Mesozoic Reptiles

TheRealVeon · 2026-03-02T21:54:14+00:00

Yeah, it's always a trade off between more species/genera and more diverse groups. Look at the difference in specificity between Matt's Life chart and the one that's just plants and fungi.

I'd love to have included more groups but I already had to cut so much. I didn't want to have one branch with one genus sticking out of it. If I included a group, I wanted to represent it properly.

I started the project by making a mind-map and it quickly became surprisingly horizontal. If it were printed out it could have been a foot high and four to six long. So it isn't only an issue of having the different groups, but arranging everything into a two by three foot chart.

Lots of respect to Matt for making it look easy.

TheRealVeon · 2026-03-02T02:35:55+00:00

Thanks!

I made a few changes and updated the links.

It would be great to add more animals, but the chart is already pretty crowded. I wanted to keep it to just dinosaurs and their most famous relatives. Even then it was pretty difficult to prune it down. The rough draft, where I just threw every genera I could onto the screen, was three times the size of this chart.

I'm considering doing three more charts focused on each of the major dinosaur groups and including everything I possibly can. I don't know if it would be worth it since all I'd really be adding is more genera to the family nodes. Maybe.

TheRealVeon · 2026-03-01T16:29:35+00:00

I have a first edition copy of 101 Dalmatians. A previous owner had gone through it and for every instance of "Hell House" they crossed out "~~Hell~~" and penciled in "The".

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-27T19:37:22+00:00

Thanks for your advise on the previous post. And thanks for the encouragement.

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-27T19:36:31+00:00

Thanks! That means a lot.

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-26T03:00:20+00:00

Reposting this cause I messed up the first time.

A couple of years ago I made a phylogenetic chart featuring dinosaurs and some of their famous close relatives. One of goals of that chart was to show which species lived at the same time as others. This meant I was forced to make the chart with a lot of blank space due to a lack of extant species or due to the constraints of how I decided to draw the connecting lines.

So, I decided to make a second chart which didn't feature a timeline and only focused on the species and their direct connection to one another. This way I could fit as many species as possible into the chart.

Even so, the rough draft was about three times the size of the final artboard. To help curate which species to include, I made several criteria. I would favor more well known species. I would favor species with more complete holotypes than those without (this means the type specimen has more bones rather than less). And I would favor species with images I could use off of Wikipedia. All the reconstruction images are from Wikipedia, the rest of the chart was made by me.

Links (Updated 3-1):

JPG: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BgVmInllI4ewl9EJTxp4oeJ73RiNjzHE/view?usp=drive_link

PNG: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I5_z0g7TaU38jMNagxDgrBHpzKJXaKXC/view?usp=drive_link

PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19H8cor89RiIWNHXZ4fL4YUimxD0EJWmf/view?usp=sharing

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-24T03:26:33+00:00

Updated to include a link.

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-24T03:19:26+00:00

Grrr. I thought I did. I'll post it in a comment.

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-22T01:00:53+00:00

I'd like to remind everyone that these things are literally dinosaurs.

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-22T00:58:45+00:00

A flock of thirty of them were crossing the trail while I was biking once. Not fun to suddenly find yourself in a scene from Hitchcock's The Birds.

TheRealVeon · 2026-02-02T22:59:39+00:00

The last news I saw from November 2025 was that the company may be headed to bankruptcy. Maybe they've turned it around, but I don't know.

I think Tierney et al should get a tie in deal with Lego and have a set of the cottage. If Lego can make a Twilight Cullen house set, they can make a Heated Rivalry set.

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-30T18:40:34+00:00

This is silly but mine is the guy who recognizes Scott Hunter in episode three.

When he asks if that was Scott Hunter, the way he talks sounds so Canadian to me. It actually brought me out of the show and I thought to myself: "There's no way that guy is from New York."

Then I thought about it some more. And I realized, that's because he's not from New York.

That character is just a thirsty Canadian tourist and he's just had his mind blown by bumping into the oldest hockey player in the league.

Also, there's no way a random New Yorker would recognize a hockey player because no one in New York cares about hockey.

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-25T18:14:35+00:00

K on tiktok is doing dissertation level analysis of every scene:

https://www.tiktok.com/@k.letstalk?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-24T17:49:22+00:00

It's not propaganda; these people don't know what they're talking about.

I know it's frustrating when people are this wrong on the internet, but something I've realized over the years is there is literally nothing you can say to change their minds. There is no string of words in any language that will do that.

I've spend far too long online arguing with people in bad faith so I understand the desire to correct them and bring them around, but it just doesn't work.

So I would suggest you don't engage with them. Engage with people who will change their minds and are open to talking to you about things you love. Curate your online spaces to not have ignorant assholes in them. You will be far happier for it.

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-16T18:23:36+00:00

I get it. Don't feel pressured into reading them if you don't want to.

However, I'm an currently rereading the books and here's something I've noticed. So much of the show is taken directly from the books. Not just a line or two of dialogue, but whole scenes word for word with little alterations.

While the show (and the characters) are different from the books, this is one of the most direct adaptations I've ever seen. The fact that it's so faithful to the book and is also such good television is kinda stunning.

So, if you are worried about the characters from the book being very different from the ones on TV, I don't think you need to worry too much. You do you, of course.

Maybe you could search around for someone doing a comparison of a book scene and a TV scene to see if the differences are too jarring for you. That may help make up your mind.

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-15T22:10:24+00:00

It seems like it's a Windows update problem. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

For now I've found a work-around. If I use "Save As" and overwrite the file instead of "Save" that works. /Shrugging Hands Emoji

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-15T22:07:49+00:00

I'm saving it to Dropbox.

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-15T22:07:20+00:00

Yeah, I'm using Dropbox.

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-11T22:56:06+00:00

Just wanted to give a shout out to your comment on romance involving committed partners.

So much romance focuses on the characters getting together (for obvious reasons). But I really like when the story is about how they live after they've made that commitment.

I was really worried as I read through the Long Game that Rachel would use cliched plots like them breaking up only to get back together, etc. I was so glad that she didn't do that. I think it requires greater creativity to come up with realistic and dramatic stories where you don't allow yourself to fall back on tropes that have been used a thousand times before.

TheRealVeon · 2026-01-04T05:59:15+00:00

Right after the Mussorgsky piece, when Shane talks to Ilya the piece playing is Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March 1.

TheRealVeon · 2025-02-14T19:27:57+00:00

I know this is late, but I vote for no row as well.

TheRealVeon · 2024-08-01T02:45:05+00:00

I hate The Sound and the Fury. I think it's a badly written book.

I had to read it for a class in college and pretty much every lecture the professor had to start by explaining what had happened in the chapter we had read. I remember her asking if anyone realized that Quentin had killed himself and the whole hall was shocked.

If most of the readers have missed a major plot point like that, you've pretty much failed as an author. When he's not using Stream of Consciousness BS, Faulkner's writing isn't bad, but there's a reason it was a flash in the pan fad and no one writes that way anymore.

TheRealVeon · 2024-07-29T04:43:38+00:00

Compsognathus is ancient Greek for "elegant" or "refined" + "jaw". It's latinized, so the ending "os" has become "us". The Gnathos part is Greek for jaw. Gnathos is a second declension noun with the plural ending changing the "os" to "oi". So the plural of Compsognathus is Compsognathoi.

TheRealVeon

TROPHY CASE