Small size seems to have come before a change in diet for a tiny dinosaur lineage.
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Tiny, long-armed dinosaur leads to rethink of dinosaur miniaturization
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So how tall were they in inches, mm, yards? The title emphasized their small size. Nice to hear about the weight, 700 grams, but how about physical dimensions? Smaller than a bread box, bunny, mouse, unladen swallow?
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I am the opposite of an expert, but this search for a single explanation for all instances of dinosaur miniaturization seems strange to me. Isn’t there room for multiple phenomena to play out across time, species and niches?
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From Figure 1 in the actual paper. The scale bar for the silhouette is 5cm (and only for the silhouette - the scale bars for other components of the figure differ from the silhouette and often from each other). Individual measurements of bones can be found in Supplemental Figs S2/S3 to the original paper.
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So about five scale bars tall, or as they say in French, haut comme trois pommes.
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Thanks! So roughly 25 cm tall at the hips and about 75 cm from stem to stern.
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Anybody who doubts there's a certain subset of theropods who never got the memo that they're supposed to be birds now and not ferocious pursuit predators clearly hasn't met geese. I had one chase my dog the other day hissing with its entire chest, and if the translation on that wasn't BITCH I'M A DINOSAUR I'll eat my crustiest hat.
Anyway, Alnashetri seems like a clever girl. Stories like this always make me wish for a spoof dinosaur movie Cretaceous-Tertiary Park where a major character gets nibbled to death by like a thousand chicken-size feathery Dino-birds making cute little pigeon noises. But it would have to be in the vein of Airplane or Blazing Saddles - played absolutely straight and serious, like it's a thriller. In one major sequence, a T-Rex (with magenta feathers, natch) chases everybody for 20 seconds, gets out of breath, and wanders off to scavenge on a dead thing, and then for the rest of the movie people keep reacting to it in terror while it just lumbers around slowly, placidly eating carrion. And then at the end of the movie, with no warning at all, a meteorite just annihilates Isla de los Pollos Grandes and kills everyone, including the hero and plucky small children about to board the helicopter. The mid-credits sequence is just Jake Tapper reporting on the bolide strike.
Yes, I have spent some time bullshitting about this with friends, why do you ask
Anyway, Alnashetri seems like a clever girl. Stories like this always make me wish for a spoof dinosaur movie Cretaceous-Tertiary Park where a major character gets nibbled to death by like a thousand chicken-size feathery Dino-birds making cute little pigeon noises. But it would have to be in the vein of Airplane or Blazing Saddles - played absolutely straight and serious, like it's a thriller. In one major sequence, a T-Rex (with magenta feathers, natch) chases everybody for 20 seconds, gets out of breath, and wanders off to scavenge on a dead thing, and then for the rest of the movie people keep reacting to it in terror while it just lumbers around slowly, placidly eating carrion. And then at the end of the movie, with no warning at all, a meteorite just annihilates Isla de los Pollos Grandes and kills everyone, including the hero and plucky small children about to board the helicopter. The mid-credits sequence is just Jake Tapper reporting on the bolide strike.
Yes, I have spent some time bullshitting about this with friends, why do you ask
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Three apples high, approximately the height of the small blue hominids they appear to have hunted to extinction. /s
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https://phys.org/news/2026-02-flatfooted-lumbering-rex-tiptoes.html
11 to 25 mph for full grown, 40 y.o. Trex. Faster for juveniles. Have you tried even 7-9mph on a treadmill? NFL players barely hit 20-22mph.
May I suggest hiding a lot, making lots of consumable children, and carrying spears? Spears of various forms are the traditional method for humans to kill large animals, before bows or gunpowder.
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Now this would be a good use case for AI. This isn't your day job. It's not crappy AI instead of something good, it's crappy AI instead of nothing. Each sentence could be one or more video scenes, each a separate AI session. It doesn't matter if the T-rex looks different each scene, or has an extra arm in one of them.
If you eventually have all those pieces, maybe some additional scenes to tie it together, you'll have a nice demo movie.
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Here’s my hypothesis:
If therapods evolved over time to take longer-term care of their offspring, then their offspring wouldn’t be competing in the niche for small prey. That would open up that niche for a species where the adults are small, where’s before maybe that muchniche was dominated by juveniles of larger species, where’s they weren’t being fed by their parents.
EDIT: typos as indicated (in fairness to me, those are all autocorrects, and autocorrecting “where” to “where’s” is especially annoying).
If therapods evolved over time to take longer-term care of their offspring, then their offspring wouldn’t be competing in the niche for small prey. That would open up that niche for a species where the adults are small, where
EDIT: typos as indicated (in fairness to me, those are all autocorrects, and autocorrecting “where” to “where’s” is especially annoying).
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Never underestimate a goose -- not even if it appears to be a little unwell:
Fight between bald eagle and Canada goose in Burlington bay.
Eagle gave up after after 20-minute fight.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/canada-goose-bald-eagle-burlington-bay-brawl-1.7473477
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That’s awesome. Yeah, Canada geese are annoying when they’re dominating the path through the park behind my apartment, but they’re a pretty impressive bird, if just thinking about them in their natural environs.
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I think this is a case of poor translation from paper to headline. There is no search for a single explanation. This is specifically about Alverezsaurid miniaturization.
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Sacred blue! What can I say? As the phrase goes, "Great mimes think alike."
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Yeah! You know, like mammals that eat ants!
See? Puny, even!
(CHAWMP! CRUNCH... CRUNCH... SQUELCH... GULP)
We're going to need another Timmy!
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After studying the resonant air channels within the fossil skulls, researchers have succeeded in reproducing the vocalization of the Alvarezsaurus as "MEEP BEEP!"
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I usually feel bad for Aardwolf because they are the lame relative of the most vicious african savannah gangsters, but right now I feel bad for them because you omit them.
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Just want to note that, due to reclassification, modern birds are dinosaurs. That's why the article calls alvarezsaurids "non-avian dinosaurs."
I had a bit of a funny moment with my friend at the Museum of Natural History: in their dinosaur exhibit they had a small family tree showing 5 lines of dinosaurs, with 4 of the 5 lines marked extinct. My friend asked, a little nervously, "why isn't that 5th line marked extinct?" Of course, that's the lineage that evolved into modern birds.
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My grandfather had geese. They are great watch dogs and when I was 6 they would chase me and hiss and scare the living daylights out of me. They loved my grandfather and grandmother though. I've also been chased by a pair of angry swans at a young age. Clearly dinosaurs.
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Imagine how much even scarier swans and geese would be if they had teeth and talons.
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Wile E Coyote, holding lit TNT arrow and wearing ACME rocket skates: clever girl
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That's why I called them "a certain subset of theropods"
Follow-on: my dog is a retriever. The ancestors sing to him in his blood to hug birds very gently with his mouth and bring them back to dad. He has never done so successfully because birds have this tendency to fly away; the whole hunting thing is completely unknown to him but the thought is what counts. After the gooseoraptor hissed at him, he ran back to me with an extremely concerned look on his face like "um dad I am very sorry I did not bring that birb back to you in my mouf, some birbs above my pay grade"
That is remarkable, possibly, but not exactly surprising.
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Trump quieted down a bit regarding the 51st state stuff shortly after that incident.
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...so about the size of a large mouse or a small rat.
(1" by 3" in Imperial)
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I'd advise trying to make friends with the T-Rex and picking parasites off of it.
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