Mansourasaurus: note the little armored plates upon its back, a feature not found in the super-gigantic sauropods… so far.
(Thanks to “Unknowable” for the news tip.)
A new dinosaur, Mansourasaurus, has been discovered in Egypt. It appears to be a sort of downsized brontosaur, or sauropod, a bit over 30 feet long.
The find is significant for two reasons. It opened a previously unopened geographical area to the search for dinosaur fossils; and it appears to be more closely related to European sauropods than to others found farther south in Africa, casting doubt on the notion that African dinosaurs were totally isolated from the kinds discovered on the northern continents.
The first news reports were just about useless: the noozies didn’t seem to know what they were writing about. They were citing scientists who called it “the Holy Grail” of dinosaur discoveries, but no one troubled himself to explain why that was so.
I hope you don’t mind a dinosaur story now and then. After writing about Sarah Silverman’s profane and fatuous remarks about unborn human babies, I felt the need for something a little less toxic. We can disregard the Evolution baggage that comes with any dinosaur report, and marvel at the complexity and vastness of God’s creative work.
Very interesting. It’s surprising how someone can affix a body to bones and come up with a realistic rendering of what a critter probably looked like.
And to think that in this day and time there are still things waiting to be discovered is really quite something. I imagine there are other somewhat inaccessible places that still hold secrets.
A complete dinosaur skeleton is a find so rare as to be almost impossible. So what they do, when reconstructing a whole animal from an incomplete set of bones, is to look for points of similarity with other, better-known, more complete dinosaurs. Otherwise, they couldn’t even start a reconstruction. When pressed, they will also look for similarities to living animals.
The farther down this path they go, the bigger the potential for error. It can’t be helped: paleontologists have to do the best they can with what little they have.
We wind up with a picture of Mansourasaurus that may, if we’re lucky, resemble what it really was in life. And sometimes those pictures, in light of further discoveries, have to be substantially revised. Compare old dinosaur pictures from, say, the 1950s to today’s dinosaur pictures and you’ll see what I mean.
Here’s one for later, if you like 🙂
If I had emoticons, I’d put up a smile.
Some of these were obviously set up by humans; but it’s OK with the cats, it’s OK with us.
Thanks for the sanity break!
FYI – an easy and universal way to create your own smiley face: type a colon and a close parenthesis with no spaces in between – : ) without the space; and for a frown the same steps but with an open parenthesis. We don’t have WordPress emoticons either, but we make our own.
Glad you enjoyed the kitties 🙂
Here’s the one I make. (*!*)
Oh, he’s cute! 🙂
I find it fascinating that the scientific community has to jump through so many hoops to fit new discoveries into their evolutionary narrative. A few bones and the next thing you know, they are feeling us what their favorite color was and where they went for a stylish lunch. 🙂 They can learn a lot from bones, but the boundary between fact, theory and surmising seems a bit blurry at times.
Loved the cat video.
I saw an article about this today and was hoping it would make your blog. Egypt is perfect terrain for finding ancient items. In my Hebrew Bible class in collige they taught me how there is nothing found to prove the Hebrews were ever in Egypt. I researched it and found that the Egyptian gov’t won’t let archeologists in to even study the area. I am pretty sure what they would find if they were allowed to do so.
Well, there are proto-Hebrew graffiti in the ancient Egyptian mines in Sinai…
wow!!