Racing Turtles

Thinking about a duct tape wizard

Thri-kreen traveler (based of of a Jerusalem cricket)  for @agni-kai13 /// Thank you so much//

It amuses me greatly that, if we ever invent time travel and go back to the Cretaceous, we’d see a Velociraptor and say “hey look at that bird” “oh cool” and nothing else. Honestly, imagine if future civilizations assigned mythic importance to turkeys. I hate that comparison but it’s appropriate in the sense that, like… how many people care that much about turkeys? They’re, like… small-scale famous, you’d recognize one but you wouldn’t look for it on a safari. That would be what happens with Velociraptor. One of the most famous dinosaurs ever found could easily be imagined as your Christmas dinner. I would bask in the public’s disillusionment.

Pop culture Velociraptor is… imagine paleontologists from the future find raccoon skeletons. Call them, let’s say, Raccoonraptor because they look like thieves of small animals.Then some well-meaning but overzealous artist decides that the skeleton of Raccoonraptor looks an awful lot like that of the tiger (Tigeronychus), so he decides to lump them all together as Raccoonraptor. Then some godawful author of airport novels decides to make a book about the evils of science and wants to make the villains prehistoric animals. He chooses tigers because they’re big and scary and have a huge braincase and were found in small groups in association with deer carcasses, clearly they’re super smart. And he uses the artist’s book as reference, so instead of calling them tigers they’re called raccoons.

Finally a big name in cinema makes a movie about them and before you know it raccoons have joined the stable of movie monsters as superintelligent pack hunting human-sized carnivores.