Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.
Matthew Rossi will be your host today.
I don't really have a favorite dinosaur. Or it's more like I have so many favorite dinosaurs I can't pick one. And to be honest when I do sit down and think about my favorite dinosaurs, my opinion changes with the research to a degree. At the moment, I'm fond of
Deinocheirus with those massive arms. But a lot of people ask me
what's the deal with all the dinosaurs, like there's a proper age to like them, and I'm way,
way over the limit. So I'll try, just this once, to explain what the deal is with the dinosaurs.
They were our superiors.
They were better suited to life on Earth than the mammals. This is indisputable. They first arose 231 million years ago during the Triassic, at a time where our own therapsid ancestors were recovering from a mass extinction that nearly wiped out all life on Earth, just as the mammals were starting to evolve. Our ancestors.
Us, in potential. And our ancestors, with their highly evolved teeth, with the start of the mammalian body plan that we see today in everything from tigers to dogs to sheep to cattle, lost the competition with the archosaurian dinosaur clans. It's just that simple. For over one hundred and thirty five million years, mammals went head to head against dinosaurs in the evolutionary arms race. And in all that time no mammal larger than a modern housecat thrived. The dinosaurs
won. Their dominion was so total that even after the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, it was
birds that first evolved into truly massive predators feeding on our mammal ancestors.
So that's it. Dinosaurs are proven winners. They lasted for one hundred and thirty five million years, and they
still exist today in the form of birds. And you'll notice that no mammal has managed to push birds out of their aerial niches. So yeah, I like dinosaurs, and I see no reason not to keep liking them for the rest of my life. I realize this was a huge digression, but to be honest, it simply wouldn't have been right for me not to talk about dinosaurs in this edition of The Queue.
This edition of the Queue will likely be very, very long. I got quite a few questions on Twitter, and there's 981 comments, so we're going to try and get through as many of those as we can.
Sean Boyle asks:
Here's one for you Rossi. Why haven't we seen any Naga or Ethereals on Draenor?
Naga are native to Azeroth. The ones we saw on Outland were part of Lady Vashj's contingent, pledged to Illidan's service. Etherals are also not native to Draenor, but were cosmic exiles whose native world of K'aresh was destroyed by Dimensius the All-Devouring, and in the process of trying to save their people from his arcane devastation the Ethereals lost their corporeal forms. Neither group was on Draenor thirty five years ago in our timeline, and as a result, they aren't on the alternate Draenor we now explore.
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