Dinosaur Digest
Here’s a collection of recent news about the extinct creatures that fascinate everyone: the dinosaurs.
Before There Were Dinosaurs, This Triassic ‘Lizard King’ Ruled Antarctica (Live Science). Would you believe the continent of Antarctica, now a frozen waste, was once a lush land of forests and large beasts? An archosaur found in Antarctica must have been four to five feet in length. Evolutionists were surprised how, according to their moyboy timeline, this beast rebounded so quickly after their so-called Permian Extinction. It only took one or two million years! Wow! Snap your fingers, and in an instant of geological time you get archosaurs walking on the land, pterosaurs flying overhead, and ichthyosaurs swimming through the oceans. That’s Darwin magic.
The 210-million-year-old Smok was crushing bones like a hyena (Science Daily). What’s a smok? It’s the name given to a type of archosaur found in Poland. But how much can you tell from coprolites (fossil dung)? The divination experts see a bone-crushing predator, even though “it is not fully clear whether it was a true dinosaur or a dinosaur-like precursor.” They had to add some Darwin Flubber to say that the fossil indicates “similar feeding adaptations being independently acquired at the beginning and end of the age of dinosaurs.”
What’s the World’s Largest Dinosaur? (Live Science). Answer: Argentinosaurus. It weighed in at 77 to 90 tons. The tallest contender is likely Giraffatitan, a 40-foot-tall beast from Tanzania. There is some uncertainty in these estimates. After all, nobody saw them alive. Most of the guesses come from single bones.
The very first dinosaurs probably evolved in South America (New Scientist). Dinosaur fossils are found all over the world, but some think the southern hemisphere, probably South America, got them first. To come to that conclusion, Brazilian scientists “examined six dinosaur evolutionary trees published over the last 20 years – including the radically different one published last year.” Are they just trying to win one for the home turf?
Opal-Filled Fossils Reveal Timid, Dog-Size Dinosaur That Lived Down Under (Live Science). This fossil was found in a bucket of opals. It’s very rare to find an opalized dinosaur. The only place in the world may be Wee Warra, near the town of Lightning Ridge in New South Wales. Opal is a silica mineral that under certain circumstances can form rapidly. The opalized fossil came from an opal mine and was recognized by someone looking in the bucket. Paleontologists think this one was about the size of a sheep dog. Sheep dogs are not timid, though.
‘Treasure trove’ of dinosaur footprints found in southern England (Phys.org). 85 “incredibly detailed” dinosaur footprints have been found near Sussex. The discoverers of these “extremely rare” trace fossils of iguanodons, ankylosaurs, stegosaurs and sauropods admit that circumstances of preservation have to be special. “The ground needs to be ‘sticky’ enough so that the footprint leaves a mark, but not so wet that it gets washed away.” But they also must be covered up before the next wave erodes them. These ones are “so well-preserved that fine detail of skin, scales and claws is easily visible.”
‘Miracle’ Dinosaur Whose Bones Survived Being Blown Up Discovered in Italian Alps (Live Science). How did a large dinosaur get up to the Italian alps? It’s quite a tale. The discovery “thrilled scientists, who deduced that the dinosaur’s body ended up in the sea, where marine critters nibbled on its bones before it was buried. Then, it was lifted up toward the heavens as the Alps began forming about 30 million years ago.” Anyone see a Flood alternative here? After all, evolutionists believe in miracles, too:
“It is a miracle that it survived such a long chain of events: drifting away to the sea, then floating, sinking, being scavenged by marine animals, reworked by sea bottom currents, buried, uplifted within a mountain chain, and eventually blown up by human explosives,” study lead researcher Cristiano Dal Sasso, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Milan Natural History Museum, told Live Science.
Most animals do not drift, float, then fossilize. They quickly decay and all their parts are scavenged. They are not typically buried at the bottom of the sea. Whatever happened must have happened quickly.
Could Evolution Ever Bring Back the Dinosaurs? (Live Science). Answer: No. Both creationists and evolutionists can agree on that. But evolutionists, being master storytellers, love speculating anyway. With the Stuff Happens Law at their disposal, anything could happen.
Jamal Nasir, a geneticist at the University of Northampton in the United Kingdom, said he wouldn’t rule out the idea of dinosaurs evolving back from the dead. In his opinion, evolution isn’t fixed or planned. In other words, anything could happen. “Evolution is largely stochastic [randomly determined], and evolution doesn’t necessarily have to go in a forward direction; it could have multiple directions.”
Of course, in evolutionists’ consensus opinion, birds are dinosaurs, so they didn’t die out in the first place.
Darwinians are still working their puzzle (see “How not to work a puzzle,” 5 Feb 2013). They have their framework, and can move things around as long as the moyboy Darwin framework doesn’t change and they don’t run out of Darwin Flubber. With those things, a little Darwin magic and the Stuff Happens Law, they can explain anything. Instant pterosaurs? No problem. Instant archosaurs, ichthyosaurs and sauropods are easily be explained. The SHL can even take dinosaurs from the seafloor to the top of the Alps. Just say the magic words, “It evolved.”
Wouldn’t it be nice to take the Darwin glasses off while looking at dinosaur evidence? Try it.