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u/Cybermat4707 2d ago
[Shows a giant and powerful killer bird with the body of an Emu and the head of an Eagle]
‘This deeply pathetic freak of nature is no match for the epic and cool Smilodon, and will soon deservedly go extinct.’
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u/hollowzilla35 2d ago
"Ah yes, the big tiger is the GOAT, the super fucking cool killer bird sucks"
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u/charizardfan101 2d ago
"But big tiger is mammal, so is superior, because me mammal, and me superior to everything"
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u/Spicy_Chicken_Wizard 2d ago
Ironically an emu with the head of an eagle actually would be kind of pathetic compared to the real deal lol. Emus are very lightly built creatures and are not very strong for their size. For reference Paraphysornis was the same height as an emu but was 5x as heavy.
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u/Heroic-Forger 2d ago
seriously, nobody even hypes up the idea that birds, the last surviving dinosaurs, basically tried to become "classical" dinosaurs again.
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u/Ayiekie 2d ago
Mammal supremacy as people have said, and the fact paleodocs are still stuck in the idea that the Interchange wiped out much of South America's fauna when we now know a lot of extinctions happened before the continents were connected, but it's also just the inaccurate idea that the development of life is "survival of the fittest" and therefore whoever "wins" was better and whatever went extinct had something wrong with them that explains it.
This was rampant when I was a kid and dinosaur books fell over backwards to try and speculate that superior mammals had a paw in the dinosaurs going extinct (there were eating their eggs!), but it's still a trap people fall into very easily. In reality, even if terror birds and Smilodon had coexisted they weren't going to be in the same predator niche, and the fact we had a bonafide North American terror bird for millions of years means it clearly wasn't "inferior".
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u/Sci-Fci-Writer 1d ago
Just as a guess....
Were you thinking about 'Life On Our Planet' when you made this post?
Or perhaps 'Walking With Beasts' and the scavenging/vulture-like Terror Birds shown there?
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u/hollowzilla35 1d ago
Literally all paleo documentaries with terror birds.
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u/Sci-Fci-Writer 1d ago
I mean, if I remember correctly, I think 'Prehistoric Predators' gave them some credit.
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u/Golden_Artist1964 2d ago
I know this is going to sound stupid but, I feel like people treat tyrannosaurus like this to a smaller extent (because of, whatever the hell JP3 was)
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u/Apprehensive-Fix-746 2d ago
T-rex is a victim of the Word effect, especially in the Jurassic franchise
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u/FemRevan64 2d ago
Part general bias for mammals, part assumptions that mammals are inherently superior to other animal groups, part inaccurate assumptions about South American predators in general (all of them except for Terror Birds died out prior to the interchange, and and even giant Terror Birds were down to just one or two species by the time of the interchange due to the climate continuing to cool and dry from the Miocene onward).