Creationist diagram of the day

[Diamond]

http://www.nwcreation.net/wiki/images/8/8e/Not-dinos.gif

"These ancient animals are NOT dinosaurs!
Plesiosaurs - Pterosaurs - Wooly Mammoths"

From http://www.nwcreation.net/wiki/index.php?title=Dinosaurs#Dinosaur_Classification

The creationist wiki :rolleyes:

All that great software gone to waste. It's a shame.

[bignickel]

Following the link I couldn't find any reason on the site why Plesiosaurs are NOT dinosaurs. Artistic license?

Fits in with everything else at the site...

[CFLarsen]

"Wooly Mammoths" are not dinosaurs???

Oh, my! My world view is destroyed!! :eek:




......who ever claimed that they were dinosaurs?

[Floyt]

If I remember my vertebrate palaeontology courses correctly, this assertion is actually true.
The Dimetrodon (or something closely related) is a therapsid (the reptile branch eventually leading off to mammals); and both plesiosaurs and pterosaurs are reptile lineages branching off towards their own (now stunted :) ) endpoints. None of these are descended from the the Triassic archosaurians that are the ancestors of "real" dinosaurs.

edit - oops, my bad. Sez Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur) I'm talking through my caudal aperture re: pterosaurs. They are not dinosaurs, but archosaurs nonetheless.

[geni]

Originally posted by Diamond
The creationist wiki :rolleyes:

All that great software gone to waste. It's a shame.

You would not belive how tempting it is to vandalise that wiki alas thats not my style.

[Ladewig]

Although many dinosaurs are extinct by definition, it is certain that if allowed to live free from selective predation by humans, modern reptiles would reach much larger sizes than they do today and closely resemble their ancestors found in the fossil record.

[Eos of the Eons]

Large animals need a lot of food. Good luck trying to find enough food and the type of food today to feed any dino or large extinct animal, and find an environment that is warm and wet enough to support a huge cold blooded dino.

With the climate changes came changes to the dino habitats. They deny these changes?

there is much evidence that dinosaurs and man coexisted on earth

Like??????

Those non-dinosaurs in the picture are still extinct. What is the point they are trying to make? That ALL these animals were just HUNTED to extinction?? What? That's ridiculous! Find me a habitat that any dino population could survive in today.

I don't think those ignorant types could even tell you what a dino (particularly herbivores) ate, and you most certainly won't find any of their food in abundance today.

Oh, and find me a dino skeleton in a man's fossilized stomach..then I'll be impressed. Yes, mammals co-existed with some smaller types of dinos way back when. Nobody has ever said they didn't.

[Beckett]

Thanks, Floyt, for the paleontology lesson. I didn't realize or remember there are different (and correct) classifications other than dinosaur for the animals you listed. I just lumped all reptilelike creatures existing 65 million years ago or earlier as dinos. I'm almost certain I've heard of the other terms mentioned, but may have simply considered them subcategories under dinosaur. It's been many years since I've read about dinosaurs, that's my excuse. Oops, not simply dinosaurs, I mean dino-... uh... small, medium and large reptile/reptilelike creatures that may or may not have had fins, flippers, legs and/or wings that died out long, long before a creature became evolved to the point that it could Xerox its own butt. Surely, there's a better term than the description I came up with?

[Beckett]

Indeed there is much evidence that dinosaurs and man coexisted on earth.

How can this be denied when their (the website's) link to the topic dragons offers such confirming evidence? :rolleyes:

Seriously, though, while I can't say with absolute certainty that man didn't coexist with dinosaurs, pelycosaurs, and pterosaurs, oh my!, I haven't seen nor heard of any solid evidence that supports the website's assertion.

Except maybe this:

[Floyt]

Originally posted by Eos of the Eons
Find me a habitat that any dino population could survive in today.

I don't think those ignorant types could even tell you what a dino (particularly herbivores) ate, and you most certainly won't find any of their food in abundance today.


We-ell, again, careful there. There were a lot of species even of "genuine" dinosaurs, mostly of the theropod (the 2-legged carnosaur direction) variety, that were quite tiny and might fit into recent ecosystems just fine. Carnivorous reptiles the size of a chicken would be quite comfortable in your basic SA or SE-Asian rainforest (just chuck out a couple monitor lizards to make room).
As far as the smaller varieties of sauropods go, they would probably pretty exactly fill the Asian Elephant niche.

(Btw, there's been good agreement for some time now that at least some, possibly all, dinosaurs were warm-blooded)


@ Beckett:
Surely, there's a better term than the description I came up with?

Beats me, actually. I guess the highest-level catch-all term would be "extinct Sauropsida", but that won't do much for anyone. Unless you are being very discerning about it (as with that pic), dinosaurs works just fine, I think :)

[Floyt]

Where's that cool movie image from, btw? Looks like my kind of film :)

[Eos of the Eons]

Originally posted by Floyt
We-ell, again, careful there. There were a lot of species even of "genuine" dinosaurs, mostly of the theropod (the 2-legged carnosaur direction) variety, that were quite tiny and might fit into recent ecosystems just fine. Carnivorous reptiles the size of a chicken would be quite comfortable in your basic SA or SE-Asian rainforest (just chuck out a couple monitor lizards to make room).
As far as the smaller varieties of sauropods go, they would probably pretty exactly fill the Asian Elephant niche.



I'd like to see those reptiles compete successfully for space and food in those niches, especially with the other reptiles already there and adapted.


(Btw, there's been good agreement for some time now that at least some, possibly all, dinosaurs were warm-blooded)

I'd like to see the evidence.

[Floyt]

Originally posted by Eos of the Eons
I'd like to see those reptiles compete successfully for space and food in those niches, especially with the other reptiles already there and adapted.

Well, this is obviously hypothetical for the present time, as no living dinosaurs seem to be in evidence anywhere. But we are talking about surviving (the KT boundary extinction, that is) dinosaurs, right? That means that in whatever habitat they would have happened to survive, they would have been just as adapted to it as anything else living there. In fact any animal arriving later would have had to adapt to the dinosaurs already being in place and occupying niches, not the other way round.

Of course if you were talking of freshly dumping dinos into already well-stocked ecosystems, that's a different stack of vertebrae. But then why should you? :)



(warmbloodedness)
I'd like to see the evidence.

Here you go:

- a nice NPOV overview at Ye Goode Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaur#Warm-blooded.3F

- a more in-depth discussion of pros and cons (it might be a 2nd year lecture, but I thought it was quite thorough)
http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~pkoch/lectures/lecture15.html

- rundown of the evidence pro endotherm
http://dinodata.net/Discussions/dino/metabolism.html

[Eos of the Eons]

Thanks for the links. Keep in mind that humans are "endotherms", and they are thinking that some dinos could be "homeotherms".

Some Dinos could possibly be homeotherms in the conditions that the earth was back then. Those larger and even smaller dinos would have it really rough now though. The planet is not nearly as warm as it was during the times the dinos roamed the planet. We've also had ice ages that really would have taken care of any stragglers except for the remaining reptiles you see now.

They are having a problem proving endothermy in dinosaurs, they can show how some might have been, but it also shows the adaptations needed to be a larger animal. 4 chambered hearts and secondary palates would be needed to support larger sizes, but the animals didn't need to be completely endothermic if the climate was warm enough to keep their systems going.

We see many of the features needed to show how down the line animals evolved to warm blooded fur bearing and feathered animals.

John Ruben and his colleagues at Oregon State University have analyzed the snout areas of sevearl different types of dinosaurs, including small theropds. They discovered that these dinosaurs fall on the ECTOTHERM nose area line. They don't seem to have noses modified for the high ventilation rates required by endothermy.

Very interesting comaparisions of anatomy.

We can look at all that and see how animals that did evolve endothermy could outrun, outfight, etc. any meandering dinos. Put them in an ice age and watch them fall away like flies as others compete with them for resources.

[Eos of the Eons]

In fact any animal arriving later would have had to adapt to the dinosaurs already being in place and occupying niches, not the other way round.

I guess I am saying they did, and managed to seal the dinos' fates in the process. Just like the cats and rabbits drove a lot of masupials in Australia to extinction.

[Eos of the Eons]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9c/Phanerozoic_Climate_Change.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Phanerozoic_Climate_Change.png

[LostAngeles]

Thanks, (rule 8). Because of your link, I learned that the Cabazon dinosaurs are owned by some Creationist idiot.

Thanks.

*weeps*

[Floyt]

Originally posted by Eos of the Eons
Thanks for the links. Keep in mind that humans are "endotherms", and they are thinking that some dinos could be "homeotherms".

OK. Endothermy being a specific way to achieve homeothermy. My sloppy use of words.

Some Dinos could possibly be homeotherms in the conditions that the earth was back then. Those larger and even smaller dinos would have it really rough now though. The planet is not nearly as warm as it was during the times the dinos roamed the planet. We've also had ice ages that really would have taken care of any stragglers except for the remaining reptiles you see now.

Actually I don't think that particular argument holds much water. As that chart shows, most of the Permian falls into one of the four major ice ages, and amphibians and early reptiles (many of them in the size class of later dinosaurs) were all over the place. Also, an ice age slap-dang over the Jurassic-Creataceous boundary, and these two eras are the heyday of dinosaurs.
Also, as there seem to have been these capabilities for temperature control in an increasing number of species (notably the feathers and fur instances), they would have had an easier time of it than all the reptiles that are around now.

These fossils from the now-Australia part of Gondwana (the "polar" dinosaurs) also speak of cold tolerance. It certainly wasn't uniformly warm and balmy for dinosaurs all through the Mesozoic!


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Ruben and his colleagues at Oregon State University have analyzed the snout areas of sevearl different types of dinosaurs, including small theropds. They discovered that these dinosaurs fall on the ECTOTHERM nose area line. They don't seem to have noses modified for the high ventilation rates required by endothermy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


These nasal cavities seem to continue to be a problem for the endotherm line of argument, true.



We can look at all that and see how animals that did evolve endothermy could outrun, outfight, etc. any meandering dinos. Put them in an ice age and watch them fall away like flies as others compete with them for resources.

Again, that's just not justified. In terms of "length of tenure", dinosaurs are THE success story of terrestric vertebrates. You don't stick around for 250 mya if you are a pushover for any old climate change. Without the shove in the back by the Chixculub meteorite, our shrewy forebears would never have gotten a front claw in.
There's this pervasive idea that mammals are somehow "naturally superior" to dinosaurs. It would be interesting to see where the matter stands in another 100mya.

I guess I am saying they did, and managed to seal the dinos' fates in the process. Just like the cats and rabbits drove a lot of masupials in Australia to extinction.

No, that's the other case - drop-kicking an organism into an established ecosystem and seeing who happens to have the luck of the draw. They did not co-evolve in the same environment.

[Eos of the Eons]

Without the shove in the back by the Chixculub meteorite, our shrewy forebears would never have gotten a front claw in.

Something they had got their claws in to survive. There was an advantage of some sort.

The wikepidia also points out:

The Jurassic-Cretaceous period, plotted as a lighter blue bar, was intrepreted as a "cool" period on geological grounds, but the configuration of continents at that time appears to have prevented the formation of large scale ice sheets.

The world is a very different place now than during the time of the dinos. Different vegetation, different climate zones. There is a reason they no longer creep back into our lives somehow. Even large, well HUGE, mammals came to be and are no longer.

They did not co-evolve in the same environment

Mammals did start to evolve during the time of the dinos.

The now successful reptiles have adapted to the environments. They are very successful models. They do better in some environments than mammals do.

Right now the mammals have the lead, and have for a while now. They have even more traits that allow them to survive extreme climate changes than the dinos had.

Can we imagine a species that can survive even better? We should try. It could happen. I think the dinos are done for though, forever.

[BillHoyt]

Originally posted by CFLarsen
"Wooly Mammoths" are not dinosaurs???

Oh, my! My world view is destroyed!! :eek:


The other dinosaurs kicked them out of the club. It gets tough when everybody in the club is naked and these clothed dudes show up, bible-thumping about being naked and how they ought to be ashamed, and what kind of moral example are they setting for the eggs... Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. D***d jesus lizard freaks.

[Mojo]

Originally posted by Floyt
We-ell, again, careful there. There were a lot of species even of "genuine" dinosaurs, mostly of the theropod (the 2-legged carnosaur direction) variety, that were quite tiny and might fit into recent ecosystems just fine. Carnivorous reptiles the size of a chicken would be quite comfortable in your basic SA or SE-Asian rainforest (just chuck out a couple monitor lizards to make room).And Robert Bakker has suggested that birds should be classified as dinosaurs. So maybe they aren't extinct after all. ;)

[Deetee]

We can be reasonably certain of this since the Bible specifically states that....

:D