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Sauropods

|< < Prev #3185 (December 24, 2025)

Title text: Vertebrae Georg

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Explanation

This is incomplete: This page was created by an explainxkcd user who created 3184 pages. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

This comic attempts to correct people on the skeletal structure of sauropod dinosaurs, claiming that most individuals actually had short necks and tails, and the "queen" of the colony had an enormous number of vertebrae, possibly resembling a snake with legs. The idea is that paleontologists misconstructed the skeletons, averaging the vertebrae out between all specimens, and not giving most of them to the queen.

In reality, most of the animal species that have colonies with queens are insects, particularly termites, ants, bees, and wasps; with naked mole-rats as a notable exception. No sauropods or other reptiles are known to do so. Also, while queens are often larger specimens than their workers or drones, they always share the same general anatomy. The comic suggests however that regular sauropods have a vastly different anatomy than their supposed queens.

The title-text references Spiders Georg, an internet meme character who eats over 10,000 spiders a day, skewing the average, creating the factoid that "the average person swallows 3 spiders a year."

Transcript

This is one of 33 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[Top panel: A sauropod with a normal long neck and tail, crossed out with a large red X.]

[Bottom panel: Two sauropods with very short necks and tails, with a green check mark drawn in between and an eel-like supposed "sauropod queen" situated above them, who is predominantly composed of sauropod necks winding off both sides of the panel, with a single head and tip of the tail visible. The sauropod queen and the sauropod on the left look at each other.]

[Caption below the comic:]

Thanks to modern paleontological reconstructions, we now know that most sauropods had short necks, and all those extra vertebrae belonged to the sauropod colony's queen.

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Discussion

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This is a test. PoolloverNathan^{[stalk the blue seas]} 20:48, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

This is not. —While False (museum | talk | contributions | logs | rights | printable version | page information | what links there | related changes | Google search | current time: 21:36) 18:38, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

A foreign student asked me to help fight against his math teacher. That was unusual. He was in that class for just a couple of weeks. The teacher's phone number was sent to me. The student asked me to spam-call the teacher. 172.71.155.55 22:58, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

here i'm just messing around in html, ignore this

^furhhfghure _{guyrburgryhuyvfr} "rvhru"

interesting way of writing quotations xd

hmmm this one of putting "<p>" in a line break will come in handy for when i want it to start at the same place than the first line

Please beware that <p> on mediawiki also disables automatic paragraph breaks, so you need a closing </p> or you'll break automatic paragraph formatting for the rest of the page. Zmatt (talk) 22:06, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

edit: da hek did that "</div>" come from An user who has no account yet (talk) 14:14, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

hi uh its hard to get here. is this a reference to undocumented feature??? hmm... this is interesting.
108.162.241.216 02:05, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

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yum yum [citation needed]

Hiuiedeixgeyceiyedhcdiedcve {{trout}}

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