Talk:2362: Volcano Dinosaur

The nearest living relative of any 125 million-year-old dinosaur is all living birds. They are all descended from the same "stem bird," which was a dinosaur of a different group. Nitpicking (talk) 02:08, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

But some living birds will be fewer generations removed from that dinosaur than others Jeremyp (talk) 08:57, 22 September 2020 (UTC).

True, but is a 100,000,000th cousin that different from a 100,000,001th cousin? Nitpicking (talk) 11:25, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

One might wade in caustic lakes, except when it flies to its feeding grounds, the other breeds in icy wastes and be flightless but a superb swimmer in freezing oceans. And if there's a large intestate estate needing to be inherited then be prepared for legal challenges! 162.158.155.198 11:47, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

Just in case, if you have a parrot you should ask it if its family has any stories of a great-to-the-millionth uncle who went missing around the time of an eruption. Barmar (talk) 13:37, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

But how close are parrots to dinosaurs? They might be the poor dino's 100,000,002nd cousin. Donthaveusername (talk)

That would depend on the value of the estate. BunsenH (talk) 17:32, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

After 65 million years of inflation and compounding, it must be worth quite a bit. Barmar (talk) 17:40, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

Compounding would indeed increase the value, but wouldn't inflation decrease the value? The value after 125 million years should depend on which factor is outpacing the other, on average. Also, bird species with short generations would be more distantly related than bird species with long generations. 162.158.107.89 23:49, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

That would depend upon many things, like how it turns out if progeniture is the basis of branch-prioritisation (male/female-preference giving different results to the absolute version) and sallic (including semi-sallic and quasi-sallic) rules which could see an entitlement even dive back up out of the avian branch and down into any other sprawl of the tree-of-life... 141.101.99.153 01:27, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

This specimen is described as "basal ornithopod dinosaur" which means it is close to root of the species and is also described as adapted for burrowing which would make it a very unlikely to fly. So it seems to me that there is very low possibility that there are any DIRECT descendants. So to find the "closest living relative" would require going back up many prior generations to find an ancestor of modern birds. Unless birds are descended from burrowing dinosaurs who escaped getting wiped out with all the other dinosaurs.

I'm only who feeling that [CITATION NEEDED] joke is overused by now? In every second comic there is [CITATION NEEDED] at least once. We have around 450 pages with that, https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/285:_Wikipedian_Protester 162.158.183.205 09:15, 23 September 2020 (UTC) LauLain

There are 358 links to that page from actual comics (excluding redirect, talk pages, etc.). Since we have 2,362 comics, that's around 15% of the explanations. Quite high, but I guess not really overused, especially since it's not annoying. Justhalf (talk) 09:33, 23 September 2020 (UTC)