The Queue: Dilophosaurus did not have or need venom or a neck frill

At the time it lived, Dilophosaurus wetherilli might well have been the largest and most dominant predator on Earth. It was over seven meters long and 400 kilograms at the low side, making it about as big as a modern polar bear.

Now, I get you that a modern polar bear, while big, is nothing compared to later therapod dinosaurs like Allosaurus much less titans like Giganotosaurus or Tyrannosaurus Rex, but that’s because Dilophosaurus lived 193 million years ago, more than 40 million years before Allosaurus and even further before the others.

I bring this up because to this day we’re still given the idea that it had things like venom or a weird neck frill because those things wouldn’t be preserved in the fossil record. Except they do leave traces, and we would see them — the idea that it had a lizard-like neck frill but no preserved bone structure to help open and close that frill is ridiculous and there’s nothing in the well preserved teeth and jawbones that would anchor any structures for venom of any kind.

This was an animal that was at the time bigger than any other predator in its environment that had bony crests on the top of its head — there’s no evolutionary reason for it to evolve expensive display or threat options like a throat fan when it already have big bony ornaments on its head, that’s like saying that a moose has antlers and a sail, or that crocodiles subdue their prey with a powerfully venomous bite because they can’t bite very hard.

If a Dilophosaurus got into your jeep, it’s not gonna waste time on nonexistent spitting venom or a neck frill, it’s just going to kill you with its teeth. They’d do the job right quick.

Surprisingly like a Dilophosaurus.

No, paleontologists have not told me that Dilophosaurus also loved the Barrens music and its use of oboe, but I bet it did.

Feed those stupid ungrateful orphans to a Dilophosaurus. That’s my advice.

I’m struggling to think of a reason why Dilophosaurus would make sense in my response to this. Perhaps something about it being really into alts, considering that it was originally reconstructed as a weak, spindly Ceolophysis-like animal before the more modern work was done on the species? I don’t know, I’ll workshop it.

Still, thank you for that update, I’ll go download it.

Honestly, is it time for a complete revamp on spell visuals to let players customize what colors and casting elements their spells have? Imagine if you could choose between several different auras or visual flares when you cast a spell — a Balance Druid could choose between a moon theme of light blue and white, or a nature theme of green crackling lightning, for example.

As you point out, there are a lot of these kind of effects that will only exist for one expansion, sometimes only one raid or patch, and it would be cool if Mages could learn Shadowflame the way Warlocks learned Green Fire.

Just imagine a Dilophosaurus here saying Variety of spell effects is good! with a nice cartoon speech bubble over his enormous, brightly colored, likely covered in horn or keratinized skin crests. Similar to that thing on top of a Hornbill, I suppose.

I mean, sure, but that can be applied to a lot of games and other fantasy fiction. I mean, in Dragon Age there’s widespread use of cremation and yet we still see demons possessing corpses and shambling around, and the entirety of Diablo would be a lot easier if everyone cremated or composted their dead and yet every time some jumped up monster from Hell shows up, there’s skeletons everywhere. 

And while we’re at it, why are they always humanoid corpses? Why don’t we see more possessed tiger bodies? Heck, why doesn’t some enterprising spook possess a Dilophosaurus (or, really, something bigger like Tyrannotitan or Saurophaganax)?

Okay, now I want a story about the Bone Wars but with the skeletons getting reanimated and rampaging undead fossils vs. cowboys.

See, I don’t want an entire expansion going back to the Shadowlands, but I’d love it if we ended up going to some weird pocket dimension in the Shadowlands from time to time, and every time we did, it completely contradicted everything we learned in Shadowlands and just made everything more confusing and nonsensical. The land of the dead shouldn’t be something mortals can map out and have all broken down and deciphered and mapped out.

Imagine going to the Shadowlands again and absolutely no one you talk to has any idea what Oribos is, or has ever heard of the Arbiter or any of those factions, and they just talk about the giant Dilophosaurus that sits in a hole at the center of their realm eating people’s souls? And in the next expansion, you get a quest to help a Songwitch (new playable class, think Bard meets Runepriest) save her wife from the Shadowlands and this time it’s like Whimsyshire and again, Arbiter who? Jailer what?

Okay, that’s my Queue for today. See y’all next week.

Dilophosaurus.