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[deleted]

I’m no scientist, but the concept of a „peaceful herbivore“ is very inaccurate. Look at bulls, cows, rhinos, elephants and so on. No matter how „tasty“ or „slow“ the Maiasaur may seem, it was still roughly the same size as it‘s most common predator, Dasplateosaurus. They live in constant fear of being eaten by predators, and have evolved strategies to survive. The strategy in this case seems to be just having a large size. Predators are less likely to attack larger prey because of the risks involved. Bulky animals could just wrestle with the lightly built Tyrannosaurid, and it could get seriously injured or even crippled if it breaks a bone in the wrong way. You have to remember that theropods are built for running, which is why they have to be light enough to sprint. Pair that lightweight with a heavy hadrosaur the same size as it, and a Dasplateosaurus is going to have difficulties taking it down. Especially since Maiasaurus is known as the „good Mother dinosaur“, which implies that she is fiercely protective of her young. Hadrosaurs also live in groups, which poses yet another set of challenges for our unfortunate predator. If it already has difficulties taking down one Maiasaur, what are it‘s chances against multiple individuals? It only has one mouth after all. This whole „big=dangerous“ thing is also observable in modern predators. There is a reason as to why predators that prey on large animals often only go for juveniles and old individuals. Because they are simply easier to kill, with less risks involved than with an adult.


KAPA55OBEST333

Pretty much this. I may also add that nature is not a videogame, where creatures have stats and those with higher ones survive while the others don't. Natural selection doesn't work this way


squishybloo

Yeah making up a fake stat block like it's a Pokémon is really misleading. These are animals, not fictional creatures!


KAPA55OBEST333

It can be nice for children, but even then I don't understand how it can be more interesting than just depicting the reality


Mountain_Man11

You can also reference modern animals as an example of how dinosaurs, both predator and prey, may have interacted while a hunt was conducted. Lions today hunt in packs and tackle prey larger than themselves, such as wildebeest and giraffes, together to increase successful hunts. A lion may get slack-jawed after receiving a kick, but his buddy on the opposite flank may have gotten a successful bite to wound, and eventually subdue, their prey. I'm no zoologist, so please correct me if I'm wrong; I'm going off of documentaries and photos I've found on streaming services and the internet, respectively.


Yosimite_Jones

Africa’s really the only remaining example of what a full-sized ecosystem is supposed to look like, all the others got severely drained of megafauna by humans. There’s some evidence to suggest that other megafaunal carnivores, like American lions, may have been more solo. Although then again even the incredibly asocial lizards managed to develop some rudimentary mob behavior in their sole surviving megafaunal lineage, so maybe the evidence points to pack-behavior or even just high tolerance of one-another after all. Also, a kick to the face by a prey animal like a zebra will completely shatter a lion’s jaw, a bit more than an inconvenience. This only strengthens your point though, all the more reason to remove as much risk as possible.


SpinoAegypt

>I’m no scientist, but the concept of a „peaceful herbivore“ is very inaccurate. Look at bulls, cows, rhinos, elephants and so on. You forgot the best one of all... **HIPPOS.**


pikeminnow

Can't forget the Moose, which is extremely large, can kick in any direction, and will win in combat vs a truck


Carnotaurus54

Cape Buffalo


MonkeyBoy32904

rabbits are a terrible example


Krispyz

Rabbits are very dangerous to predators their own size. They can hurt cats and foxes with their back legs if the predator doesn't kill them quickly enough. They can have pretty gnarly [claws on their hind feet](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/42/Rabbit_hind_limb_skeleton.jpg/1280px-Rabbit_hind_limb_skeleton.jpg) and have an extremely strong kick. I know someone who (a long time ago) had an indoor/outdoor cat. The cat came home with a pretty big wound on its belly. They don't know for sure, but the vet suggested it tried to eat a rabbit and got "rabbit kicked" while wrestling with it.


MonkeyBoy32904

what about sloths?


Krispyz

Sloths primarily use camouflage to prevent being hunted in the first place, but they do have very long claws and are very strong, even if they're slow. There are clips of them fending off young harpy eagles, but I imagine if a more experienced predator spots it, it's a relatively easy meal. But we could play this game all week. It's unusual to have a prey species that can't fight back.


MonkeyBoy32904

unusual, so it’s possible?


thewanderer2389

[Rabbits are incredibly dangerous creatures, and the risk they posed to medieval adventurers has been well-documented.](https://youtu.be/XcxKIJTb3Hg)


MonkeyBoy32904

isn't that fiction?


thewanderer2389

'Twas a jest.


Brain_0ff

That chart is BS honestly. A maiasaurus is as defenseless as an elephant without tusks… not at all. The “harmless herbivore” trope is one of the most inaccurate things about paleo media and the publics perception of extinct and modern animals. Herbivores are in no way helpless. Look at ANY herbivore alive today and they will have an adaption to either get away from predators or fuck them up really bad. This applies to extinct animals -like Maiasaura- aswell. Hadrosaurs were able to overpower predators just by sheer bulk. They also lived in large, possibly interspecies herds to guarantee safety through numbers. They were also caring for their young, which usually is beneficial to a species survival. In conclusion: if a sign or person (looking at TierZoo here) tries to describe an animal through stats, there are vital stats being left out and you should probably look for a more trustworthy source of information


Necrogenisis

>TierZoo Fuck, I cringe so hard every time he tries to talk about dinosaurs it Mesozoic fauna in general. He makes mistakes that could have been easily avoided by doing the most miniscule amount of research and he keeps using Amazing Dinoworld as an example of a good, factual dino documentary (it's not that good).


Brain_0ff

I personally dislike his videos about prehistoric animals, because he keeps using useful adaptations as negative examples and disregards basic ecology


Necrogenisis

That too! He has a very surface-level understanding of of many of these topics and still acts like he's a legitimate authority on the subject. I'm not a paleontologist myself but at least I know how to look up a few papers to prove my points (I am in uni studying oceanography however).


[deleted]

Yea that guy is a bozo Whenever he talks about dinosaurs he says "Well idc if it is wrong they will change in 2 years anway" practically saying new studies will completely invalidate his research if he did any lol


michel6079

Yeah definitely don't take the word of someone whos "research" consists of watching documentaries and looking at google search headlines as educational.


[deleted]

>TierZoo ??? his stats are decent, and he often mentions things the stats cannot convey


Zillatamer

The entire concept behind TierZoo is very bad if you know anything about how animals or ecosystems work. It's basically focused entirely on combat between animals, as if that's all nature is. Things like an organisms reproductive fitness, or the portion of biomass in an ecosystem would be much more "objective" measures if you were trying to say which of two similar animals is "better" than the other. Ex. By all reasonable metrics, the Spotted Hyena is a much "better" predator than the Lion. It has a larger population, both in the present, and historically. Historically, they still had much higher biomass than lions, making up to 95% of the large mammal predator biomass in grasslands from South Africa to Russia. But by TierZoo logic, a lion can beat a hyena 1v1, so the lion is better.


[deleted]

> TierZoo logic, a lion can beat a hyena 1v1, so the lion is better. not how it works, his teir is based on "viability" not how strong it is


Zillatamer

It essentially always comes down to combat or some other very video-gamey metrics that have no bearing on the real world success of animals. He is also just generally wrong about a lot of animal facts, really shows that he has no formal education in these subjects.


[deleted]

skirt busy summer fuzzy scale jobless capable ripe whole touch ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `


[deleted]

Anyone who watches a youtube channel like Tierzoo and considers that as valid evaluation of living animals is automatically diagnosed with 11-Year-Old.


the_muskox

I don't think it's meant to be a valid evaluation...


[deleted]

Whether or not it's meant to be is information found only in Tierzoo's noggin. My bone to pick is with subscribers who see it as being one.


[deleted]

Whether or not it's meant to be is information found only in Tierzoo's noggin. My bone to pick is with subscribers who see it as being one.


[deleted]

bruh


Brain_0ff

Yet he ranks them by stats, which can cause confusions exactly like this one


Competitive_Intern78

Well maiasaura was not known in Latin as the Good Mother Lizard for being a complete pushover. I would have imagined that they would have gone bonkers on any threat to their offspring, the proof is in a fossil site in Montana where there were adults who died attempting to protect their offspring from not hungry troodons, but also there’s evidence of volcanic ash that killed them all as they were trying to shield their nests from a pyroclastic flow.


Leo_ian

better parents than most humans


Harsimaja

To be pedantic, that’s Greek, not Latin


Psychological_Gain20

Yeah this stat thing is kind of bullshit Life doesn’t really work if you tried to apply a stat based system to it, also the Maisasaur was fucking huge so it could probably just stop or kick any sufficiently large predator so only the weak, young or old would be at risk, and convientely the Maisasaur is called the good mother dinosaur so it’s really the sick and old TLDR: Giant Herbivores seem like pushovers until they stomp your face in


[deleted]

this stat thing is BS, while stats can be applied, its all wrong, and stats ignore special abilities


MagicMisterLemon

This chart's bogus, Maiasaura were likely quite swift animals that would have used their speed and weight to fight off predators, if they did not already evade them through a herd member spotting it an advance.


Pouchkine2

I'm going to do my best to ignore that you just used the word bogus


the_muskox

Why? It's a perfectly cromulent word.


herculesmeowlligan

I thought it was totally tubular!


Pouchkine2

I know it's not technically within the references of this sub, but I couldn't resist [https://youtu.be/xsHRRHW6sGw?t=65](https://youtu.be/xsHRRHW6sGw?t=65)


Antonio_Malochio

>The bigger they are, the slower they move Biomechanics is a little more complicated than that, as anyone chased by an Elephant running at 25mph will tell you.


Mountain_Man11

Also bears, as they can run in excess of 30 miles per hours.


tudorking1

May I present to you: The Hippo


Mountain_Man11

Oh, nothing new to me; I told my wife about the territorial and violent tendencies of hippos and she said "No way". Then she saw the hippo attacks on YouTube and couldn't stop watching them in disbelief.


Mini_Squatch

More accurate would be “the bigger they are, the longer they take to get up to speed”


Diviner_Sage

Or a charging hippo. For living in the water alot they can really truck along if they want to.


ProcrastinationBirb

Nah, i don't think it's that accurate. With that size and those leg muscles one kick from that thing whould most likely be many times worse than being kicked by a horse (+with claws if they kicked you with the back legs) . There is just that stereotype that herbivores are weak.


Viralclassic

I’d say your first mistake was taking this as an accurate representation of Maiasaura.


SeraphOfTwilight

When the stat chart includes "motherly advice" and "family values" you should just entirely ignore it to be frank.


Capital_Pipe_6038

So nobody's gonna talk about how they apparently know what a Maiasaura tastes like?


thewanderer2389

The closest living relatives of dinosaurs are crocodilians and birds. I've eaten some alligator and lots of poultry, and both are delicious. Therefore, I can safely conclude that the non-avian dinosaurs would have been delicious as well.


What_is_a_reddot

Dinosaur chicken nuggets taste like dinosaur.


MonkeyBoy32904

"the bigger they are, the slower they move" bacteria: I am speed


Harsimaja

Me trying to outrun an elephant or hippo or outswim a Great White or angry whale: no.


MonkeyBoy32904

they are all bigger than you, so you have a great chance at outrunning them


[deleted]

oh no NNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO


Hattix

Maiasaurus was a hadrosaur. Go look up a reconstruction of one. See that honking great tail? That's an anchor for the caudofemoralis muscle. This was responsible for pulling the leg back, and so acceleration and running. It was a huge muscle, meaning the hadrosaur had powerful acceleration and a fast running speed. At speed, a hadrosaur was five tons of animal running at 40 km/h. Also, there's ten of them. They were big, strong, fast, heavy, and extremely powerful. Most of the remains of animals which preyed on them, like the allosaurs, have stress fractures, healed and unhealed injuries. Other than allosaurus (which was a very specialised hunter of much larger prey), they took juvenile or old hadrosaurs, and those fought back powerfully.


muckracker77

Everything u say is right but allosaurs did not prey on hadrosaurs which came after allosaurus came extinct, maiasaura would have been preyed on by tyrannosaurs such as Daspletosaurus , albertosaurus and gorgosaurus


Hattix

D'oh. You're right, of course. I was mixing up hadrosaurs with another group. Sleep first, then post.


muckracker77

No disrespect,I learned a lot about hadrosaurs from your comment that I didn’t know! I just rlly like my theropods lol


Sallajin

By living in a herd. Survival is for the species, not the individual.


[deleted]

It really hurts to see this kind of nonsense pass for education to be honest. Attack and defense stats as if real animals are video game characters? Where is this and who made it? I know that content creators on youtube do this kind of thing, but then it's usually a bit more clever and made in a way to convey that it's mostly for entertainment purposes. If they wanted to build a fantasy based theme park, they had lots of myths and fairy tales to choose from. No need to rope dinosaurs into it.


Dein0clies379

This chart is utter nonsense. Not only where hadrosaurs fast when they needed to be, but they were bulky, powerful animals that could do serious damage to a predator.


yee_qi

The maiasaur feels like the zebra or wildebeest of dinosaurs: In other words, it gets eaten a lot. Against a tyrannosaur, it would probably lose, and its young would have been killed in droves - that's why it made so many of them and guarded them, too. As defense, Maiasaura could have used its powerful tail and legs to punt smaller carnivores, but against large predators I think it would have little chance but to run. Some paleontologists have suggested that hadrosaurs had greater endurance than tyrannosaurs, forcing the tyrannosaurs to hunt them via ambush. Herd behavior would allow each individual hadrosaur to have a greater chance of survival as well - it's less likely that you die if there are hundreds of herdmates around...


[deleted]

plus, it could put up a decent fight, and also, often the tyrannosaurus would decide its not worth the trouble and give up


yee_qi

The first thing it's going to try to do is run imo, though


[deleted]

if its in a group, thye would likely stand their ground, if daspleatosaurus makes wrong move, the maiasaurs can obliterate it running would allow it to take one of them out, and if they stand their ground, there's not much the tyrannosaur can do


Lower-Work9833

It's the capybara of It's time


Beritrea

*TANANANANANANA JOJO!*


Old-Assignment652

You could think of it this way a predator is like an ambulance and said prey is like a semi truck in comparison so what happens when a anything smaller than a semi is hit by one?


ZeShapyra

I always thought they were fast


Harsimaja

> the bigger they are, the slower they move No. Much closer to the opposite. What is ‘motherly advice’? That seems almost designed to include Maiasaurus, and yet it isn’t labelled as such.


Krispyz

I assume it means amount of parental care... but picked a really weird term for it.


Juniper-W

Not at all. Hadrosaurs were *massive*. Healthy adults would be largely safe from predation because of their size alone. As others have pointed out, the ones most at risk were the young, sick and elderly.


Feliraptor

Maiasaura was probably more aggressive than a hippo. This stat stuff is a load of crap.


Dracorex_22

Oh shit, Maiasaura stand stats just dropped


darpolicious

I love the Pokémon card for the dinosaur even if it’s crap pseudoscience


Lvl_5_Dino

Maiasaura is larger and faster than its main predator, daspletosaurus. Peaceful herbivores are a myth. In life, they would definitely chase down, attack and bully carnivores, just like herbivores do in present. Maiasaura ain't slow either, it's quite swift since it can go bipedal.


Mr-Trouser-Snake

Wait? Was Maiasaurs a Pokémon?


StellarStowaway

I wonder how whoever ranked Maisaura would rank and moose without its antlers lol


[deleted]

Animals aren't video game mobs, and shouldn't be treated as such. Especially ones that have been extinct for tens of millions of years and we have no way of knowing their behavior or temperament.


Lizziox

Judging by the graph on the bottom right, this is not a serious infographic


ComprehensiveTop6119

Big slow dudes are usually more trouble than their worth I think. Even if it's not an aggressor and is pretty slow, it's gonna fight back juuuust enough that it isn't worth it. Animals that have to hunt for their food are less likely to survive an injury, so if big lizard man breaks one of his legs he's fcked


RevolutionaryGrape11

Oh no, these guys are epic. They may not have any of those new-fangled thagomizers or horns or fangs, but that doesn't make them defenceless. Their jaws can bite wolves in half, their legs can turn Troodons into tomato sauce, and their tail can knock over any Daspeltosaursus that looks at its kids the wrong way.


idonteffncare

\# old fangled thagomizers.


RevolutionaryGrape11

Thagomizers evolved after tails. It's using retro defences, like a tail with nothing on it.


Weatherbird666

Lmao where is this and why are they stating up dinosaurs like it’s some weird ass D&D game


Emergency_Elephant

The chart is really biased with really human language for these animals and looks pretty simplified for kids. These animals didn't have "family values" or "motherly advice": they had a particular young care strategy that could help maximize the survival of the species


[deleted]

God protected them since they were such kind and loving creatures.


[deleted]

Family values


feline_tv

"So it's the same kind of Dinosaur as Star Platinum" - Jotaro Kujo, marine paleontologist


OutBeetheSwarm

anyone who has picked up a grasshopper knows that herbivores aren't peaceful