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Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs

|< < Prev #3204 (February 6, 2026)

Title text: Staplers are actually in Pseudosuchia, making them more closely related to crocodiles than to dinosaurs.

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Explanation

This is incomplete: This page was created by something that doesn’t seem like a dinosaur. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

This comic explores the seeming paradox that certain extinct prehistoric species which are popularly thought of as being "dinosaurs" are, from a strict taxonomic viewpoint, not. It also takes into account the fact that all bird species are descended from dinosaurs and thus - again, from a strict taxonomic viewpoint - are themselves dinosaurs as well (see 1211). To illustrate this, Randall provides silhouettes of dinosaurs, of entities that are widely thought of as dinosaurs but are not, of entities that are not widely thought of as dinosaurs but are (i.e., birds), and, lastly, of entities that are neither dinosaurs nor thought of as dinosaurs (which is funny because it's so all-encompassing as to be practically meaningless, just like it would be if you replaced the word "dinosaurs" by any other plural noun, or adjective).

Clockwise from upper left in each quadrant of the image:

• Silhouettes in "seem like dinosaurs / are dinosaurs": stegosaurus, triceratops, tyrannosaurus, diplodocus, velociraptor
• Silhouettes in "seem like dinosaurs / are not dinosaurs": mosasaur, quetzalcoatlus, dimetrodon, plesiosaur, pteranodon
• Silhouettes in "don't seem like dinosaurs / are not dinosaurs": squirrel, stapler, bicycle, Cueball, pineapple
• Silhouettes in "don't seem like dinosaurs / are dinosaurs": penguin, egret, falcon, pigeon, ostrich

The title text is a further joke about taxonomy, seemingly predicated on the assumption that staplers are biological organisms (which they are not), and can thus be sorted into taxa. Pseudosuchia is in fact the clade that encompasses all crocodilians, and staplers bear a certain resemblance to the open mouth of a crocodilian.

The original Linnaean taxonomy did at first have a top-level classification for "mineral" taxonomy, in addition to those for animal and plant, which in its broadest sense might allow one to assign a stapler a taxonomic relationship with dinosaurs.

Transcript

This is one of 44 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[A 2x2 chart containing various animals and objects.]

• Left column: Are dinosaurs
• Right column: Are not dinosaurs
• Upper row: Seem like dinosaurs
• Lower row: Don't seem like dinosaurs

[Top left (seem like dinosaurs, are dinosaurs):]

[Top right (seem like dinosaurs, are not dinosaurs):]

[Bottom left (don't seem like dinosaurs, are dinosaurs):]

[Bottom right (don't seem like dinosaurs, are not dinosaurs):]

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Discussion

Maybe it's more of statistics than exhibitions. --While False (speak|museum) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

pixels-assembly-3.png

how is it 0 bytes?? i see that it is shown as 0 bytes on the wiki, but the file itself, when downloaded is 5kb! how???108.162.221.209 16:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

If the question is how it can be written like that here, the answer is that I used the numbers of the wiki. —While False (speak|museum) 19:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

There's always the possibility that this is actually the Null image under the .png file format. Every other .png is defined by the delta required to display the desired graphic when starting from the baseline of this 'ur'-image, but if you ever wanted to display that graphic the undocumented format specifications allow you to omit all unnecessary bytes (including the magic header bytes) and it will happily produce its hardcoded "it's a PNG!" preprocessing template, which happens to be this image. Obviously, the PNG spec (and, ultimately, the original ancestor of the detailed source code tree for every subsequent implementation) was written before Randall ever got anywhere near to drawing this image so the chances are slim that he just happened to luck upon the exact image that happens to have a 100% compression rate because it just happened to consist of something Randall wanted to draw, and in the manner of Randall's artistry. But it's a non-zero likelihood that an arbitrary artist might draw exactly the same image as a purely arbitrary "index null" page's collection of pixels and so... This might not be the Best Of All Worlds, but there has to be some highly fortunate occurance to balance out all the unfortunate ones, statistically, and this is ours!

(Or maybe there's a minor bug/data-error in the way the wiki database serves the front-end webserver, but I can't ask you to believe something as trivially random as that!)) 172.70.90.245 15:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
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