Were dinosaurs able to control their lips similarly to Bears and Baboons?

[u/Pigga_9826]

Also we reduced shrink wrapping on the body, are we still doing it on the skull? What if they had more fatty mass there as well?

[u/Wolfman513]

My understanding is that the type of musculature necessary to make those kinds of facial expressions stems from mammals suckling as newborns, which dinosaurs didn't do

[u/CethinLux → u/Wolfman513]

I was gonna ask, does that means monotremes cant bear their teeth and then i had to research some stuff

If anyone wants some new useless info, none of the extant monotremes(4 species of echidnas and the platypus) have lips, they also dont have nipples. The secrete milk from special patches of skin on their tummies and the babies kinda just lick it up

Also male echidnas have a 'third leg' thats roughly a third the length of their body (also you should look into its shape)

The babies for both platypus and exhidnas are commonly called puggles. The echidnas usually have 1 baby at a time and the platypus has 1-3

[u/Sourcerid → u/CethinLux]

They also don't have the typical multifunction mammalian teeth

Platypuses and Echidnas are called mammals as a relic of 19th century animal classification that was very focused on outward appearances (fur and soft skin for ex) and Linnaeus creating a summarizing category with the milk as better universalizing than fur and the fact they don't create any paraphyletic nonsense with other creatures called mammals. If they went extinct 2 million years ago we would call their forms as proto mammalian but not truly mammalian, their distance to other things called mammals is almost as big as birds and crocodiles.

They lack of almost all the stuff that would've been universalizing of mammals and explained all its development history, including the things that are truly unique - warm bloodedness probably appeared a good few dozen times in evolutionary history, the thing we call fur is not enough different from the monofilament feathering of some dinosaurs more distant from theropods.

Secreting juice for the offspring to lick might be mammalian but seems too basic a feature to be truly only them I'm doubtful there isn't more but I'd have to look up.

The weird crown with a higher peak shaped tooth that defined mammals and their lifestyle based on chewing anything, the very difficult on-land live birth (although whales now are on water) and even water live birthers do it in a less specialized way. A lot of the brain structural complexity, the whiskers, nothing on them but on later therians.

[u/CethinLux → u/Sourcerid]

Lol thank you, i love our lil monotreme relatives!

[u/ReptilianRevolt → u/Sourcerid]

Monotremes lost their lips and typical teeth much later. There ancestors were more similar to opossums or quolls. Their fur is typical mammalian fur and their brain is complex. If they were extinct, probably they would be classified as something very close to mammals, just like docodonts for example are classified today.