strange dinosaurs – Lee Duigon

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It would be easy, what with all the books and movies, toys and TV specials, to get the idea that experts really know what they’re talking about when it comes to dinosaurs. Easy, but wrong.

The Freddy Kreuger Dinosaur

The dinosaur pictured above, Therizenosaurus, is mostly guesswork. What they’ve got, all they’ve got to guide them, is a few scraps of broken bone, an extra-wide pelvis–live births instead of eggs?–and those extra-long, sharp claws. I haven’t read anything about live births in dinosaurs; it just struck me as an exciting idea.

Anyhow, as cool as this dinosaur is, the way scientists have reconstructed it, we really have no clear idea what it looked like.

We’ll have to wait for God to show us.

Image result for images of mononykus

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.