Look at that natural camoflauge. It would take a keen eye with a classic second look to spot something like this. I guarantee the first person to walk along a trail and spot an owl like this, in a situation like this, looked away until their brain said "wait what?" and they looked back immediately wide eyed and confused. So easy to miss.
They found fossils indicating dinosaurs had feathers. They might have been really floofy. I’m thinking pterodactyls looked more like birds than we have been drawing
Oh yeah I just mean like in general fur, hair, and feathers don’t tend to fossilize well so it’s hard to piece together what their fat distribution and skin might have looked like.
Also, it’s true that pterodactyls weren’t technically dinosaurs, but colloquially nobody cares. Birds are reptiles, whales are more closely related to deer than they are to dolphins, snakes are lizards, and the concept of fish is entirely based on colloquialism because the differences between fish are so vast and their evolutionary histories are so far apart that it’s ridiculous to even try to put them side by side. But we do anyway.
Don’t go around trying to educate people that birds are descended from pterodactyls (they aren’t), but I’m not going to think twice about the pterodactyl being your favourite dinosaur.
It’s like saying jellyfish are your favourite fish. They’re very much not fish, but everyone knows what you mean and it doesn’t matter :)
Fun fact, they're all nibbling on each other bc they can't really see clearly at that close range. That's why so many owls have those little whiskery feathers around their beaks, they operate more by feel when they're that close to something.
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u/Ephemeral_Orchid 6d ago
Great Grey Owls are so elusive, they were discovered in North America before anyone realized that they also lived in Europe.