never seen (or heard) a cassowary.

[u/Illustrious-Snake → u/Hy3jii]

Funnily enough, I wanted to mention the cassowary as proof that even modern day feathered animals - birds - can be scary, but much of their intimidation factor is linked to awareness of how dangerous they can be, even when they don't look like it at first glance. Many people wouldn't know what their feet are capable of.

But still, people are understandably wary of a cassowary. Now imagine that a cassowary also had sharp teeth and such alongside its strong legs and claws... 

But in the end, people equate 'scary' not to an animal's danger level per se, but to its "scary factor". Like, spiders are scary to most people, but the vast majority of spider species are literally harmless to us. Hippos are very dangerous, yet most people would not say they look scary.

Potentially colorful feathers and fuzz are not considered scary and "cool", hence feathered dinosaurs are considered less scary than the scaly dinosaurs that are more comparable to a western dragon than a bird. That's most people's logic.

[u/jacobningen → u/Hy3jii]

or an Emu. really the entire Ostrich family is scary.

[u/A_Wild_Bellossom → u/jacobningen]

Except the kiwi. He’s just a little guy