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Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs

|< < Prev #3204 (February 6, 2026)

Title text: Staplers are actually in Pseudosuchia, making them more closely related to crocodiles than to dinosaurs.

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Explanation

This is incomplete: This page was created by a webserver that is often described as being a dinosaur; however, it is definitely not. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

This comic explores the seeming paradox that certain extinct prehistoric species which are popularly thought of as being "dinosaurs" are, from a strict taxonomic viewpoint, not. It also takes into account the fact that all bird species are descended from dinosaurs and thus - again, from a strict taxonomic viewpoint - are themselves dinosaurs as well (see 1211: Birds and Dinosaurs). To illustrate this, Randall provides silhouettes of dinosaurs, of entities that are widely thought of as dinosaurs but are not, of entities that are not widely thought of as dinosaurs but are (i.e., birds), and, lastly, of entities that are neither dinosaurs nor thought of as dinosaurs (which is funny because it's so all-encompassing as to be practically meaningless, just like it would be if you replaced the word "dinosaurs" by any other plural noun, or adjective).

In reading order from upper left in each quadrant of the image:

• Silhouettes in "seem like dinosaurs / are dinosaurs": Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, Diplodocus and Velociraptor
• Silhouettes in "seem like dinosaurs / are not dinosaurs": Mosasaur, Quetzalcoatlus, Pteranodon, Plesiosaur and Dimetrodon
• Silhouettes in "don't seem like dinosaurs / are dinosaurs": Penguin, Heron, Ostrich, Pigeon and may be a Falcon or Petrel
• Silhouettes in "don't seem like dinosaurs / are not dinosaurs": Squirrel, Stapler, Pineapple, Human (here depicted as Cueball) and Bicycle

The title text is a further joke about taxonomy, seemingly predicated on the assumption that staplers are biological organisms (which they are not),^{[citation needed]} and can thus be sorted into taxa. Pseudosuchia is in fact the clade that encompasses all crocodilians, and staplers bear a certain resemblance to the open mouth of a crocodilian. Also, "suchia" sounds a little like "sutures," and in some sense staples are pseudo sutures.

The original Linnaean taxonomy did at first have a top-level classification for "mineral" taxonomy, in addition to those for animal and plant, which in its broadest sense might allow one to assign a stapler a taxonomic relationship with dinosaurs.

Creatures that seem like dinosaurs and are dinosaurs

• Stegosaurus
• Triceratops
• Tyrannosaurus Rex, whose name literally translates to Tyrant-Lizard King, was a Late Cretaceous dinosaur, living during the Maastrichtian Age at the very end of the period. It was a contemporary of Triceratops and Mosasaurs, also listed in this comic. T-Rex is arguably one of the most well-known dinosaurs, due to the recovery of intact skeletons, as well as successful marketing and pop-culture influences, such as Jurassic Park, a movie of which Randall is a known fan.
• Diplodocus
• Velociraptor

Creatures that seem like dinosaurs, but are not

Dinosaur is a paleontology term which refers to a specific group of reptiles, based upon evolutionary lines, bone structure and living domain. However, it is also a popular science/cultural term which refers to extinct large reptiles, hence the confusion between what is scientifically included and what is culturally assumed to be included. While dinosaurs and pterosaurs had a common ancestor, the archosaur, they diverged around 250 MYA, and are distinct enough to be entirely separate lineages.

The creatures listed are:

• A mosasaur is an extinct aquatic reptile, looking similar to a dolphin, that existed at the same time as the dinosaurs. Although mossaurs appeared in Jurassic World, they had a different ancestor than dinosaurs.
• Plesiosaurs.
• Pteranodons are flying reptiles.
• Dimetrodon (lived well before the Mesozoic, and more closely related to mammals than to dinosaurs).
• Quetzalcoatlus was a genus of flying pterosaurs, related to pteranodons, that lived in the Maastrichtian Age alongside Mosasaurs, T-Rex, and many others. They were some of the largest flying animals in history, with wingspans up to 36 feet (11m). They were not, however, dinosaurs, as they had pterosaur ancestry.

Creatures that don't seem like dinosaurs, but are

As Randall loves to remind people, birds are more closely related to dinosaurs such as T-rex (temporally, anatomically, and phylogenetically) than T-rex is related to some other dinosaurs such as stegosaurus, and therefore, birds are dinosaurs in their own right.

• Penguin
• Heron
• Ostrich
• Pigeon
• Falcon or Petrel (both of them qualify)

Creatures that don't seem like dinosaurs, and are not

• Squirrel: mammal
• Stapler: not a living thing
• Pineapple: plant
• Human: mammal
• Bicycle: not a living thing

Transcript

[A 2x2 chart where each of the four quadrants contains five silhouettes. These depict various animals, a few objects, and a human. Above each column and to the left of each row there are a label:]

[Left column:] Are dinosaurs

[Right column:] Are not dinosaurs

[Upper row:] Seem like dinosaurs

[Lower row:] Don't seem like dinosaurs

[Here follows a list of what are in each of the four quadrants:]

[Top left (seem like dinosaurs, are dinosaurs):]

[Stegosaurus, triceratops, tyrannosaurus, diplodocus, and velociraptor.]

[Top right (seem like dinosaurs, are not dinosaurs):]

[Mosasaur, quetzalcoatlus, dimetrodon, plesiosaur, and pteranodon.]

[Bottom left (don't seem like dinosaurs, are dinosaurs):]

[Penguin, egret, falcon, pigeon, and ostrich.]

[Bottom right (don't seem like dinosaurs, are not dinosaurs):]

[Squirrel, stapler, bicycle, human (here depicted as Cueball), and pineapple.]

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Discussion

Maybe it's more of statistics than exhibitions. --While False (speak|museum) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

pixels-assembly-3.png

how is it 0 bytes?? i see that it is shown as 0 bytes on the wiki, but the file itself, when downloaded is 5kb! how???108.162.221.209 16:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

If the question is how it can be written like that here, the answer is that I used the numbers of the wiki. —While False (speak|museum) 19:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

There's always the possibility that this is actually the Null image under the .png file format. Every other .png is defined by the delta required to display the desired graphic when starting from the baseline of this 'ur'-image, but if you ever wanted to display that graphic the undocumented format specifications allow you to omit all unnecessary bytes (including the magic header bytes) and it will happily produce its hardcoded "it's a PNG!" preprocessing template, which happens to be this image. Obviously, the PNG spec (and, ultimately, the original ancestor of the detailed source code tree for every subsequent implementation) was written before Randall ever got anywhere near to drawing this image so the chances are slim that he just happened to luck upon the exact image that happens to have a 100% compression rate because it just happened to consist of something Randall wanted to draw, and in the manner of Randall's artistry. But it's a non-zero likelihood that an arbitrary artist might draw exactly the same image as a purely arbitrary "index null" page's collection of pixels and so... This might not be the Best Of All Worlds, but there has to be some highly fortunate occurance to balance out all the unfortunate ones, statistically, and this is ours!

(Or maybe there's a minor bug/data-error in the way the wiki database serves the front-end webserver, but I can't ask you to believe something as trivially random as that!)) 172.70.90.245 15:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
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