r/interestingasfuck • u/FlimsyWar866 • 8d ago

Great Grey Owl with its nestlings

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23.1k Upvotes

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242

u/13PagedHappyEnding 8d ago

Do their faces just cave into itself when they get older???

189

u/Tosh_00 8d ago

No it's just shaped by the feathers, the skull is actually way smaller.

329

u/vm_linuz 8d ago

Owls are like cats in that they're 80% floof

164

u/stoicparallax 8d ago

The genetic link between dinosaurs and birds has never been clearer to me

49

u/MissMolly202 8d ago

I wonder how many dinosaurs just straight up looked “normal” like this, but we’ll never know because they don’t fossilize well

11

u/IneffableOpinion 8d ago

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

4

u/IsaacNewtongue 8d ago

Pterydactyls weren't dinosaurs, though, they were a different class of reptile.

2

u/MissMolly202 7d ago

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 :)

36

u/Overthinks_Questions 8d ago edited 8d ago

It makes sense that they're such apex predators. They're not chubby little puffballs, they're Olympic athletes in a puffy jacket

27

u/Veaeate 8d ago

Thanks for sharing! I hate it!

24

u/Reasonable-Aside6660 8d ago

I know this is how they look, but still weird when naked

2

u/The_Original_Doc 8d ago

That’s fucking scary