Why Short Dinosaur Arms?
Evolutionists have a new problem with short dinosaur arms, now that an unrelated species has them.
Did the short arms on T. rex have a function? Probably everyone, whether creationist or evolutionist, has wondered about the monster’s short arms with two digits each. Were they shrunken vestiges of longer arms in an ancestor, serving no purpose for the king of tyrants?
Behold Gualicho shinyae, found in Patagonia. This species had similar short, stubby arms with two digits each, but it lived a continent away from T. rex, so it could not have been a direct relative. Artwork on the BBC News shows what the theropod dinosaur might have looked like.
Like Tyrannosaurus rex, the new Gualicho shinyae is a theropod, one of the two-legged, bird-like dinosaurs – but it’s on a different branch of the family tree.
“Gualicho is kind of a mosaic dinosaur, it has features that you normally see in different kinds of theropods,” said co-author Peter Makovicky, from The Field Museum in Chicago, US.
The position of Gualicho on the theropod tree suggests it evolved its small forelimbs independently from other carnivorous dinosaurs which shared the trait – rather than it arising from a common ancestor.
Reasoning about this strange convergence of a puzzling trait, New Scientist comes to a design conclusion:
The functionality of T. rex’s tiny arms has long been a source of debate, with theories ranging from grasping onto a partner during mating to holding prey in place to deliver a death blow. Many experts still think that the arms served no useful function, but the fact that Tyrannosaurus and Gualicho have both independently evolved the same highly reduced forelimbs with two fingers, despite occupying different branches of the dinosaur family tree, suggests otherwise.
“It seems to be something that’s adaptive in lineages of dominant predators,” says Makovicky. If a feature appears separately multiple times, it becomes less and less likely that it evolved accidentally.
Thus reporter Josh Gabbatiss’s headline, “T. rex lookalike suggests that tiny arms developed for a purpose.”
The cognitive dissonance of the evolutionist is apparent in the quote, “If a feature appears separately multiple times, it becomes less and less likely that it evolved accidentally.” According to neo-Darwinism, everything evolved accidentally! There is no purpose, aim, or design in Darwinland. Design is only apparent, not real. Mutation means that stuff happens by chance, and natural selection (chance) likewise reduces to Stuff Happens (see 10/03/15). Darwinian evolution teaches the accidental appearance of things that only look designed for a purpose.
Since evolutionists cannot live with the futility of their own “Stuff Happens” worldview, they infer (like the rational created beings they are) that the traits of living creatures are (or were) purposeful. They reach the same common-sense conclusion Paul Nelson attributes to his father in the film Flight: The Genius of Birds, “If something works, it didn’t happen by accident.”
Just because we don’t yet know the purpose of a trait, that doesn’t mean it was nonfunctional. Finding the same trait in unrelated species strengthens the inference that the stubby arms of T. rex and Gualicho – both apparently successful predators – had a function. Intelligent design thinking would follow the evidence toward a rational explanation rather than calling it useless. The science-stopper is Darwinism, crying out “Stuff happens the same way independently for no reason.”
Dinosaur aficionados may want to LOL at a new theory about extinction published on The Conversation: an oil spill did them in. Called “one of the most exciting developments in years” by Nick Longrich, the idea that the Chicxulub asteroid triggered a burning oil spill that did in the dinosaurs suffers the same shortcomings of all the other theories, including the high selectivity that would kill off all dinosaurs of all sizes but leave millions of delicate creatures to carry on.