new dinosaur discoveries

How Big Did Dinosaurs Get?

leeduigon(patty)October 28, 2019

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Awesome and mighty are the works of your hands, O Lord!

See that tiny red dot under the dinosaur? It’s an adult human being. By comparison, the dinosaur, Amphiceolias, would have been like a walking apartment building.

So many new discoveries are being made in dinosaur paleontology these days, I can hardly keep up with them–and I do try. Now that scientists are looking in places where they haven’t looked before, in South America and Asia, they’re always finding new ones. And one of the themes of those discoveries is “bigger and bigger and bigger!”

These animals, as living things, are virtually unimaginable. There’s just nothing like them anymore. What would it be like, to see one? The earth must have shaken when they walked. And how much did they have to eat, to support such bulk? When I was a boy, the Brontosaurus was acclaimed the biggest dinosaur. But these new ones would have made one of those look like a baby.

Just contemplating these animals ought to make us feel humble. There may even have been creatures that were bigger, much bigger, than these that take our breath away. Was there, after all, no limit to how big they could grow? What must their world have been like?

Awesome and mighty are His works.

Is It a Fossil, Or Is It Memorex?

leeduigon(patty)May 13, 2017

Please ignore the appalling music, and focus on the pictures

Here’s something you don’t often hear from a scientist who is studying a dinosaur fossil:

“It might’ve been walking around a couple of weeks ago.” (http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/dinosaur-nodosaur-fossil-discovery/)

“It” has been called the most perfectly-preserved fossil of its kind, an armored Nodosaur from the mid-Cretaceous Period in Canada. They have what’s left of the animal from snout to hips. Look closely at the pictures within the National Geographic story. I find them somewhat haunting.

The fossil was found in 2011, and it has taken the Royal Tyrell Museum staff six years to free enough of it from the surrounding rock to allow it to be exhibited. It’s difficult, painstaking, and exciting work.

Alive, paleontologists estimate this Nodosaur would have been around 18 feet long and weighed about 3,000 pounds.

And I ask myself: Just how far away from our own present-day world has God removed the dinosaurs? In my Bell Mountain novels, He brings back ancient animals to usher in a new age of the world, and to demonstrate His sovereign power.

The fossil dinosaur’s face is almost well-preserved enough, when you look at it, to look back at you.

That’s what haunts me.

Biggest Dinosaur Yet?

leeduigon(patty)March 28, 2017

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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…