Tag: dinosaurs

Ninny Break: No, This is not a Dinosaur

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Image result for images of real dinosaurs found whale shark

This enormous fish, a whale shark, the biggest fish in the world, is not a dinosaur. Honest.

I stumbled upon this picture when it was used to advertise a youtube video titled, “Ten Real Dinosaurs Found.” It’s over half an hour long, and that’s why I haven’t posted it.

The whale shark really is that big, but it is not a dinosaur. For all its colossal size, it is a harmless plankton-feeder. There are also photo-shopped pictures of a whale shark attacking people, to eat them. That has never happened. Plankton-eaters do not eat large mammals.

What does it say about our general education level, that a fish is presented to us as a dinosaur? I mean, how dumb is that?

Nature is interesting enough without the baloney.

I’m Mr. Nature, and I’ve approved this message.

A Most Unusual Dinosaur

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Original arms

Check this out–and this is only the hands and forearms of a very odd dinosaur.

It’s called Deinocheirus, meaning “horrible hand,” and for a long time this set of hands and forearms was all that was known of it, other than the facts that it once lived in Mongolia and doesn’t live there anymore. Over the years, a few more bits and pieces were discovered, upon the basis of which, scientists have reconstructed this beast as an overgrown “bird mimic” dinosaur. If more bits turn up, they may have to change their view. By “overgrown” I mean, by comparison with others in the group, amazingly colossal. The others were about our size or a little bigger. You can see by the photo that this was way, way bigger.

God created dinosaurs, as He did everything else, and this is a dramatic example of the boundlessness of His imagination and the boldness of His handiwork.

God also removed the dinosaurs. We don’t know why. Maybe someday we’ll get to ask Him; but so far, He has not told us.

Where has He put them? Well, He has the entire universe at His disposal. So who knows?

One Extremely Weird Story

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Buckland’s great discovery–the first named dinosaur, Megalosaurus

I had a lot of trouble believing this, so I took some pains to check it out. And according to the official Westminster Abbey website, this outlandish anecdote is true ( http://www.westminster-abbey.org/our-history/people/william-buckland ).

Every dinosaur nut knows the name of William Buckland (1784-1856)–clergyman, scholar, and one of the founders of the science of paleontology. He was the first man to scientifically describe and name a dinosaur, Megalosaurus bucklandi, before the term “dinosaur” was ever coined. So Dean Buckland is an important figure in the history of science.

In 1848, Buckland was invited to dinner at one of England’s great country houses, where he was shown a priceless family relic in a silver locket. It was a little piece of the mummified heart of King Louis XIV, the great king of France, the “Sun King” whose reign, power, wealth, and glory shone over Europe like the sun itself.

Buckland snatched up the shriveled bit of meat and ate it before anyone could stop him. Adios, priceless family relic.

In this he was only following a lifelong custom he had of eating strange things.

Feh.

This was only the final indignity perpetrated on Louis XIV, who in his day had been the greatest man in Europe. When the French Revolution broke out, some 80 years after his death, the mob violated his tomb and destroyed his remains.

Dean Buckland, by the way, was one of the originators of the “Gap Theory” of interpreting Genesis–what we would also call an Old Earth creationist. He tried to reconcile a strict reading of the Scriptures–really, is there any other kind of reading that is properly respectful?–with current scientific findings: of which not a few were his own.

In all this strange history, there is much to contemplate.

St. Patrick’s Dinosaur

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The little drop of Irish in me (by way of my paternal grandmother’s people) urges me to get a jump on St. Patrick’s Day, two days early, to celebrate the first dinosaur skeleton found in Ireland. Actually it was discovered in 2014, but I somehow missed the story at the time. ( http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/fossilised-remains-of-new-dino-species-discovered-in-waterford-263909.html )

This is an exceedingly strange-looking dinosaur! I can’t think of another dinosaur with such long forelimbs in proportion to its total size. You’d almost think it was some kind of mammal, with a build like that–but it’s most unlikely that any paleontologist worth his salt would ever confuse a dinosaur with a mammal.

Most dinosaur finds are nowhere near as well-preserved as this: we know so many dinosaurs from only bits and pieces. Enough of this creature is preserved to confuse scientists. They haven’t been able to decide just what kind of dinosaur it is. But it’s certainly put the city of Waterford on the prehistoric map.

Well, enjoy it–another tantalizing piece of God’s creation.

 

So Dinosaurs Weren’t Real?

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Yeah, I could be writing about Campus Sex Week, and how it’s yet another Planned Parenthood project funded by you and me, and our new RINO Speaker of the House says sorry, it just ain’t possible to defund Planned Parenthood: heck, it just ain’t possible to do anything except real bad stuff that our LOL president wants…

Or I could write about the continuing torrent of abuse being poured on Ben Carson by noozies and other left-wingers who are probably levitating, with their heads spinning around 360 degrees, as they write it.

Well, maybe later. But this morning, just to show you that I do recognize that not all the lunacy is on the Left (although you can’t find any leftist thought that isn’t lunacy), I wish to mention, briefly, the Internet phenomenon of Dinosaur Denial.

Just run a search of “dinosaurs aren’t real” or anything like that, and you’ll find page after page of blogs and websites by persons who insist that dinosaurs never existed, it was all a hoax, and you must be a simpleton if you believe a single one of those dino fossils is legit.

In one example, the blogger insists that all the fossils, thousands and thousands of them, “were made up by people who wanted to travel the world and needed an excuse from the government for funding.” ( http://sochamc.blogspot.com/2011/01/blog-post.html ) Dinosaur fossils, he adds, are only found in exotic, hard-to-get-to places, “never in North America.”

Almost every dinosaur you ever heard of was found in North America, including Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus… it’s quite a long list.

It’s a very silly argument, which he does back up with some profanity. But I don’t mean to pick on him. This particular aspect of reality is denied by many individuals.

As Christians, I think sometimes we need to have the courage to say, “I don’t know.” I don’t know why God removed the dinosaurs. I don’t know why He didn’t explain it. The Bible tells us everything we need to know. It doesn’t tell us everything we might want to know, be it dinosaurs, the history of China, or how to build an internal combustion engine. But it does tell us how to live with God and with each other, and why we ought to live that way.

And there is nothing in the Bible that isn’t true. That goes for the miracles, too.

It’s one thing to deny Global Warming, aka Climate Change: because those who push it are notorious liars, never known to tell the truth, having been caught in lies innumerable times, and are obviously trying to gain wealth and power for themselves at our expense.

But anyone can, as I have done myself, go out to a likely place and find a dinosaur fossil or some other kind of fossil of another creature equally extinct.

I refuse to believe the secret dinosaur hoaxers ever got around to fabricating a Mosasaur tooth, breaking it into three large pieces, and planting it in the sand and clay hills behind Thom McCann Plaza in Middletown Township, New Jersey, just in time for me to dig it up in 1970.

A Interllectural On Dinasores

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This hear is Godziller, I seen him on TV he is a dinasore! Evry interllectural knos thare is no God becose of dinasores.

I heared that guy who dose this blog talkin to his wive, they going to wach a movie abuot dinasoares today. Well that mad me lauhg!! He dont kno nothin abot dinasores becuse he is one of them christins and christins dont know nothin at alll.

Frinstence, us interllecturals at collidge we kno that dinasores proves that christinaity is not true and the Bibel is just a boookfull of hat speech and stories thatare not truue.

Take the Tryannosoros, also knon as Teerecks. It prooves Evolutoin is trough and ther is not no God! If thear was a God, then there woodnt be no Teerecks. My prefesser he explaned it to me.

Well i got to go now, thay are goin to try to make them moth-things fall out of my head and see if they cant finely give me wimmyn cromosoames. Even Katelyn Jender she dont got wimmyns cromosoames! It makes me wunder whatt kinder cromosoames those dinasores had that mad them get so big.

Got to run! Re-member, dinasores proove the Bibel is wrong abote everthing!!

How Stupid Can It Get?

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What would you think if you saw a picture of Stephen Spielberg posing with the animatronic “sick Triceratops” from Jurassic Park? If you’re a normal person, you’d think, “Hey, that’s the sick Triceratops from Jurassic Park, and that’s Stephen Spielberg.”

But what if someone told you it was a “recreational hunter” who had just killed this defenseless animal and was posing with the body?

“No–that’s Stephen Spielberg, and that’s one of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.”

But here’s what you get when stupid liberals, who think they’re smart, see the picture ( https://www.yahoo.com/movies/jurassic-park-photo-joyce-carol-oates-121208529972.html ). “Oh, no! He shot the poor defenseless animal! I’ll bet it’s an endangered species! Oh, Save the Planet!”

Some 40,000 ninnies protested on Facebook. To add zest to the report, one of those 40,000 ninnies was academic literary icon Joyce Carol Oates, famous for writing stories that wind up making very little sense but that’s why interllecturals like ’em.

To qualify for this degree of jidroolitude, you have to be so out of it that 1) you don’t recognize Spielberg when you see him, 2) you never saw Jurassic Park, much less read the novel (“But it was by Michael Crichton, and he’s B-A-D, a Global Warming denier!”), and 3) you were so busy eating tofu as a child that you never played with toy dinosaurs and you don’t recognize a Triceratops when you see one, despite your master’s degree in Social Justice and Feminist Literature.

They run our universities. They run our public schools. They run our news and entertainment media. And they vote.

Did Dinosaurs Really Exist? Really?

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It came up in the conversation: “We sent our son to a Christian camp, and they taught him there were no dinosaurs–that unbelievers just made them up. He was confused about it for years.”

I’m always surprised when I hear anyone deny that there was ever any such thing as a dinosaur. True, dinosaurs aren’t mentioned in the Holy Scriptures. Neither are ancient China, the polar regions of the earth, or volcanoes, and Spain is the westernmost country mentioned in the Bible (did you know that?). Furthermore, although dinosaur fossils have been found all over the world, the Middle East–the region where most of the action in the Bible takes place– is singularly impoverished in that respect.

It’s also true that a lot of the things we used to “know” about dinosaurs have turned out to be wrong. When all you’ve got to go on is bones and tracks, it leaves a lot of room for error. Compared to what I was brought up on, some of these feathered monstrosities that are today’s representations of dinosaurs look altogether screwy.

And then we’ve got “behemoth,” in Job 40:15-24–a big, fearsome, awe-inspiring animal described as eating grass and having a tail like a cedar, as in a cedar tree. Whatever it was, behemoth was a herbivore–and can you think of any herbivorous land animal today whose tail would remind you of a cedar tree?

What do you suppose God was talking about, when He spoke to Job and used behemoth as an example to teach Job about His divine sovereignty?

Whether behemoth was a dinosaur or not, one thing we do know is that its like is on the earth no more.

Believing that dinosaurs existed should not threaten anyone’s Christian faith. We don’t want to put ourselves into the position of claiming that the bones–say, a Tyrannosaurus skull, or a brontosaur skeleton–were manufactured by the thousands and thousands and seeded all over the earth by some powerful and fiendishly clever conspiracy formed by persons who otherwise can hardly find their way out of a rest room. [Note: It turns out there really is a conspiracy theory that says the government, or “corporations,” or even God just made up dinosaurs as means of either spreading disbelief or, in God’s case, testing our faith.]

Yes, they are not discussed in the Bible. So what? Does anyone know all there is to know about God and His ways? Like, isn’t that what they were trying to teach poor Job?

Christians are at liberty to enjoy dinosaurs as the work of God’s hands, and to be richly amused by the endless revisions necessary to the scientific study of dinosaurs–and even, if so moved, to jump into that study themselves and lend a hand.

God and Dinosaurs

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that God created dinosaurs. No one that we know of has ever seen one, and our interpretations of the fossils are subject to never-ending revision–but still, those great big bones had to fit together some way. Maybe someday we’ll figure out what any dinosaur was really like.

The difficulty is that dinosaurs are nowhere specifically mentioned in the Bible. Oh, and another difficulty–they don’t exist anymore.

We are, however, assured that God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, so that would include dinosaurs. We are also taught that God pronounced His creation good: therefor dinosaurs, at least in His eyes, are good.

I think you will agree that T. rex and his playmates would be a little much for us to handle. So God removed dinosaurs before the human race multiplied and spread throughout the earth. Again, the Bible doesn’t get into this. That doesn’t mean we can’t prayerfully consider the matter and use our brains for something more than cooking up mischief.

It’s my personal belief that God has put the dinosaurs somewhere else, where they can’t eat people, and where numbskulls can’t try to put them into an amusement park and charge money to see them. God has the entire universe at His disposal. Anything we imagine that limits His use of it is almost certainly wrong.

I look at the re-assembled bones, the paintings, the videos, the vast outpouring of human creativity and human reason and emotion evoked by these creatures, and can only marvel at the work of God’s hands. Dinosaurs also make me reflect on how much fun it must be to be God, and able to do things like this–makes it easy to imagine the pleasure our Lord must take in His creation.

What a blast He must have had with dinosaurs!

 

New Dinosaur, Same Old Poppycock

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I love dinosaurs; always have. So when I saw a report that a “bizarre” new dinosaur had been discovered in Chile ( http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/27/bizarre-jurassic-dinosaur-chilesaurus-diegosuarezi-discovered-in-remarkable-new-find ), I hastened to read all about it.

“New” dinosaurs are being discovered all the time. It’s exciting. This one, Chilesaurus, is neat because it has the skeletal structure of a meat-eating dinosaur (theropod) but the skull and teeth of a plant-eater (sauropod–and sauropods and theropods both belong to a larger group of dinosaurs, the lizard-hipped… but I digress).

OK, Chilesaurus is new. What’s old is the way “science journalists” and the alleged scientists they interview talk about it.

The creature’s odd mix of parts, says the article by The Guardian’s science editor, show “an extreme example of mosaic convergent evolution, where different parts of an animal adapt to the environment along the same path taken by other creatures.” You’d almost think he’d actually observed it. Lemme see, now–my nose is gonna follow this path of evolution, kinda like a tapir’s nose, and my neck wants to follow this other path, like a giraffe… man, am I a mess…

But a real scientist easily outdoes this bit of verbage:

“It shows that dinosaurs were experimenting with a wide range of body types…”

This is a singularly asinine group of words. The dinosaurs were experimenting? OK, first we’ll try this body type, and run it through a couple of tests, and then we’ll try that one…

None of this stuff, including the dinosaurs themselves, has ever been observed by a living human being. There are no records to consult. We have wonderful fossil remains which move us to speculate–wisely, we hope–as to what the animals were like when they were living. But we’re laden down with this old Theory of Evolution that has to be defended at all costs, lest the wise men of the world have to answer for the crimes committed in its name, and they keep shoe-horning the dinosaurs into it.

Maybe if scientists stopped talking through their hats, I might try listening to them again.