Tag: dinosaurs

‘So Dinosaurs Weren’t Real?’ (2015)

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Stegosaurus–from the unexplored wilds of North America

Don’t you love it when stupid tries to sound smart, and convinces himself that he’s done it?

Here is stupid trying to sound smart by claiming dinosaurs weren’t real; and as a bonus, offers a conspiracy theory to explain away fossils. As it is based on pure ignorance, the theory doesn’t quite rise to the level of the asinine.

https://leeduigon.com/2015/11/11/so-dinosaurs-werent-real/

How many times have you heard someone say they believe something because it was on TV… or because they read it on the Internet?

‘I Stand Corrected’ (2013)

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I’m still amazed, always, when I encounter conspiracy theories that say dinosaurs never existed, they’re just a massive hoax cooked up by “the corporations” or whoever. How did so many people come to think this way–if you can even call it thinking?

https://leeduigon.com/2013/08/04/i-stand-corrected/

‘God and Dinosaurs’ (2015)

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Although the founders and pioneers of the study of dinosaurs were all Christians, today’s atheists like to use dinosaurs as “proof” that the Bible’s wrong about pretty much everything.

But it was the 20th century that was the humanist century; and look what they did with it.

Dinosaurs, of course, were God’s handiwork. And as Bob Bakker–another Christian who’s a leading dinosaur scientist–says, God must have really enjoyed creating these babies.

God and Dinosaurs

The Age of Dinosaurs: Who’s Telling the Truth?

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Did dinosaurs die out 65 million years ago, or only thousands of years ago?

I’ve been reading up on this today, because I came across a startling claim that Carbon-14 has been found in dinosaur fossils and can be used to date them. C-14, an isotope of carbon, has long been useful and reliable for dating archeological finds. The thing that makes it useful is that C-14 decays into nitrogen at a consistent, predictable rate. The thing that makes it less useful is that after 100,000 years ago or so, tops, there’s no C-14 left to measure.

A site called “newgeology” has a long article about C-14 dating of dinosaur fossils, an article which makes some eye-popping claims (http://newgeology.us/presentation48.html). Let me very briefly discuss three highlights.

One: Creation scientists who found C-14 in eight dinosaur fossils presented a paper to a conference of the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society. This is the right protocol to follow. The paper was at first accepted, but then abruptly deleted from the program without a word to the authors. Because, said the chairman, “There is obviously an error in these data.” An error not even worth discussing.

Two: Creation scientists submitted samples of dinosaur fossils to the Center for Applied Isotope Studies, without revealing what the samples were. After allowing for the usual variations, the lab found the samples to be about 30,000 years old.

But when someone informed them that the items they’d tested and dated were dinosaur specimens, the lab president hit the ceiling. “The scientists at CAIS and I are dismayed by the claims that you and your team have made with respect to the age of the earth and the validity of biological evolution. Consequently, we are no longer able to provide radiocarbon services in support of your anti-science agenda.” Which does not address the issue of whether their testing procedures are all they’re cracked up to be.

Three: A part-time employee studying C-14 in dinosaur fossils at the Biology Dept. at Cal State U. Northlands was swiftly sacked after the department head found out what he was doing. “We are not going to tolerate your religion in this department!” raged the objective scientist. No emotional commitment to atheism here. That was in 2013. In 2016 the–ahem–university paid $400,000 to settle the employee’s wrongful termination lawsuit.

Can I vouch for my source, “newgeology”? No, not really. It’s a creation science website. That does not mean its writers are incapable of any kind of prevarication; nor does it mean that their claims here aren’t true.

I want to believe my fellow Christians, but the Old Earth/Evolution paradigm was so deeply instilled in me, for so long, that it’s hard to break away. And who am I to say that my interpretation of Genesis Chapter 1 is the one and only right interpretation? I’d be laughed out of the room.

At the same time, I confess to a deep distrust of Establishment Science. The Global Warming/Climbit Change Scam has abundantly demonstrated a profound lack of integrity among scientists as a subculture. Anything for politics! Anything for power! High priests of a New World Order! (And those who know me well, will understand that I have to be pretty riled up to use that turn of phrase.) Plus the fact that this subculture is riddled with atheists of the most rabid variety.

The supremely funny thing about it all is that it really doesn’t matter when the dinosaurs died out. And yet this question has been turned into an emotional battleground, with other things at stake that do matter, that matter very much: like whose word has authority, God’s or man’s? Is science divorced from God still science, or just a kind of idol worship? And so on.

I can’t prove that anybody’s telling the truth, and that does trouble me.

The Freddy Kreuger Dinosaur

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This is a dinosaur I never heard of when I was a kid, probably because its discoverer thought it might’ve been a giant turtle.

All they’ve got are a few bones, including an extra-wide pelvis, and those enormous claws. If you think the reconstruction above looks rather fanciful, welcome to the club. There’s no skull, no teeth, so it’s not possible to guess what this creature ate.

Therizenosaurus means “scythe lizard,” named for the claws. How they were used, who knows? Someone suggested, for digging into termite mounds for yum-yums. But it would take an awful lot of termites to feed this baby, several times the size of a grown man. Maybe Therizenosaurus went around like Freddy Kreuger in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, using the claws to commit murder. We just don’t know. The few fossils that we have come from Mongolia and northern China; and except for the claws, it’s all just bits and pieces.

Bob Bakker, the scientist who did more than any other to popularize the notion of dinosaurs as active, complex, and reasonably intelligent creatures, rather than just these big lumps of stupidity that hung around in swamps, once told me he thought God created dinosaurs because He took delight in them. I would guess God had a blast, creating these. And He is probably amused–tenderly!–by our efforts to figure out the fossils.

Maybe someday He’ll let us see these animals as they really were.

Mr. Nature: The Biggest Dinosaur

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Hi, Mr. Nature here–with what may be the biggest dinosaur known so far: Argentinosaurus.

As paleontologists fan out into territories untouched by earlier fossil-hunters, they find cooler and cooler dinosaurs. Argentinosaurus was published in 1993 and is called by Wikipedia “the largest dinosaur known from uncontroversial evidence.” Which means its title is only temporary, pending further study and new discoveries. It is estimated, from incomplete remains, to have been about 100 feet long and weighed about 100 tons. Give or take a few.

Now that’s big!

The video gives you an idea what this creature was like. It is based on speculation, and study of the bones, comparison with similar dinosaurs, etc. Please feel free to ignore the evolution chatter in the narration. I always do.

Bob Bakker–the scientist who, more than any other, gave the world the concept of dinosaurs as lively, warm-blooded, reasonably intelligent animals–once told me that one of the things he enjoys about dinosaurs is thinking about the pleasure God must have had in creating them. Yes, I like to think about that, too.

No one has seen a living dinosaur. We can never be sure that our reconstructions of them and their world are entirely on target. I love them because they fill me with a sense of awe: “What hath God wrought!”

As far as we know, dinosaurs no longer exist on earth. But God has the entire universe at His disposal, in which to do His pleasure. In speaking of these creatures, it’s a good idea to leave absolute certainty behind.

Admire God’s handiwork, and wonder.

Biggest Dinosaur Yet?

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Jesus defend us, the news is just so bad this morning, I can’t  bring myself to write about it. Come, Lord Jesus, come! You can’t get here too soon.

Meanwhile, scientists in Western Australia have discovered what looks like the biggest dinosaur footprint ever found ( https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3189717/worlds-largest-dinosaur-footprint-discovered-in-australias-jurassic-park/ ). Unfortunately, it’s almost axiomatic in paleontology that wherever you find a lot of footprints, you never find bones: so whatever anyone wants to say about these Australian dinosaurs, it’s all based on just the footprints. Which is better than nothing.

These great big prints were made by sauropods, more famously known as “brontosaurs,” and the biggest of the prints is almost as big as a grown man. The prints match up with the kind of prints made by the kind of feet that sauropods, going by their skeletons, are known to have had.

Scientists are also excited that they’ve found stegosaur prints in the area, the first ever found in Australia.

I remember when all the dinosaurs we knew about came from Western North America, the fringes of Western Europe, and the Gobi Desert. Nothing known from Africa, South America, Australia, Eastern Europe, etc. Now we’re finding dinosaurs everywhere we look. It’s hard to keep up with the discoveries!

Should not these discoveries inspire us with awe for God and the vastness, the majesty, and the infinite complexity of His created natural order? The more of it we learn about, the more we find we’ve yet to learn. We will never reach the limits of it!

In which we see the wisdom of God, in making it so much bigger even than our imaginations…

Memory Lane: Nabisco Dinosaurs

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Ah, there they are! The whole gang. Free Inside! For a little golden while in the 1950s, these gloriously crude little dinosaurs came free inside boxes of Nabisco cereal–Wheat Honeys and Rice Honeys, to wit. You can only imagine with what eagerness I opened each fresh box of cereal and rooted around until I found my prize.

Actually these figures were a little smaller than pictured above, which made it terribly easy to lose them in the sandbox. I still have a few of them, and I wouldn’t part with them for all the tea in China.

Looking back, I’m amazed at what little it took to make kids happy, back then. Well, these toys made me happy, at any rate. So did a 5-cent pack of baseball cards, which costs $5 now and probably makes no one happy.

All right, maybe you’re not into dinosaurs. But there were all kinds of nifty prizes in cereal, those days. Little plastic figures of characters in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp (remember that?); bronze or silver-colored plastic doodads representing famous breeds of dogs; little spacemen, The Spoonmen, that you could attach to your cereal spoon… little cars, little speedboats. All of them simple, tiny, cheap–and lovable.

I don’t even what to know what they’re offering 9-year-olds today. I’m sure it would depress me.

Another Weird Dinosaur

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See? No hands!

Poor Mononykus! First they had to change the spelling of its name, because a beetle (!) had already been named “Mononychus.” Then they had to change its original identification as a fossil bird. All in all, a most confusing critter ( https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13818712-900-science-mongolias-early-bird-fails-the-flight-test/ ).

Hi, Mr. Nature here–and to me the most confusing thing about Mononykus is why any scientist would ever have thought this animal–with its very long neck and very long tail–would have lived the lifestyle of a burrower. That has kind of gone by the boards, recently, but for a while there, you had any number of scientists saying, more or less authoritatively, that “Mononykus was a burrower.”

See, Mononykus had extremely short, but muscular, arms–but no hands. Instead of hands, its forelimbs ended in sharp and stubby spikes.

How could it ever have burrowed without its long neck getting in the way? So now the leading opinion is that Mononykus used its extremely strange forelimbs for tearing open termite mounds for yum-yums.

And so we have another prehistoric puzzle which God has given us. We can’t say He didn’t give us plenty of material in which to exercise our brains.