u/Khwarezm — reddlx

Could Gorillas and Giant Pandas be described as ecologically convergent?

I don't really know if this makes much sense but I'm kind of curious if it could be said that Gorillas and Panda bears are sort of similar ecologically in being reasonably large, browsing animals that make particular use of their grasping forelimbs in manipulating and pulling selected plants into their mouths, often in a similar position while eating. They seem quite different from other herbivores but I don't really know enough about the specifics of their behaviour and adaptations to know whether or not they are very similar or if I'm just going by surface level interpretation since they both seem to spend most of the time sitting around munching on plants they pull down and hold with their forelimbs.

One of the other reasons I wonder about this is because it sort of seems that there was a recurring ecological role like this among a wide variety of extinct animals including Therizinosaurs, Grounds Sloths, Chalicotheres and possibly some other dinosaurs like Plateosaurus or other mammals like Palorchestes, and I'm wondering if Gorillas and Pandas can be seen as the closest modern analogues to these kinds of animals.

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u/Khwarezm — 7 hours ago

▲ 21 r/AgeofMythology

Do you think that World's Edge might be hit by the meltdown going on in Microsoft and that this will negatively effect AOM?

Basically, there's a lot of talk about how Microsoft is about to launch a round of layoffs and studio closures since their financials are so bad and they don't really have a good strategy. Other studios like Compulsion and Double Fine come up a lot in discussions and rumours about getting axed but I've not really seen any talk about World's Edge (who are in charge of the Age Of franchise).

I don't really expect that WE will be closed down or anything, as far as I understand the AOE games have been consistent and cheap moneymakers compared to others, but in a situation like this they could clipped by the shotgun blast mostly directed at others so to speak. That could mean having to focus on maximum profits considering how precarious things are in Microsoft so if AOM is the least lucrative of the AOE games that still have ongoing development, that might mean cancelling any potential plans they have for this game specifically and focusing everything on AOE2 and 4 since they offer more guaranteed returns.

I hope that's not the case, but its just something to keep in mind.

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u/Khwarezm — 20 days ago

▲ 62 r/AskHistorians

Would the average person in Ancient Rome have a conception that they were at the mercy of "the economy" like we do today?

I was thinking about the way that the ups and downs of the economy is usually foremost in many people's mind in the modern day, but how far back does this go?

Would a society like, say, the Roman empire at its height in the 2nd century, have been dealing with things like rapid inflation, speculation bubbles, runs on banks such as they existed, the cost of living, unemployment and other such things we'd associate today with broader economic troubles? Did normal people perceive that they were living in periods when the abstract idea of the economy was a major part of their life and it was going poorly for them?

On a gut level, I assume something like a famine would be a pretty obvious indicator that the economy was in a very bad state but that almost feels a bit too immediate for what I'm talking about, I mean it more in the modern sense where you can have periods of boom where trade and activity are expanding and regular people feel like things are on the up, along with downturns and depressions doing the opposite.

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u/Khwarezm — 29 days ago

▲ 13 r/007FirstLight

Levels based on famous movie locations I'd like to see as future Tacsim DLC

I think Tacsim is ripe for additional content including entirely new levels, and I'd love to see some of the classic and iconic locations from the movies (regardless of some of the actual quality of the movies themselves) appear in the future. Here's my list of things I'd like to see, if anyone else has additional ideas please mention them here.

u/Khwarezm — 1 month ago

▲ 51 r/Spyro

What is the actual evidence that a new Spyro game is in production?

I see lots of clickbaity things on youtube talking about Spyro 5 as if its a sure thing but is this actually borne out by anything particularly concrete? A lot of it seems like the kind of reading of tea leaves that has people claiming year after year that Half Life 3 is sure to come out because of the Morse code detectible in Gabe Newell's blinks in an investor meeting, but if there actually are more serious reasons to think that something is on the horizon I'd like to see them.

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u/Khwarezm — 1 month ago

▲ 6 r/Paleontology

Always a bit curious about the timeframe for these things, I know the gist of the asteroid impact causing dramatic destruction immediately in the first few days of the impact leading to a post-apocalyptic first year that likely kills most animals, and then leading to a period of something like nuclear winter for potentially centuries due to the dust kicked up into the atmosphere that causes longer term extinctions.

But I'm wondering about how long Dinosaurs could have hung around, especially different groups.

-Would the immediate effects of the impact itself have been sufficient to kill off many species entirely within the first day or so? I'm curious about this because since it was so close to North America, if it was conceivable that the likes of Tyrannosaurus or Alamosaurus were just exterminated outright, or if there was any possibility such large creatures so close to the impact site somehow found a way to hobble along for a little while, at least if they are young?

-Would almost every animal over maybe a ton in weight have been killed within the first year, even if the actual blast itself didn't get them? I'm just wondering how conceivable it would be for things like Hadrosaurs and Ceratopsians to continue on for some time if the worst effects and most catastrophic collapses in food supply are going to happen in the first year?

-I presume the order of extinctions goes something like this, giant predators, giant herbivores, medium sized predators, medium sized herbivores, small herbivores, small predators (including insectivores) and finally omnivorous opportunists. What that kind of thing in mind, what would be the longest that a dinosaur could reasonably last? Decades? Centuries? Millenia? I'm assuming it would be very small and unspecialized little opportunistic animal, what would be good candidates for the last non-avian dinosaur? Oviraptorans or something?

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The other thing I'm wondering, I get the impression that the K-Pg extinction happened on a very rapid timeframe compared to most other mass extinctions, but I don't know if that's true necessarily, it just feels logical if it overwhelmingly comes down to a particular dramatic but one-off catastrophe with the impact instead of something like extremely protracted volcanic activity that's the chief cause of the end-Permian or end-Triassic extinctions, and I also get the impression that the world of Paleocene was that of drastic and rapid reconstitution of ecosystems since not much was stopping them. If that's the case, did the actual negative effects of the impact essentially vanish within a few thousand years and could it have been plausible that some straggler lineages of dinosaurs carried on into the Cenozoic for maybe up to a few hundred thousand years but weren't able to establish themselves and leave a fossil record in the way other animals were? I ask in part because its my understanding that this actually does seem to have happened with Ammonites according to recent evidence, could dinosaurs have gone through the same fate or as a group would they have gone extinct very quick?

One of the things prompting this post is a recent scishow video about the progress of the extinction, and they have a hypothetical story about a Saurolophus managing to survive and even reproduce up to a decade after the impact and I'm wondering if that's really plausible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2XooQTsxEM

u/Khwarezm — 2 months ago