>>14047077Even in your criticism of my assessment you conceded wholesale to the osteological claims I made which you know to be correct. The air pockets in large dinosaurs are also verifiable by basic analysis of fossilized remains. It's a feature they have in common with birds, who have various air pockets which make them incredibly light for their size. Certain dinosaurs and pterosaurs went to extreme lengths to save on their weight by having incredibly light bones and huge air pockets. Certain large azhdarchids even had hollow bones with layers as thin as playing cards, which is how animals like Quetzalcoatlus the size of a giraffe weighed only 250 kilograms and were able to launch themselves into flight. We know this because the material is right there, in the ground, where we can look at it and see it and analyze it.
However, mistrusting pop science is a virtue and to always be questioning the "news" these talking heads are peddling you is a scientific position to take. Just because there's retards in pink hair who are glorified journalists posing as scientists telling you tyrannosaurs were nonbinary or whatever doesn't mean that their claims are scientific.
What is scientific is the easily verifiable and observable aspects of their anatomy. The hollowness of their bones and the presence of air pockets are not conjecture. They are observable. Stem dinosaurs happened to have a set of unique mutations that allowed them to attain huge sized. It's part of Cope's biological rule that animal population lineages tend to increase in body size over evolutionary time. Most land animals can never be that large, and might never be this large again, because they lack the unique set of traits. This makes it hard to believe in the current climate where even moderately sized animals like elephants weigh many tons and the image of a 20 meter tall animal simply defies belief. But it can happen, and the proof is there.
