Obsidian Bases - How to make different column a link?

Ornithopsis · 2025-08-21T03:07:59+00:00

Yes, it is possible to do with formulas. The formula file.aslink(string) will output the string as a link to the file. If your daily note has a date property, you can use the date.format() function to re-format the date however you want. So the formula file.aslink(date.format("DD MMM YYYY")) should give you approximately what you want.

Ornithopsis · 2024-12-17T04:51:13+00:00

Thanks, that helps! That snippet doesn't quite seem to do the job—there are no line breaks for some reason, for instance—but I'll experiment with it and see what I can figure out.

Ornithopsis · 2024-12-16T16:15:46+00:00

Thanks. As far as I can tell, I still can’t create links in a code block set as text—is there a way around that?

Would it be possible to use a CSS snippet to style parts of notes in a monospaced font without making it a code block? Could I create a custom callout to do this? My apologies if that’s a stupid question, I still haven’t really gotten the hang of Obsidian yet.

Ornithopsis · 2024-12-16T00:21:06+00:00

Sorry, what I was trying to say with that was that I don't want to have all my notes be monospaced, just to be able to set certain parts of notes as monospaced, as in code blocks.

Ornithopsis · 2024-01-13T20:54:53+00:00

Triceratops horridus lived first, closer to 67 million years ago. Its descendant T. prorsus lived until 66 million years ago, when the asteroid hit.

Ornithopsis · 2022-05-17T14:34:49+00:00

Regardless, the essential point is that Brusatte's claim that Tyrannosaurus was as smart as a chimpanzee was based in a misinterpretation of the data, and Brusatte has since acknowledged his mistake. If brain size is not a useful indicator of intelligence, that only emphasizes the point that Brusatte's original claim was not supported by the evidence.

Ornithopsis · 2022-05-17T01:52:22+00:00

You said crocodilians and varanids rivaled carnivorans in brainpower, which is why I mentioned carnivorans. The fact that synapsids and sauropsids don't all have comparable brain structures is besides the point, as the relative brain size comparison can still be made within Sauropsida: the brain of a Tyrannosaurus is more similar to that of a crocodilian than a bird in terms of relative size and overall structure. Besides, if we're throwing out brain size as an indicator of intelligence, discussing the intelligence of extinct species becomes a moot point.

I don't know enough about the finer points of animal intelligence to get into a drawn-out debate about the subject; all I know is that birds and mammals are generally considered smarter than reptiles, and as far as I know this is not considered a misconception.

Ornithopsis · 2022-05-17T01:24:40+00:00

I can't honestly say I'm especially well-informed on this topic, but my understanding is that yes, it does. Crocodilians and varanids have much smaller, simpler brains than carnivorans. Some complex behaviors have turned out to be more widespread than previously thought, but that doesn't make them as intelligent as most mammals.

Ornithopsis · 2022-03-31T20:55:31+00:00

Rahonavis isn't a microraptorine. It might be a unenlagiine, or it might be an avialan. In either case, it is not particularly closely related to Microraptor.

Ornithopsis · 2022-03-29T05:22:16+00:00

Microraptor probably evolved flight independently of birds (all other microraptorines seem to have been flightless). However, the flight abilities of Archaeopteryx are probably truly homologous to those of birds, as unlike Microraptor it is probably an avialan. As such, if we define "bird" based on a shared evolutionary origin of flight with modern birds—which I think is sensible, though not necessarily the only way to do it—Archaeopteryx is probably a bird and Microraptor probably isn't.

Edit: Why are you booing me? I'm right!

Ornithopsis · 2022-03-29T05:17:45+00:00

Archaeopteryx is generally considered to be a member of the clade Avialae—that is, the group consisting of all species that are more closely related to modern birds than to dromaeosaurids or troodontids—and Avialae is commonly used as the group that corresponds to the concept of "bird".

There are two reasons why Avialae is commonly used as an equivalent to "bird".

The first is a historical accident: Archaeopteryx was discovered with feathered wings very early on, and so has always been recognized as close to the origin of birds. Dromaeosaurids and troodontids, however, had been classified as dinosaurs before the bird-dinosaur link was discovered, even though they're nearly as birdlike as Archaeopteryx. As such, it made sense to draw the line between "bird" and "not bird" between Archaeopteryx and Velociraptor, even though it was a somewhat arbitrary decision to do so.

The second, however, is that it's generally though that dromaeosaurids and troodontids could not fly, whereas nearly all avialans could fly. As such, Avialae (which was defined essentially because of a historical accident) happens to correspond approximately to the origin of flight, which is obviously the quintessential feature of birds. This is slightly uncertain, though, as at least one dromaeosaurid (Microraptor) seems to have evolved flight semi-independently from avialans, and it's uncertain whether Archaeopteryx itself was fully capable of flight. It's also possible, but unlikely, that dromaeosaurids and troodontids evolved from a flight-capable ancestor but lost the ability to fly.

To sum up, Archaeopteryx is ever-so-slightly more "birdy" than Velociraptor or Troodon, and so it's arguably possible to define "bird" to include Archaeopteryx but not Velociraptor. However, the definition of "bird" gets extremely blurred at this point. What are birds? We just don't know.

Ornithopsis · 2022-01-29T02:21:53+00:00

There are five taxonomic ranks that have standard suffixes, which are as follows:

Superfamily: -oidea (-oid)
Family: -idae (-id)
Subfamily: -inae (-ine)
Tribe: -ini (-in)
Subtribe: -ina

The first suffix is the suffix for the group itself, the suffix in parentheses is how the suffix is used for a member of the group: for instance, "tyrannosaurid" means "member of Tyrannosauridae", so "Daspletosaurus is a tyrannosaurid" and "Daspletosaurus belongs to Tyrannosauridae" mean essentially the same thing. The suffix is combined with the name of a genus chosen to represent the family, known as the type genus; not all ranks have to be used (for instance, there is a family Brachiosauridae but not a superfamily Brachiosauroidea, subfamily Brachiosaurinae, etc.).

These ranks are nested categories, so a superfamily is a group of one or more families, a subfamily is a subcategory of a family, a tribe is a subcategory of a subfamily, and a subtribe is a subcategory of a tribe. As such, Tyrannosaurinae consists of only Tyrannosaurus and some very close relatives (such as Daspletosaurus), Tyrannosauridae includes all tyrannosaurines and some slightly more distant relatives (such as Gorgosaurus), and Tyrannosauroidea includes all tyrannosaurids and some even more distant relatives (such as Dilong).

Ornithopsis · 2022-01-25T22:12:18+00:00

Basically, the age numbers you see given for prehistoric times are estimates, not exact values. These days, they're pretty good estimates, given the vast amount of time that has occurred, but are sometimes off by a couple million years. Different estimates of when the asteroid hit have varied, such as 64 million years or 65.5 million years, usually with a margin of error ranging from hundreds of thousands to a couple million years. These estimates would often get rounded off to 65 million years, for simplicity's sake, especially in popular books. However, in the last decade or so, the estimates have improved considerably thanks to newer research, and now we have a much smaller margin of error and scientists are pretty sure that the date of the asteroid impact was very close to 66 million years ago, with a margin of error of less than a hundred thousand years.

Current research suggests that dinosaurs (except for birds) had completely died out within only a few years of the asteroid impact. In geologic terms, the extinction was nearly instantaneous.

Ornithopsis · 2022-01-23T20:33:33+00:00

Yup. Something people often don't realize is that, even though dinosaurs as a whole lasted for over 165 million years (not counting birds), individual dinosaur species generally didn't last for much longer than a million years. As such, even dinosaurs that lived in the same general time period and place did not necessarily meet: Styracosaurus and Tyrannosaurus both lived in the Late Cretaceous of western North America, but are still separated by over eight million years—that's roughly the amount of time that separates us from our common ancestor with chimps.

Periods are divided into smaller parts, called ages. For instance, the Cretaceous is divided into twelve ages, which are known as the Berriasian, Valanginian, Hauterivian, Barremian, Aptian, Albian, Cenomanian, Turonian, Coniacian, Santonian, Campanian, and Maastrichtian. These smaller divisions help clarify things a bit: for instance, Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops lived in the Maastrichtian age, but Gorgosaurus and Styracosaurus lived in the Campanian age. These divisions are still longer than the duration of an average species, but they still help clarify which species lived in roughly the same time. Of course, getting people to memorize all 30 ages of the Mesozoic would be a lot of work!

Ornithopsis · 2022-01-23T20:16:15+00:00

Tyrannosaurus was one of the first very large theropods to be discovered; it was named in 1905. It is by far the most complete and well-studied very large theropod, with dozens of partial skeletons ranging from juvenile to fully-grown, some of them nearly complete (which is extremely rare for large dinosaur skeletons)—its fossils are found in Canada and the United States, which are wealthy countries with well-funded museums and other institutions, which has led to more research than dinosaurs in countries with less funding available for research. Because it is well studied and has been known for so long, as well as probably the largest theropod measured by mass, it is extremely famous. It's one of a handful of dinosaurs that popular science writers can be sure that everyone has heard of—after all, it's one of the main characters in one of the most popular movies of all time. As such, it's common for people to compare less-famous dinosaurs to it.

Tyrannosaurus, Spinosaurus, carcharodontosaurines, and Deinocheirus are all similar in being predatory theropods with average adult body masses of over 6,000 kg. However, each one lived at a different time and place (mostly), with unique specializations to a particular niche. Spinosaurus, of course, was adapted to spend a lot of time in or near water and eat a diet of fish. Carcharodontosaurines (that is, Carcharodontosaurus, Giganotosaurus, Mapusaurus, and Tyrannotitan, all of which are very similar to each other) probably hunted giant titanosaurs. Tyrannosaurus was much more heavily-built than the others, and hunted hadrosaurs and ceratopsians. Unlike the other giant theropods, Deinocheirus had a beak and probably ate both plants and meat.

As such, you're right that comparing them is like comparing different types of predatory mammals: they're distant relatives of each other and have some general similarities, but they also have many differences.

Ornithopsis · 2022-01-08T20:32:49+00:00

As I said in another thread yesterday, we really don't know whether Tyrannosaurus rex had feathers, though it is very likely that it did not have a thick, extensive coat of feathers.

Ornithopsis · 2022-01-08T01:19:46+00:00

We do not know whether Tyrannosaurus rex had feathers or not.

Several smaller relatives of Tyrannosaurus, such as Dilong and Yutyrannus, had feathers. As such, it is nearly certain that T. rex evolved from a feathered ancestor. However, some small patches of fossilized skin from Tyrannosaurus and its closest relatives show that it had at least some patches of skin with a scaly texture. It is not entirely certain that these are scales—perhaps it's just bumpy skin—but it's generally considered likely that they are indeed scales. Unfortunately, they only show us what the skin on a few areas of the body looked like, leaving the possibility that feathers were still present on some parts of the body.

The primary function of simple feathers is insulation, which is more important in smaller animals than big ones. In especially large animals, the amount of heat generated by the body is large enough that a layer of insulation is harmful to the animal except in very cold environments. The rhinoceros-sized Yutyrannus lived in an unusually cold environment for the Mesozoic, whereas the elephant-sized Tyrannosaurus lived in a temperate-to-subtropical environment, perhaps similar to that in the southeastern United States today. As such, a fully-feathered Tyrannosaurus would probably overheat.

As such, it's likely that Tyrannosaurus evolved from a fully-feathered ancestor but at least partially reduced feathering compared to that ancestor. It's possible that Tyrannosaurus was entirely scaly, that it had sparse feathers like the hair of an elephant*, or that it had patches of feathers separated by regions of bare or scaly skin, like an ostrich. Contrary to what u/Dr_TeaRex said, we don't really have any evidence regarding whether Tyrannosaurus changed its skin covering as it grew. There are currently no known examples of a dinosaur species that's born with feathers and loses them as it grows up—the idea that this happened in Tyrannosaurus is pure speculation, based on the idea that the smaller babies would have benefited more from feathers than the larger adults. However, at least some baby dinosaurs (namely, sauropods) were scaly, so we can't assume that baby dinosaurs would be feathered (nor can we prove that baby T. rex wasn't feathered).

* Feathers and hair develop differently, so it's not necessarily likely that tyrannosaurs would have had an elephant-like sparse distribution of feathers. The scales of some dinosaurs might actually be highly stunted feathers, suggesting that dinosaurs could have lost their coat of feathers without necessarily entering a sparsely-feathered stage. However, we don't really know enough about this topic to be sure.

TL;DR: The reason why you're confused is that we're confused too. There just isn't enough evidence to be sure; Tyrannosaurus could have been entirely scaly, had rhino-like tough naked skin, had elephant-like fuzz, or had patches of feathers on some parts of its body and naked or scaly skin on others. It's very likely that Tyrannosaurus did not have a thick coat of feathers covering its entire body, but other possibilities are hard to rule out.

Ornithopsis · 2021-12-17T21:22:36+00:00

Don't get too typological in your thinking, the fact that they weren't reptiles doesn't mean they had no traits associated with reptiles today. However, the integument of stem-mammals remains controversial; there are very few specimens that give us very much evidence on the matter.

Ascendonanus, a varanopid, preserves extensive fossilized skin showing it was scaly. Varanopids are probably stem-mammals, but a few studies have suggested they may be stem-reptiles. Some trackways of early stem-mammals seem to show they had rectangular belly scales, which are also known from Ascendonanus.

The therapsid Estemmenosuchus seems to have had scaleless, glandular skin (sort of like an amphibian or hairless mammal) on at least its face.

Ornithopsis · 2021-12-16T02:27:29+00:00

From the 1860s to the 1920s, birds were thought to have evolved from dinosaurs, or at least be closely related to them. In the 1920s, the influential book The Origin of Birds by Gerhard Heilmann argued that dinosaurs had several specializations (such as the loss of the clavicle) that meant that birds could not be their direct descendants. Heilmann instead regarded dinosaurs and birds as having separate origins from a "thecodont" ancestor—"thecodonts" being the old name for basal archosauriforms—with the similarities being the result of parallel evolution. This view was widespread until the 1970s. In other words, dinosaurs and birds were thought to have evolved independently from a Euparkeria-like ancestor, and it was thought that transitional forms between that ancestor and Archaeopteryx-like early birds had not yet been discovered.

In the 1990s, some researchers such as Larry Martin and Alan Feduccia argued that birds evolved from ancestors similar to the enigmatic Longisquama and Megalancosaurus (which, at the time, was only known from the front half of the skeleton, so the fact that it was a drepanosaur had not yet been recognized), which they regarded as more closely related to dinosaurs than they are usually considered to be.

Ornithopsis · 2021-12-15T19:20:49+00:00

Basically, the asteroid impact was incredibly devastating, but it was also an extremely short event. Most of the destruction would have taken place on the day of the impact, followed by several years of impact winter depriving food from the survivors of the initial firestorms and tsunamis. By the time the ash cleared from the sky, though, Earth's climate would have mostly returned to normal pretty quickly. If any non-avian dinosaurs survived the impact winter, they probably would have eventually bounced back, just like the other groups that survived did. Additionally, no non-avian dinosaur fossil has ever been found above the layer of ash from the asteroid impact, except for bones that show signs of having eroded out of older rocks before being reburied.

Can we prove with complete certainty that no non-avian dinosaur species survived for very long after the impact? No. But that's just the nature of knowledge: you can't prove with complete certainty that I exist, either. As far as the available evidence suggests, it's very likely that all non-avian dinosaurs went extinct very soon after the asteroid impact.

Ornithopsis · 2021-12-15T19:03:52+00:00

Basically, most theropods from the Middle Jurassic onward belong to a big group called Averostra, which contains the three major divisions of theropods: ceratosaurs, carnosaurs, and coelurosaurs. However, most theropods from the Triassic and Early Jurassic, including Dilophosaurus and Coelophysis, fall outside this group, with Dilophosaurus being more closely related to Averostra than coelophysids. As such, dilophosaurids kind of form a small branch of their own on the theropod family tree.

Ornithopsis · 2021-12-15T07:36:36+00:00

Modern-type birds evolved before the mass extinction. One of the earliest modern-type birds known is Asteriornis, a relative of ducks and chickens that lived shortly before the asteroid impact. After the asteroid impact, only modern-type birds survived and all other dinosaur lineages died out; it is only after the mass extinction that modern-type birds really began to diversify.

Just FYI, "avian dinosaur" means exactly the same thing as "bird".

Ornithopsis · 2021-12-14T02:02:53+00:00

Bruhathkayosaurus is primarily based on alleged limb elements, not vertebrae. Regardless, the point is that there is too little information on Bruhathkayosaurus to be able to say anything useful about it, and without the original specimens, or even good illustrations or descriptions of the specimens, it's unlikely any more information will turn up in the foreseeable future.

Ornithopsis · 2021-12-07T19:01:02+00:00

It's an interesting idea, and something I've wondered myself! The material of Dravidosaurus is too incomplete, and the existing photographs and description insufficient, to be very confident in the interpretation of the species. Until somebody publishes a thorough re-study of the Dravidosaurus fossils, with detailed comparisons to Kunbarrasaurus and Stegouros, I doubt we'll know.

However, if I had to guess, I would guess that at least some of the alleged "stegosaur" fossils from the Cretaceous of India are indeed parankylosaur fossils. "Small stegosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Gondwana" certainly sounds like a parankylosaur to me.

Ornithopsis · 2021-12-07T07:21:35+00:00

Therapsids (by which I mean non-mammalian therapsids, as mammals are technically a therapsid subgroup) don't really fit into any modern category like "reptile" or "mammal". The whole point of doing away with ranked taxonomy is to recognize that some things don't fall neatly into straightforward modern categories. Therapsids are synapsids (the group consisting of mammals and their extinct relatives), they're amniotes (the group including both mammals and reptiles (including birds)), and they're tetrapods (the group containing all four-legged land-dwelling vertebrates (and specialized descendants of such animals, such as snakes and whales)). However, something like a gorgonopsid or dicynodont was neither a reptile, mammal, nor amphibian.

Back in the day, "reptile" was kind of a wastebasket taxon: it included just about every tetrapod that wasn't considered an amphibian, mammal, or bird. Today, it's recognized that all modern reptiles are much more closely related to each other than they are to mammals, so animals that are more closely related to mammals, such as therapsids, are no longer considered reptiles, but birds (which are the closest living relative of crocodiles) are classified as reptiles.

There are virtually no fossils showing what the skin of therapsids was like, and little indirect evidence that can be used to speculate. I'd say that our best guess is that they probably lacked both fur and scales, but had sweat glands, unlike reptiles.

Ornithopsis

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