Comments by "Psiberzerker" (@Psiberzerker) on "PBS Eons" channel.

"...So far." A good microclimate that you can see today is the Maritime Climate around the Humbolt Current, and Puget Sound of the Pacific NW. There, we have Cloud Forest, and Temperate Rainforest at latitudes, and altitudes associated with, well. Canada. Ferns are everywhere, and the rich volcanic soil looks like a Dunkan Hines chocolate cake commercial. (I've actually picked up soil with the tines of a fork, to demonstrate on Vancouver Island.)
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Dention is one of the most important traits in the fossil record, because fossils are like the Cheshire Cat. The last thing to fade away is the teeth.
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Feedback Loop: It's hard to assign Positive, or Negative to what's essentially Neutral. Both glaciation, and Greenhouse Heating reinforce their feedback loops through Albedo. For example, Ice/Snow is a lot more reflective than Water. So, as the ice caps melt, and the ocean levels rise, there's more open water, and less snow to absorb sunlight, and re-emit it as Infrared. (The frequencies that CO2, and Methane absorb) Conversely, during ice-ages, sea levels drop, and glaciers expand, reflecting more light, and absorbing less. "Positive," and "Negative" have positive, and negative associations, to popular science audiences. Of course, they also mean something scientifically, for example in Thermodynamics, where Entropy tends to reinforce in a cascade failure. Our current runaway greenhouse effects (Plural) could be described as either Positive (Thermal) reinforcement, or a cascade failure.
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Blisters, and Callouses: This is often overlooked, even in academia, but Primates don't get blisters on their hands. IDK how much experimenting you've done with tool-making, but you do get a lot of blisters, pretty quickly, and I have to think that this is a tool-making adaption.
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I'll put it to you this way: I learned how to make Clovis point in Taos (Pueblo) but I never actually made one, without it breaking. I know how they do it, academically.
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I don't actually think that much about Dinosaurs. Okay, they were my Gateway animal, but if you ask me about life before them, I'm going straight for Trilobites, because those are the most fascinating, and diverse fossils to me.
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The linear model was also intrinsically heirarchal. The idea was that evolution happened. It was over, it had reached it's pinical, and now we're here. (Also, those people over there aren't as evolved as us.) In a word, it was racist, and inevitably led to Eugenics.
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Emily Zarka sounds like a ghostbuster's name. (Or someone in a similar field, like Cryptozoologist for a PBS web series.)
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Could you do Giraffes?
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I think the Escape hypothesis makes more sense.
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I don't know.
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Early natural history was Heirarchal, and Linear. So, we had ideas like The Food Chain, the Apex Predator, and Alpha Male. Evolution was something that happened, and reached it's ultimate goal: Us. So, that thinking colored conclusions like "Of course we weren't the prey, we're the pinical of evolution, we had to be the Apex Predator, that's what all that evolution was about." The truth is that it's more complex than that. The food chain is more like a web, and evolution is still going on.
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Look, if you're weighing your portions, eating on a schedule, and counting calories, you have no concept of how people ate a century ago, let alone before we developed Agriculture, and NUMBERS with it. The first things we weighed were no doubt Grains. Wild animals, basically the troglodites you're pretending to emulate, don't eat every day. Let alone get their food in boxes from Amazon. Go to the Khalahari, and see what the Paleo diet is really like.
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Methane, and Water Vapor are tricky, as Greenhouse Gasses. Water Vapor basically has 2 Alotropes in our atmosphere. One is a greenhouse gas, and then it condenses into Clouds, which reflect, and disperse light about as efficiently as fresh fallen snow. (Another alotrope of Water) Methane for several reasons: First of all, there's various sources, as diverse as ruminants (Cattle) to rotting vegetation. So, you have swamps being cleared for farmland (And drained) but then you have cattle turning crops into meat, manure, and Methane. Also, Methane isn't stable in an oxygen rich atmosphere, so it tends to break down. Into Carbon Dioxide, and Water Vapor.
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The fruit also feeds the seeds that fall without being eaten. Of course, they can also attract animals to dispurse the seeds, but I believe (No direct fossil evidence here) that they were fertilizer first, and then adapted to animals picking them up by making them more enticing.
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It need not serve a purpose, or only one. Another thing a feature like that sail can do is distract Predators. Like the bushy tail on a Squirrel, if they chomp into that, it's going to hurt, but it's not going to be a life-threatening injury. Similarly Spinosaurus (Who also had one on it's tail that was no doubt for swimming) This sort of protection is nice against Ambush Predators, especially from above, so Leopards, or for semi-aquatic life that might be jumped from the banks of a river, or something. (As well as temperature regulation, keeping up with the herd, mating displays...)
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Divergent Evolution. It looks like Bone Dome was sexually selecting in some sort of head butting mating ritual, whale Gorilla Horse was diverging toward Food Selection, trying to reach more succulents higher in the canopy. Parallel Evolution is 2 separate species coming to resemble each other, like the Tasmanian Devil resembling Hyenas, even though the latter is a Marsupial halfway around the hemisphere from Africa.
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