I spent six hours reading about bird wingspans and looking for information on dinosaurs that flew, but aren't birds. A significant part of that time was *also* going on a magnificent rant about the HUNDREDS of shitty "science" articles/posts/videos calling quetzalcoatlus the "largest flying dinosaur", so prolific that even when I excluded quetzalcoatlus from the search parameters I was still served that bullshit. The rant resulted in a dozen people across four platforms being aggressively informed about the fact that pterosaurs ARE NOT DINOSAURS JFC IT TAKES FIVE MINUTES TO FIND THAT OUT, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS ANCIENT STOP CALLING QUETZAL A DINOSAUR.

I literally had to specifically look up microraptorans to find the *actual* answer to the largest flying dinosaur because lazy, misinformed jackasses that think their memories of bad paleo media count as facts that don't need to be researched have filled the internet with blatant misinformation. !

Like ffs, a weasel is more closely related to a jaguar than quetzalcoatlus is to ANY dinosaur, there's at least 160 million years between quetzalcoatlus and its common ancestor with dinosaurs!

To quote a science writer from the article on Changyuraptor (the largest, non avian flying dinosaur)

It's important to note that pterosaurs were not dinosaurs. As science writer Brian Switek has noted, "Calling a pterosaur a dinosaur is an error of the same order of magnitude as saying that our species is a marsupial." Both dinosaurs and pterosaurs have their own unique evolutionary history.

Quetzalcoatlus is a wonderful, weird animal, and pterosaurs are delightfully bizarre archosaurs that deserve to be respected! They're not dinosaurs, and that's ok! They're still cool on their own merits! The only dinosaurs that fly are avialens! Birds, their relatives, and related dromeosaurids! Get it together people!

bendy mother of sorrows

just watched the first episode of prehistoric planet. these bitches were looking at the same moon as us

Started playing a bunch of dragon games and. Omg. I love dragons (said with autism)

i still love dinosaurs and i think six year old reign would be really happy about that

Leveling up in autism by checking out all the available dinosaur encyclopedias from the library

Just Autistic Things...

Being excited about beige food and sitting alone in your room while watching your special interest on youtube for the 50th time this month...ngl I’m excited as heck for it!

↖️ this dumbass thought he didnt have trauma

@x-littlemoth I’m gonna fucking kill you! Why would you make him so fucking good! How fucking dare you you talented cunt! I love him, him my son now. He baby boy 🥺 him handsome!

Everyone meet Little Bit “Bitey” he’s this sick logo Moth drew for me and I’m obsessed. Thank you bestie, I love you so so much!

Dunno what facial hair he’s talking about BUT HE’S HOLDING A DINOSAUR!

That’s it. That’s the post.

30 days of autism acceptance; day 9

Did an interest ever turn into an "obsession" for you? If not, do you regularly experience hyperfocus when you engage in your special interest? If nothing applies, tell us about your longest interest, no matter if it's a special interest or not!

the full quarantine era of early COVID got me and my mom into casual watching of backyard birds because the house we moved into in 2018 came with a little beat-up bird feeder. when our shitty bird food ran out we found the place in town that sells good wild bird supplies and they gave us a little book of birds that are common in our area to look for at the feeder. it all went downhill from there LOL

3 years, 19 different bird feeders (with different foods to attract different birds), one Canon EOS 250D camera + 75-300mm lens, dozens of trips to local birding hotspots, one Audubon bird karaoke night, one Celestron spotting scope, and one elective Avian Conservation and Ornithology class later, I am a certifiable bird nerd. to be fair I had a pretty easy "gateway drug" to loving birds in the form of a strong special interest in dinosaurs since I was about 17. I had taken a ton of free courses about dinosaur anatomy and evolution and learning about birds I was like Damn. there are tiny dinosaurs and they're always in my yard, under the sky, over the sea... ancestral birds ruled the earth as dinosaurs, and today's birds are just extant dinosaurs :)

my longest special interest though is animatronics. I was super scared of them as a little kid, but when I got online at age 10 (in 2007ish) I started watching YouTube videos of animatronics, the making-of / behind the scenes for movie props, and learning how people control their mechanisms. something in me changed by viewing them in a safe environment now they've been extremely close to my heart for 16-ish years :)

I definitely struggle with hyperfocus and often lose time falling down the research rabbit hole about my special interests.

i met dippy the diplodocus today

some of the people on this site need to stop acting like the tier list of the jurassic films isnt in the exact order of creation like cmon-

dinosaurs were veryy silly

hia! i tried my best to make this easy for screen readers if i didnt, please tell me how i can fix it!

dinosaur are very silly! like imagine a 28 foot (8.5 meters i think?) dinosaur with a long neck just existing! my theory is that since they have/had different ways they like to hold their necks they could use them so see if anything that could hurt them was near and alert the herd! some who holds their neck lower to the ground could we if velociraptors were near, and ones who hold their necks higher could see if t-rex are near! agine this is just my theory i may be wrong! and being wrong about a theory is a okay!

imagine if we never had that scientific theory, alot of the things we know may have had the wrong theory before they tried to see if it worked!

i would like to add feel free to correct me if i'm wrong about anything, i haven't went on a info dump about dinosaurs in a bit so my info may be wrong!

dinosaur games make autism brain go brrr

Ngl walking with dinosaurs so many years later hits fucking different-