The Queue: Welcome to my self indulgent dinosaur Queue

Let’s not waste time.

Using only dinosaurs, I’d go with the following.

For Water, you almost have to go with a member of the Spinosauridae,  and I think I’d use Oxalaia quilombensis for my pick.

For Earth, I’d go with Ankylosaurus magniventris because not only was it low to the ground, it was crazy heavy for its size and it could crack T. rex bones with its tail.

Air? Pelagornis sandersi is my pick. It’s an extinct bird, the largest flying bird who has ever lived, and since all birds are theropod dinosaurs it counts as a dinosaur.

For Fire, I’d go with Alamosaurus, the only genus of Titanosaur we currently know of from North America. Mmost of the truly dangerous animals on Earth today are herbivores, so why not Alamosaurus?

Okay, this one might be a dinosaur, but it might not be, and that ambiguity makes me think it’s of use for this kind of speculation.

I’d go with Smok wawelski, which in the late Triassic (about 208 million years ago) was the largest archosaurian predator in what is now Europe. The real reason I think Smok works as a potential dragon is because the animal has a complicated array of derived features that could identity it as pseudosuchid, a theropod dinosaur, a raurisuchid, or even a prestosuchid like Fasolasuchus.

Since science cannot decide what this animal was, I see no problem with assigning it to a new clade of archosaurs that would include dragons.

Cheap, coward’s way out answer: Any game I’m playing that doesn’t have dinosaurs in it.

Honest answer: Since birds are dinosaurs, if a game has birds in it, it has dinosaurs in it. I honestly can’t think of a game I love that doesn’t have birds in it, even Mass Effect has birds in it because you go to Earth in the third game.

I honestly don’t think the Sorcerer and the Wizard are different enough to have them both as playable classes in Diablo 4. But I do think I get why people want to see another ranged caster class.

So I’m going to say I’d like to see something like the Amazon (not a gender locked class because Diablo 4 lets you pick your character’s gender, but one steeped the Amazon lore and using both bows and javelins) or a ranged version of the Tempest from Diablo Immortal. A class that summons wind and lightning and uses it to enhance throwing weapons, bows and maybe even makes direct ranged strikes with blasts of wind and cold/ice.

Also, they get a dinosaur pet, because a giant eagle is still a dinosaur.

Oondasta. Specifically Oondasta.

Okay, to break it down, and of course I am not a paleontologist so feel free to point out how I’m wrong here.

Quetzalcoatlus northropi has been estimated at various weights. Some estimates are as low as 100 KG (220 lbs) and as high as 500 KG (1100 lbs). Let’s assume 350 kg/ 770 lbs for our hypothetical Quetzalcoatlus.

I’ve seen estimates saying it could carry up to half its body weight for short distances. We’ll just go with it for the purposes of this question. Half of 350 kg is 175 kg (385 lbs).

That means that, unless it was attempting to carry someone like Andre the Giant or William “The Refrigerator” Perry. yes, Quetzalcoatlus is likely to have been able to lift and fly a human away for at least a few kilometers.

An entirely new IP about time traveling paleontologists who go from time period to time period seeing ancient ecosystems, finding animals that haven’t yet been discovered in the fossil record, and also fighting time traveling poachers, hunters, and people trying to kidnap dinosaurs for modern/future zoos.

I mean, there have been a lot of G1 Dinobots, including a dragon. But I’ll take your question in the spirit it was meant and only consider the original 5.

Since I’m trying to avoid dinosaurs that have already appeared in comics or other Transformers media, I’ll go with a Pachycephalosaurus grangeri. We’ll call him Smash and play up on his whole headbutt attack, maybe give his Transformer form a bit of a punk aesthetic with spikes around his neck derived from the ones on the head of the dinosaur robot form.

See you next week for the last Queue I write in 2025.