Dinosaurs aren't extinct, just very rare!

[bascule]

Hilarious

 

http://christiananswers.net/dinosaurs/video.html

[Phi for All]

I like how they say the stories about huge reptiles during human history may have been embellished in later years but HAD to be based in fact to begin with. Like there is no way someone could have come across fossil bones and made up stories to go with them.

 

There's twenty minutes of my life I'll never get back.

[PhDP]

This ground-breaking educational film reveals historical and archaeological evidence that dinosaur and man once co-existed.

 

Even if it's not what they meant, this affirmation that we has co-existed with dinosaurs (and still do) is true. Birds are dinosaurs.

 

I can't believe creationism, even maybe christianism as a whole, won't suffer in the near future for all those absurdities they're promoting.

[Edtharan]

Even if it's not what they meant, this affirmation that we has co-existed with dinosaurs (and still do) is true. Birds are dinosaurs.

Yes they are findinf more and more physiological and archiological evidence that birds are just a feather type of dinosaur. Infact the are finding evidence in foassils that some dinosaurs were feathered like birds.

 

So for those that say the evolution could not hapen because there has never been any intermetiate forme (from dinoausrs to birds for example) then there is no evidence for it. the fossil evidence is now showing that there are intermediate forms going from dinosaurs to birds. And this is compleate enough that we can't actualy point to a fossil and say that that is definitly a bird like dinosaur, but it is definitely a dinosaur or that is a dinosaur like bird but is definitly a bird. They mrege from one to the other through the intermediate forms.

 

And this is with a fossil record still not even close to 100% complete.

[JohnB]

An interesting if useless use for old data. (And a waste of 20 minutes:-) )

 

The branch of pseudoscience, (maybe, perhaps, one day a science) is Cryptozoology.

 

Strange as it may sound, the entire world is not explored, and from some of these areas come stories of giant creatures. They may or may not exist, but in most cases no western researcher has actually gone to have a look.

 

On the other hand, if someone actually found T-Rex or his descendents living in the Congo rainforest, would he announce it? The unexplored areas of our world are generally in the poorest parts of the planet. Anyone with a basic knowledge of human nature and Third world politics knows that there would some rich bastard willing to pay very well to be the first person to bag a dino and put his great big head on the trophy wall. (And plenty of people willing to take the bribe to let him.)

 

The point was not made but is relevent, that the decrease in reported sightings of "sea monsters" did not come about with the "Age of Reason" but with the increase in the use of steam over sail. Sailing vessels are silent whereas you can hear a prop for miles underwater. Most animals learn quickly to keep away from those noisy things. Is there a person on this board that is willing to go on record as stating that we know every species that exists in our oceans?

 

Our ancestors survived the bang 65 million years ago, is it so unreasonable to suppose that some of the dominant species of the times survived also?

 

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but 10 metre long lizards were known to be alive in Australia as little as 10,000 years ago. Did they all die out then? How can we prove it? I have seen plaster casts of lizard footprints some 14 inches across from the 1970's.

 

This is an area in the Catch 22 of science. It attracts the crazies which is of no help to the investigation at all. Because of the crazies, no reputable scientist will study the area because he/she would lose their reputation for associating with crazies. Because no reputable scientist will study the area, it is accepted by the rest of the scientific community as false because "If there were something to it, then a reputable scientist would study it." Catch 22.

 

Think about it, what would happen to a researcher who said he was going to investigate the possibility that some sightings were real and that pteranosaurs (for example) had survived to the present day? He'd be lecturing in "How to end a career in one easy statement" wouldn't he?

 

None of the above is meant in any way to suggest I support the creationist garbage of the link above. If some megafauna survived until recently, that does not invalidate evolution.

 

For my part, I'm just asking "Can we be so sure that they're all dead?"

[bascule]

For my part, I'm just asking "Can we be so sure that they're all dead?"

 

The skeptic in me responds: "If they were really alive, I would've expected some hard evidence by now"

[JohnB]

Bascule, I tend to agree.

 

But it's a really big ocean and there are a hell of a lot of islands. Add to that that the Congo region (for example) is not a place that most people want to play in for a period of years.

 

BTW, what would you call "hard" evidence? Photographs are universally denounced as fraudulent. Plaster casts of the tracks are deemed hoaxes.

 

Strangely enough, those who look into this topic are loath to put a bullet into a creature to prove they exist.

[Sayonara]

Our ancestors survived the bang 65 million years ago, is it so unreasonable to suppose that some of the dominant species of the times survived also?

We know in fact that plenty of them did. The most obvious extants would be sharks and crocodiles.

 

For my part, I'm just asking "Can we be so sure that they're all dead?"

It's not so much that we are sure they are all dead, but that there is no reason to assume they aren't if we don't see evidence of any given species once its fossil record stops or dwindles.

 

That's why coelocanth was such a surprise - the animals were there but we lacked any evidence of their history over a significant window.

 

The reasons people are unwilling to believe that there is an island somewhere that has sheltered a sustainable population of dinos for millions of years run as follows:

 

- Due to continental drift and volcanic activity forcing migration or extinction, there are few islands that would be both good candidates for sustaining the requisite ecosystem, and also geographically containing the species.

 

- Since virtually every square meter of the planet has been observed and recorded via satellite, such a concentration of large animals and their waste products would be blindingly obvious, particularly since islands with the properties above would be of special interest to a lot of scientists.

 

Just these two little hitches make it exceedingly unlikely that there is any Skull Island type habitat out there. Which is a shame, because it would be ace.

 

 

 

It's certainly possible there's all sorts of monstery fun going on in the ocean though.

[bascule]

BTW, what would you call "hard" evidence?

 

Fossils, or fossil imprints. Either makes a much more compelling argument than "Arr, thar be DRAGONS HYRE"

[JohnB]

Bascule, my personal belief is that the legends of Dragons stems from a time when the last of the Holocene animals survived. We know that the big monitor lizards were still alive in Oz a mere 10,000 years ago. Is it so unthinkable that some were on the EurAsian landmass as well?

 

A small and dwindling number finally wiped out? It would be this type of creature I would expect to find on an asland. Please note, these are not dinos, but a later monitor lizard. On rereading the thread I realised I changed tack half way through without telling anyone.

 

On to the dino idea.

 

Sayo, it's true that the world is satellite mapped, but so what? Satellite pics of the Congo, Amazon or a dozen other places would show what? The tops of trees about 100 feet off the ground.

 

I disagree that signs of the animals (if they exist) would be blindingly obvious. Have a good look at South America, we know that there are cities lost in the rainforest but we can't see them. You could hide an entire ecosystem in there without it being visible to a satellite.

 

If you have a look at the photo http://www.gerdludwig.com/images/blowups/Amazon/aerial.jpg you'll see what I mean. You're looking at tree tops about 100 feet off the ground. You could hide an armoured division in there.

 

I've got a hundred square miles of rainforest not 3 miles from my house that if there were dinos there you wouldn't see them from a low flying aircraft, let alone a satellite. (I'm not suggesting they are there, just that you wouldn't see them if they were. )

 

What would be possible with ten thousand square miles? You will not know what is under the canopy until you go look, and we haven't really gone looking. That's all I'm getting at.

 

For scale, Queensland has some 3,500 square miles of rainforest as Heritage Listed. God knows how big an area there actually is here. A surprising amount is only known from aerial observation, we haven't actually walked there and had a look at what's under the canopy yet.

 

I would point out that the Wollemi pine was discovered only 11 years ago and it was in general forest only 200 km out of Sydney. If we can miss these in 200 years of exploration, what may be missed in the less well settled parts of the world?

[Edtharan]

A simple biological fact is that the larger an animal is the more foor it needs. Also a simple physical fact is the larger an animal is the more room it need to move in.

 

A large dinosaur, say something like a apatosaur, would need a large area of open grassland to move around in, it could not hide in the dense rain forests and such. Also it would need to consume a large amount of vegitation. A preditor would be worse because they need to have a large amount of prey to feed on (the prey needs to breed and grow in size to provide a decent meal).

 

Of course not all dinosaures were big, most were smaller (chicken to dog sized). Animals such as these could concevable be still hiding out somewhere like the amazon, but it would not likely be a large population as a large population would likely show up is some way (tracks, feeding areas, local stories, used by locals, droppings, carcases, nest sites, etc).

 

Also in these areas there already exist large, top level preditors that would put pressures on these small populations. Which leads to another way of sampeling a potential site for dinosaure existance.

 

A theoretical dinosaur population would have some impact on the food availabe for other animals in an area, reducing the available food. This would show up as an indirect evidence for the existance of a population of undiscovered group of animals inhabiting an area, and could have this indirect effect over a much larger area than their needed territory (as it will involve not just animals compeating for food, but also the animals that would prey on them).

 

So there would be no large animals still present, but a small population of smaller animals could still exist in a remote location. However this small population would be very much subject to extinction pressures and so would have difficulty surviving without human interfereance. Trophy hunter would not nessesarily be interested in a dog sized dinosaur (Hunter: "Look I killed me a dinosaur". Other person: "So what. I've seen lizards bigger than that." ). Instead, they may become part of the illigal stuffed animal trade, or as exotic pets.

 

There are a few reptiles that have survived scince the age of the dinosaurs (there are other animals like sharks, fish, etc). One the Newzeland Tuatara (spelling?) is a reptile (not a lizard) that has survives scince the age of the dinosaurs, and is infact a truly bizzare animal as it has a vestigal third eye in the middle of its head (it is a light sensitive patch that is covered by a scale). And of course the largest reptilian that has survive scince the dinosaurs is ofcourse the Crocadilians (Crocadiles, Aligators, etc), some of which can grow very large.

 

A large enough population of animals (about 1000) to successfully breed over a long time without human interference an aid, would make a significant imapct on the environment that it exists in to show up either by direct evidence (tracks, nests, etc) or with indirect evidence (impact on other spieceis in an area, etc) that curent survays would most likely have been able to pick up some reliable evidence of their existance. So it is still posable for a small population of dinos to still exist the chances of it are very small.

[insane_alien]

anyone notice at the start the cartoon t-rex seems to be getting intimate with the triceratops.

[Sayonara]

Sayo' date=' it's true that the world is satellite mapped, but so what? Satellite pics of the Congo, Amazon or a dozen other places would show what? The tops of trees about 100 feet off the ground.

 

I disagree that signs of the animals (if they exist) would be blindingly obvious. Have a good look at South America, we know that there are cities lost in the rainforest but we can't see them. You could hide an entire ecosystem in there without it being visible to a satellite.[/quote']

Thermographical imaging.

[JohnB]

Bloody good post Edtharan.

 

Just to be clear I do not consider the idea of the isolated group probable, just considering it as possible. Should such a group survive, I would expect it's numbers to be very small. If they aren't extinct, they very soon will be.

 

Wouldn't the size of the prey population needed by predators be dictated by the metabolic processes of the predator though? The only large land animals left in the wild in Oz are the Kangaroo and Wallaby, yet places like Kakadu manage to support hundreds if not thousands of very large Crocs.

 

Obviously an active hunter would have a higher metabolism than the passive hunter and need more food, but what if it's only active when hunting?

 

The difficult part of the debate is that we can only go on what we know from information 65 million years old. The world has changed in that time and I would expect the look and behaviour of any dino survivors to change also. Hence a claim of seeing a T-Rex would be very suspicious, it shouldn't be a T-Rex, it should have become something else by now. Both physically and behaviourally.

 

Be that as it may, I simply file the idea of a small, isolated population of dino survivors in a remote location under the heading "Possible but Unlikely."

 

Sayo, high resolution thermographic imaging is usually only used when there is a confirmed target to check. To try to search a forest by that method with no target in mind would take years. As I said earlier, there are still entire cities missing. We do use the imaging to gain knowledge of the extent of an achaeological jungle site, but only after we know the site is there.

[Edtharan]

Remote sensing (like IR and arial photos or satalite imaging) would not be useful to pick up individual animals in a jungle environment. Not only is there other sources of IR emmisions (sunlight reflections, decomposing plant matter, radiated heat that has accumulated over the day, other animals, etc), but the fact that there is a canopy to the forest. The leaves and other plant matter will absorb IR radiation and what it doesn't absorb it will either scatter (reflections) or break up its general shaoe with sections that do absorb IR.

 

Also resolution is a big problem. The higher the resolution that you require the more expensive it is and the longer it will take to trall through the massive amount of data to find any group of animals. To have any chance of determining an animal to be a unique spiecies by remote IR the you would need an extremely high resolution (less tha a cm per pixel at least but the higher the better). This high a resolution is not comercialy available (the existance of spy satalites of this power is debatable though ). Stll if you could get this resolution than you would litteraly have to trall throught the data of the jungle centimetre by centimetre to find the animals and identify them as a unique spiecies.

 

This resolution problem and the data it generates is the main reson that many remote sensing projects don't just use realy high resolution systems. They just use a resolution that is optimal for the data processing capabilities available and the detail needed for the project. And also why the use them for locationms that are already known.

 

Remote sensing is not usually used to find things, but to gain more infomation about locations already known (some times when looking at this data they will discover an anomaly in the data and investigate, and so find something).

 

The most likely way that any small, theoreticaly existant, group of medium sized dinosaurs would be found is with boots and eyes (ie going there and looking), but of course you would need to know roughtly where to look so it would probably be as part of some other expedition or by nearby, local populations of people.

 

Wouldn't the size of the prey population needed by predators be dictated by the metabolic processes of the predator though? The only large land animals left in the wild in Oz are the Kangaroo and Wallaby, yet places like Kakadu manage to support hundreds if not thousands of very large Crocs.

True, not only for carnivores but also for the vegitarians.

 

There is fossil evidence that dinosaurs were warm blooded (endothermic). There is a fossilised heart of a dinosaur that was examind with a CT scanner that made a 3D model of it. In this image it showed that the heart was more like the heart of a warm blooded animal (similar to a bird's) that it was to a cold blooded reptile. Other evidence is in fossilised trackways of dinosaurs. These trackways show that a dinosaur could achive fast running speeds as well as being able to maintain them for long periods of time. No known cold blooded animal has ever been able to achieve these feats. Most cold blooded animals can and do achieve fast speeds, but can not maintainthem for a long period of time (I'll chalenge any croc to a marathon any day and I know that I will win as I am warm blooded). Also the decendants of dinosaurs are birds and these are definitely known to be warm blooded. So from this evidence it seems that dinosaurs were most likely warm blooded (or somthing similar) and so would need a high metabolic rate to maintain thier teperature.

 

The difficult part of the debate is that we can only go on what we know from information 65 million years old. The world has changed in that time and I would expect the look and behaviour of any dino survivors to change also. Hence a claim of seeing a T-Rex would be very suspicious, it shouldn't be a T-Rex, it should have become something else by now. Both physically and behaviourally.

The only known direct decentant of dinosaurs that is still alive today is the birds, and these animals show many similarities to that of dinosaurs. Infact there is now fossil evidence that some dinosaurs had feathers, and this further blures the line between birds and dinosaurs. It could be that birds are realy dinosaurs that have evolved to use their feathers for flight (that they are pretty much just flying dinosaurs with a beak).

[ecoli]

The title of the thread doesn't lie! Today, dinosaurs are so rare that nobody has ever seen one alive, nor any evidence of their existance.

[padren]

The title of the thread doesn't lie! Today, dinosaurs are so rare that nobody has ever seen one alive, nor any evidence of their existance.

 

Does that make you paleo-agnostic?

 

 

 

I do love how the video presents the stories of heresay and paintings as "new mounting evidence" ready to challenge classical theories - I don't think the author or his collegues ever even tried to comprehend how much evidence goes into any of the theories in natural sciences.

[Sayonara]

Remote sensing is not usually used to find things' date=' but to gain more infomation about locations already known (some times when looking at this data they will discover an anomaly in the data and investigate, and so [i']find[/i] something).

 

The most likely way that any small, theoreticaly existant, group of medium sized dinosaurs would be found is with boots and eyes (ie going there and looking), but of course you would need to know roughtly where to look so it would probably be as part of some other expedition or by nearby, local populations of people.

I'm not suggesting for a minute that one can view Dino TV by using infra red. I'm suggesting that a population of that nature may cause variations from the norm that would merit the eyes and boots investigation you suggest by the many parties interested in such things.

[Edtharan]

I'm not suggesting for a minute that one can view Dino TV by using infra red. I'm suggesting that a population of that nature may cause variations from the norm that would merit the eyes and boots investigation you suggest by the many parties interested in such things.

Possably, for large animals or large populations of animals, but if either of these existed then they would most likely have been found by now as it is hard to hide either of these situations.

 

I'm not suggesting for a minute that one can view Dino TV by using infra red.

To find the area that the animals use (so that you can go out and prove their existance) you will need to get several images of the animals. Also several frames of images will help identify them as animals, rather than oddly shaped patches of IR relection or emmision. Most IR images that you will see is either highly processed already (and not raw data) with the specific objects that you are looking for highlighted in some way, or in the movies (which is just a special effect).

 

The IR images that you might see on the News for a police chase has been highly processed to highlight the specific IR signatures that humans and vehicals produce to aid the police intheir efforts. If you watch closely you will notice that even the police dogs do not show up as good as humans do in these images.