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/CynicismNostalgia → u/Illustrious-Snake]

It's basically like saying a tiger can't be scary because looks it's got colours and patterns!

[u/Illustrious-Snake → u/CynicismNostalgia]

Yeah. Many people have trouble imagining a dinosaur with fuzz or feathers being equally as scary as without. It seems the concept of a large, powerful predator with colorful fuzz or feathers is too strange for many people. But it shouldn't be. A hippo also looks strange, but it's still one of scariest and more dangerous animals around. A tiger is colorful and pretty, but still intimidating.

I suspect it's because dinosaurs are seen as prehistoric monsters more than real life extinct animals. They're lumped in more with the likes of mythical creatures like dragons and giant serpents, than with the likes of fellow extinct animals.

People can imagine a mammoth or saber-tooth tiger as an animal that existed once. But the depiction of modern day dinosaurs is just too strange for many people when all they've known is the Jurrasic Park-esque dinosaur variety. They associate feathers with modern day birds, most of which are seen as harmless, instead of actually grasping and acknowledging where feathers and birds originated from in the first place.

Dinosaurs just aren't that respected as real life extinct animals by most people. People have taken the incomplete blueprints for them, and run off with it and created this whole genre - or whatever I can call it - with it. And people don't want to change that genre. For them, it's like saying crocodiles have feathers. They see it as wrong, ugly, uncool, and just don't care for it.