this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
119 points (98.4% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35762 readers
609 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

What evolutional benefit is that?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Someone will likely chime in with a more complete answer but the short answer is large therapods had big heads because they needed big strong heads for killing big strong prey.

If a stronger bite results in more successful kills, that creates a selective pressure towards the individuals with stronger bites. Weak bite dinosaurs die. Strong bite dinosaurs live.

To get a stronger bite, you need a lot of features. (Ex. more muscles, different structural elements) and this generally leads to heads getting bigger because big heads have more places for muscles and will then bite harder. Plus, bigger heads can bite bigger things (like, bigger necks).

The opposite is true for the tiny arms. The arms are not tiny because it's beneficial for them to be that small. They're tiny because there's no reason for them to be big.

If you have two individuals. They both have big powerful legs, and big powerful heads but one also has thick ole arms. If those arms don't provide any advantage to the individual, then they just cost energy, and put that individual at a disadvantage because they spent energy on arms while the other guy did just as well without them.

There is a much better, much more science-y answer to this too but I hope this helps in a more basic sense.

And I bet there are some cool YouTube videos and such on this exact thing if you want to do further research.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The opposite is true for the tiny arms. The arms are not tiny because it's beneficial for them to be that small. They're tiny because there's no reason for them to be big.

It is theorised that it might actually have been an advantage to have smaller arms, so there may have been some selective pressure:

"What if several adult tyrannosaurs converged on a carcass? You have a bunch of massive skulls, with incredibly powerful jaws and teeth, ripping and chomping down flesh and bone right next to you. What if your friend there thinks you're getting a little too close? They might warn you away by severing your arm"

https://phys.org/news/2022-04-rex-short-arms-lowered-frenzies.html

In case of larger species with a tremendous bite force getting bitten in the arm would probably result in very bad, and likely very short, times.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

interestingly, the opposite happened in south america, where megaraptors evolved long arms with more flexible hands for hunting prey