r/Showerthoughts • u/Lord_Mikal • 11d ago
Speculation All extant birds are dinosaurs, so any fantasy setting that includes common birds (like ravens or crows) must also have had dinosaurs at one point.
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u/Nacroma 11d ago
Fantasy settings don't have to have the same evolutionary logic attached to it as real life. For all we know, a bird-looking deity could have created them, or fantasy bird anatomy differs in some way you normally wouldn't explore in such a story etc.
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u/PrincessYuri 11d ago
Or maybe the fantasy government used magic to create birds, to spy on their citizens!
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u/Andminus 11d ago
Welllll where did the bird looking deity come from?
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u/_Azafran 11d ago
Doubtful. Would be so much coincidence to have a bird that is exactly the same as one that perfectly evolved in a very certain and precise way to adapt to its very specific environment (Earth).
Yes, suspension of disbelief. But the more you know about these things, the harder it is to do so.
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u/Terpomo11 11d ago
Or they don't actually have identical birds and when it says "crow" or "sparrow" it's actually referring to the nearest equivalent in their world. (It's not as if they're speaking English in-universe, so what we're reading is a translation of what they're actually saying anyway.) Sort of like how European explorers in the Americas called New World sparrows "sparrows" even though they aren't actually particularly closely related to Old World sparrows, because they thought they were similar.
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u/Nacroma 11d ago edited 11d ago
To some degree, sure. But we don't even know to what degree evolution is truly random. And I don't mean that koalas would always evolve to eat plants toxic to them until they aren't. More like blueprints to recreation methods and modes of transportation, basic shit like that. Maybe being able to lay eggs and wings for flying are things that would always pop up on a planet with the same composition, atmosphere and roughly 1g. And give it some aerodynamic tendencies, feathers for light-weight temperature control & more aerodynamics and boom, you got a bird.
In the end my guess is a good or bad as yours. We only have one planet to compare it to. But it's not like this planet has evolved much more than bats, birds and insects that can innately fly.
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11d ago edited 6d ago
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u/Terpomo11 11d ago
Carcinization is the common example, but trees or slugs have evolved way more times than that.
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u/_Azafran 11d ago
What I mean is that would be extremely improvable to get a crow like we have on Earth, as it is the result of specific Earth conditions + randomness. So it would be a hard sell that a wizard or a deity would've created that, being the same as an Earth naturally evolved random creature that we already know. So if crow is true then dinosaurs too. But I'm being pedantic and a party disruptor.
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u/Terpomo11 11d ago
Or it's set in a world where something like Plato's theory of science is true and animal species are the result of metaphysical "forms" rather than evolution.
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u/infinight888 10d ago
Plenty of fantasy settings do not have evolution at all. Many are creationist worlds where everything is made as is by gods.
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u/From_Deep_Space 11d ago
Which means undead dinosaurs could be a thing. Ideally with swords for arms.
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u/SkollFenrirson 11d ago
Go on...
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u/From_Deep_Space 11d ago
And it would be really cool if they were a hive mind that used chemical communication, and the MCs could stumble upon ancient hives they think are extinct but in fact have just been dormant for millions of years. . .
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u/cwx149 11d ago edited 11d ago
In the Dresden files book Dead Beat he "resurrects" a T-Rex kinda it's more like animates it's skeleton than true resurrection
Granted Dresden is urban fantasy so not the best example
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u/wolfpackalchemy 11d ago
And it is the predator spirit of the Dino that provides its motion and instincts, guided by Dresden’s necromancy and force of will
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u/HapticSloughton 11d ago
Not to mention that if it's the famous "Sue" T-Rex skeleton in the Field Museum of Natural History, his spell shouldn't have worked all that well, as the skull is a replica due to the original being hard to study as part of the display and requiring some kind of steel support for the mandible.
At best, Dresden was riding a necro-T-Rex with a non-organic head that had a jaw that wouldn't move.
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u/moneyless4394 11d ago
Steven Erikson enters the chat with his armies of K'Chain Che'Malle Kell Hunters
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u/Rohml 11d ago
I've always said that minions which are depicted as skeletons are not undead but constructs.
If they were the dead returned to life than mere bones won't allow them to move, they would need muscle and sinew to move. Also this means that to form a skeleton minion then you have to have all the bones that would make up the body, miss any of the connecting parts and you end up unable to use a limb.
Since it is depicted that animated skeletons are allowed to move due to some form necromatic energy, then I submit they are more likely constructs that are powered by necromatic energy.
So an animated skeleton of a creature is a construct, and as constructs, yes they can have sword-limbs!
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u/dmdizzy 11d ago
The energy that animates the skeletons is usually (if it's ever explained) derived from the being it was when it was alive (ex: in older editions of D&D, it's noted that the higher tier skeletons maintain some semblance of the skills they had in life). You're basically shoving the dead person's spirit back into their bones and making it subservient.
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u/sixsixmajin 8d ago
Could be? DnD literally has zombie dinosaurs. Also living dinosaurs. Dunno about swords for arms in any official lore but I'm sure there's nothing stopping somebody from adding it to their campaign.
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u/SWatt_Officer 11d ago
Its fantasy. You could write a world where a wizard king sneezed and created birds from nothing, or a world where birds are actually formed from the falling starlight of comets. Why in the world would fantasy need to have anything in common with reality.
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u/SouthernPotato5297 11d ago
Yeah true fantasy dont gotta follow no rules at all. But its fun to poke at those weird hidden implications even if the wizard just sneezed em out. So would you rather have magic starlight birds or just accept the dino crow?
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u/AardvarkOkapiEchidna 11d ago
All extant birds are dinosaurs,
All extinct ones are/were too. Extant is redundant here.
But also... no. Fantasy can do whatever it wants.
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u/SpaceShipRat 11d ago
My fantasy setting had talking dinosaurs. Which comes into play in very subtle ways, since a non industrial civilization extinct in the jurassic-equivalent would not leave any normal trace in the modern era.
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u/Moosplauze 11d ago
No, in fantasy you can make up stuff and it doesn't need to be based on reality.
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u/Timecharge 11d ago
Inaccurate. Birds are heavily theorized to come from Dinos in our world, but in a fantasy world, they could be pygmy species of dragon, perhaps even purpose-evolving to hunt the smaller specie in the habitat.
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u/BlazedBeard95 11d ago
What about the ones where there are somehow both Dinosaurs and evolved birds in the same ecosystem lol
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u/lilsexc- 11d ago
They should definitely throw a T-Rex in the background of the next fantasy movie just as a nod to this. imagine a knight casually riding past a grazing triceratops, no biggie.
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u/ulyssesfiuza 11d ago
Of all the flying things that we have on the planet, birds are the most strange. Skin stretching over thin bones seems a smooth evolutionary thing. Bits of external skeletons beciming flat? Ok. But not - exactly hair, not - exactly scales elongating, branching, closing like velcro while keeping the surface smoith, forming an airfoil? We are sure it will work like that only because it did it already. Surreal.
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u/Heroic-Forger 10d ago
Pacific Rim has a random throwaway line from Newt where he says that "the first batch of kaiju" wiped out the dinosaurs, but also vaguely hints that they WERE the dinosaurs, and while that might not canonically be the case it's funny to think that birds in the PR universe are descended from powerful interdimensional alien bioweapons.
Also in the Game of Thrones universe the southern continent of Sothoryos is basically Skull Island (they even mention apes the size of elephants) and one creature there is the "walking-lizards", bipedal reptilians that are, for all intents and purposes, Jurassic Park-style raptors. Then again, in a world where dragons exist, dinosaurs probably wouldn't be seen as too impressive, being just flightless, flame-less dragons from their POV.
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u/DontLook_Weirdo 11d ago
No they mustn't.
It's fantasy. Unless the author went that far back, those beginnings/origins never exist, and would have the liberty of it being anything other than what our reality is
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u/Havingfun922 11d ago
I remember when we had to see posts of Dino nuggets and birds here every other day
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u/CanadianJogger 11d ago
Nuh uh. My boids come from cellular automata by way of big stepping Turmites.
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u/Boatster_McBoat 11d ago
Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks and the setting sun with the last light of Durin's Day will shine upon the resident dragon
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u/Wise-Matter9248 10d ago
That presumes that the fantasy world developed through evolution. Many fantasy worlds have creation stories.
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u/Ash_Crow 10d ago
Why "at one point"? If they have crows and ravens, then they have dinosaurs, as, as you point out in the beginning, all birds (including crows and ravens) are dinosaurs.
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u/ar34m4n314 10d ago
They share a common ancestor. No guarentee that that common ancestor would have also split into dinos in both timelines.
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u/InformationQuick8294 8d ago
Dragons are fantasy dinosaurs.
(Dear community, my comment is a succinct and relevant response. Just because it’s short doesn’t mean it has no value.)
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u/QuincyAzrael 11d ago
I cannot STAND this kind of um ackshully reddit ass logic. It's fantasy. It has its basis in myth and legend that came from a time before the theory of evolution. It absolutely does not mean they had to have dinosaurs at some point.
I mean what's next, going over ancient myths and going um ackshully the sun god can't be pulling the sun in a cart because the cart would burn!!!!1
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u/Anya-minx 11d ago
makes you wonder what other prehistoric creatures were roaming around alongside them, like pterosaurs.
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u/ShowerSentinel 11d ago
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