Tell us about the dinosaurs

[Statler Waldorf]

---

Well I am sure you are aware that the Biblical "kind" is not at the species level and there is only about 50 families of dinosaurs. I am sure you are also aware that we call a lot of dinosaurs different species when they are more likely the same dinosaur just different sizes. It's not God's fault you cannot interpret the evidence correctly, it's really not that hard to interpret. I think you will have a tougher time explaining why dinosaurs all of the sudden "appear" in the geological record and there are no species that are "almost" dinosaur or "on there way to becoming" a dinosaur? Kind of amazing considering you believe a 40 foot tall Sauropod is a descendant of a single celled organism. Someone has some blind faith and it's not me.

Perhaps you could provide a list of these 50 "familes" of dinosaurs. So what you are saying is that in order to get the over 9,000 species of dinosaurs already identified by scientists (with no apparent end in sight, since there are nearly daily discoveries) into Noah's ark, you simply reduce the number of species to 50 families (ignoring the obvious nomioclatural error of doing so) that are not recognized by anyone outside of creationist circles. Do you even understand how families fit into standard binomial nomenclature? And how many species are associated with just one typical family?

All Dinosaurs suddenly appear in the geological record? At the same place, at the same time? On what planet? Just curious because there is no place on THIS planet where ALL dinosaurs appear in the geological record at the same time. Your reference to the "no transitional fossils" argument, of course, ignores the thousands of transition species already identified as well as the fact that all species are transitional. That the genomes of all species of animals studied to date contain evidence of their single cell ancestry apparently escapes you, as well as the fact that all species are related by the fact that all lving species contain DNA, the blueprint of all life on Earth.

Oh, and Statler, the offer of meeting you at the Creation Museum for an afternoon of real field studies in geology still stands, if you dare.

---

Sorry for assuming you knew more about paleontology than you actually do. I already pointed out that the method for classifying dinosaurs into "species" (an ambiguous term) is deeply flawed. we create different species of dinosaurs even when the animals are morphologically identical but just different sizes (see all the different raptors). These of course rae not neccessarily different species, people just want to get their fame by naming a different dinosaur. Pick up any dinosaur book (even children's ones) and you will see very clearly that there is only about 50 different kinds of dinosaurs. Using the same erroneous approach, if we found fossils of goats, and one had no horns and one had one set of horns and one had two sets of horns we would assume incorrectly we have three different species of goat. Every 4H student can tell you though that one species of goat can have all these different expressions for that phenotype.

Ahh, the old bad homology argument. "Common structures indicate a common ancestor, we know this because animals have common structures!" love it. However when animals have common features or genes but are separated by oceans we just assume they co-evolved. Well I guess that goes ot show that you can have your cake and eat it too. Common strucutres could just as easily indicate an common creator so that argument holds no water. So where are these fossils that are not quite dinosaurs are but are only a few features (yet evolved) from becoming dinosaurs? You make the class uniformitarian mistake that layers in the geologic record show a history of time. Bad bad.

---

You are grasping at strews. Where is the evidence people lived longer, and forget using the bible and the pathetic Statlerian tactic of using the bible's self proclaimed authority as "evidence" of its authority. Thomas Edison had 5000 years of human technical and scientific knowledge to draw on. How many generations of studious mariners, shipwrights, carpenters, and scientists did noah have access to based on the biblical "chronology"? As to the ridiculous story of the Chinese ark that supposedly sailed, even if we buy the story at its ridiculous face value, your Noah ark would need to withstand the torrential run off resulting from rain pouring down over the entire land surface of the earth at a rate 360 inches an hour, 180 times the highest rainfall rate ever measured, to make your ridiculous 40 day flood story. So how's that comparable to anything ever seen by any ship? Your ark would be bashed to splinters like a barrel in Niagara falls before the currents to be expected.

Well your questions assumes non-catestrophic plate tectonics, which of course assumes no flood. So they are not real applicable to the situation. Water levels would not have needed to be as high as you think since much of the plate tectonic activity occured while the waters were receding. Given different climates and a more pure genome, man could have very easily lived longer in the days of Noah, so that's not much of a problem. Noah was not exactly building anything like what Edison built so that was a bad example. If you don't believe that the Chinese built ships similiar in size to the Ark and sailed to Kenya then Time Magazine disagrees with you since that is where the article appeared.