July 27, 2018 | David F. Coppedge

Dinosaur Era Fossils Fail to Support Evolution

You have to squint hard to see the image of Charles Darwin in these bones. It works better if you close your eyes.

Evolutionists do not ‘own’ the history of dinosaurs, even though they pretend to. Do these fossils support the idea that dinosaurs evolved from smaller, simpler animals?

Paleontologists discover largest dinosaur foot ever (Science Daily). A dinosaur dubbed ‘Bigfoot’ found in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1998 turns out to be well named. The monster, a type of brachiosaur, apparently had the biggest footprint of any dinosaur. The open-access paper in PeerJ describing it says nothing about evolution. The authors who have studied the bones for 20 years apparently felt no need to weave a story about how it might have evolved. Nor did Live Science; Laura Geggel’s Darwin-free report says the titanosaur stood 13 feet at the hip and had a footprint a meter long.

Artwork of Lingulong sauropod from China.

‘Amazing dragon’ dinosaur discovered in China (Fox News). China is known for its dragons. This fossil ‘dragon’ found in northwestern China, a sauropod named Lingwulong shenqi, “may force researchers to rethink the entire lineage of the largest animals to roam the earth,” this article says. Why? Because “the discovery pushes back by 15 million years the appearance of so-called advanced sauropods, which included some of the largest land animals ever.” The Bigfoot sauropod in the previous item lived 150 million Darwin Years ago; this one dates to 174 million Darwin Years on the other side of the world. The paper in Nature Communications says, “The new discovery challenges conventional biogeographical ideas, and suggests that dispersal into East Asia occurred much earlier than expected.” But such spatio-temporal rearrangements are easy for Darwinians. They just turn the speed dial.

This ‘pushing back’ of the origination times of major sauropod clades reinforces recent suggestions that the Early Jurassic was a critical phase in dinosaur evolution, characterized by highly elevated rates of diversification and morphological change.

New dinosaur fossil explains how Diplodocus evolved to be so massive (New Scientist). We’ve just heard about sauropods from South Dakota and China. They sure got around; this one is from Argentina. After promising the fossil “explains” evolution, reporter Frank Swain says, “A new fossil challenges current ideas about the path to giant dinosaurs.” The fossil named Ingentia prima, dated 220 million Darwin Years old, is said to be a “precursor” of giants like Diplodocus. So how does Ingentia challenge current ideas?

Until now we thought that to acquire gigantic size, it was necessary to acquire adaptations in the structure of the skeleton to support this weight,” says Apaldetti’s colleague Ricardo Martínez. However, Ingentia lacks many of these – for example, it doesn’t have the stout, columnar legs of Diplodocus and modern-day giants like elephants. Also, while giant sauropods grew continuously, tree-ring like patterns in the bone show lessensaurids had growth spurts.

Ingentia also developed bird-like air sacs that allowed it to breathe continuously – an important feature giant dinosaurs needed to get rid of their immense body heat.

From the looks of the artwork, Ingentia had more ingenuity than the evolution-challenged scientists. Like all other dinosaurs and alleged ancestors, it was a fully complete animal, well adapted to its environment.

First snake found in amber is a baby from the age of the dinosaurs (New Scientist). Amber fossils are always exciting; this one especially so, since it contains remains of a baby snake dated 100 million Darwin Years ago. Another piece of Burmese amber was found with pieces of skin that may be from a larger snake or a lizard. Michael LePage says that snake fossils are very rare. Only 15 snake fossils are known from this period, and none of them had ever been found in amber. Unfortunately the skull did not get preserved, but judging from the artwork, it looks like it was 100% snake. LePage obviously did not do eyewitness reporting for his opening story:

Around 100 million years ago, a baby snake hatched on a tropical island in the Indian Ocean. The tiny snake, just 10 centimetres long, got stuck in resin oozing from a tree.

That chunk of resin remained buried as the island drifted north and became part of what is now Myanmar.

Could Humans and Dinosaurs Coexist? Here’s the Science. (National Geographic). In a not-so-subtle swipe at young-earth creationists who allege Noah took dinosaurs on the Ark, John Pickrell argues that there’s no way humans could have coexisted with dinosaurs. His overt target is the Jurassic Park series of movies. Their plots revolve around finding dinosaur DNA and using it to resurrect ancient beasts that lived many tens of millions of Darwin Years ago. The young-earth creationists might get a kick out of Pickrell’s waffling about soft tissue:

DNA breaks down really fast, and even in a hundred years, it has broken up into tiny nonsense fragments,” says Mike Benton, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in the U.K. “It takes massive technical power to link these bits together. So, until someone finds some dino DNA, we haven’t even got off the starting blocks.”…

I’m hesitant to say it’s impossible,” Victoria Arbour, an expert on armored dinosaurs at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, says of dino de-extinction. “So many scientific disciplines are making incredible breakthroughs all the time that something that’s hard to imagine now, like resurrecting a dinosaur, might be possible 25, 50, 100 years from now.”

Pickrell’s focus on DNA overlooks the other kinds of soft tissue that have been found in dinosaur bones, capitalized on by creationists as impossible to preserve for millions of years. Even if Jurassic Park became a reality, he says, we wouldn’t get along. How do you train dinosaurs not to eat the tourists?

“The dinosaurs would be aliens in our world,” agrees [Stephen] Brusatte. “They evolved tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, when Earth was much different. The continents were in different places, the atmosphere was different, the plants were different. Maybe they couldn’t cope at all.”

Maybe they couldn’t cope with humans killing them as trophies (9 July 2018). Before Pickrell pretends to speak for science, he needs to take a closer look at the evidence that dinosaurs lived much more recently than evolutionists believe.

And no, Mr. Pickrell, birds are not dinosaurs.

 

 

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