Posted by exvi 5 days ago
Playlist of the original videos: <https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaCDmykyjVw_B983AQ2iG...>, there's a channel now <https://www.youtube.com/@YourDinosaursAreWrong> which has newer episodes (can't vouch for, haven't seen) (playlist with old and (some of the) new: <https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnpbQOy7TfC179wPmhHZr...>)
The article is interesting but it's difficult for me to really picture the implications of the article. Actually after reading it I get the feeling that what I was visualizing is entirely contrary to what they are trying to convey to me.
You'll find that this is a little awkward. The natural resting position of your hands is with the palms facing inwards, not down.
The counter example they gave was the elephant - but this video [1] of elephants walking looks to me like "bunny hands", at least to a degree.
> Portrait of funny, lovely European girl with rabbit ears, imitating bunny, holding hands like paws and looking up daydreaming
They are referring to the pose people take when they are pretending to pose "like a bunny".
But for, say, human feet, "pronation" would appear to refer to a position in which the soles of the feet face toward the ground, just as in hands it refers to a position in which the palms face toward the ground, or in humans overall it refers to a position in which the face and belly face toward the ground. That is the meaning of "prone" ("lying on your front"; it is the opposite of supine, "lying on your back"), and "pronation" just means "making something be prone".
But obviously all feet are always pronated in this sense. The article seems to have a model of the word which is more like "pronation [in the hands] involves a certain configuration of the bones in the arm, and I'm going to call that configuration pronation too". But then they also refer to rotating the forearm, which confuses bone configuration with yet another issue, the changeability of the configuration.†
So I'm left mystified as to how this single-or-possibly-manifold concept is supposed to apply to feet, human or otherwise. The article suggests that pronat_ed_ feet have the toes facing forward, parallel to the direction of the gaze, and also that pronat_ing_ feet requires the ability to rotate the lower part of the leg.
In humans, these claims cannot both be true. Toes are angled forward, but the lower leg doesn't rotate. Something else has happened.
So it's hard to say what I should conclude about the mammoth legs that the article also complains about.
† The article complains about a dinosaur skeleton in which the hands aren't pronated - they face inwards, in a pose we might call "karate chop hands". But it says that this pose requires "pronation" in what is presumably the arm-bones sense. In "bunny hands", the hands are pronated according to the normal definition of the word, facing the ground.