Diggers in the fossil-rich wilds of North Dakota have uncovered a whole mummified dinosaur. The ol' fella is 65 million years old, give or take, and he's got almost all of his skin, hinting at pretty quick fossilization under extreme conditions. This is a swell find, and it will simply add to the wealth of material available for scientists to study, to glean an understanding of the prehistoric world. We learn new things, sometimes we reject old ideas when they're no longer valid or useful. But it's an ongoing process of learning, and it has no time for intractible ideologies.
So while the ID crowd spends its time flogging press releases and quote mining peer reviewed articles or making insipid fakeumentaries about the sinister "Big Science" conspiracy to suppress all the hard research they aren't actually doing...real scientists are out doing...teh science.
This is the difference between reality, and the warped vision of it that Ben Stein and Casey Luskin and John West and Bill Dembski and the DI seem to think we live in.
Which do you prefer?
Wow, a dinosaur found with actual skin! this is so awesome. This has to be the... Whoa-ho-ho-ho, hold on there, nice try, Satan. Thou art indeed a crafty ol' sumbitch.
ReplyDeleteMan, the Devil's getting better at making those things to test our faith in Jesus. He must have gotten the new iFossil-Maker model. This story sounded so cool I almost forgot evolution's been disproved by Ben Stein. Not that you guys would know about any of this, since you're still blindly following your god Dawkins.
To Rhology and Dan Marvin, we're ok, guys, false alarm. God still did it. ^_^
This is old news, but still interesting. There have been a few books published on this, and at least one special (I forget if Discovery on Demand or National Geographic on Demand have it - look for Dinosaur Autopsy - or Mummy, I think). Using a CT scanner, IIRC, they managed to discover that the tails of the Edmontosaurus were longer due to cartilage (IIRC again). It was a shame that they couldn't get more, but the rock was too thick. Maybe when they dig out more.
ReplyDeleteFrom a Scienceblogs post, the owner of the mummy will be taking it on the road.
Whoops - had a reread on that, and saw that I was wrong. This is a new one. Damn!, Sorry about my last post. Too much eyestrain made me skim too fast. Hopefully we'll be able to learn more from this one.
ReplyDeleteI do have a prediction - we'll be hearing more about how these dinosaurs prove a young earth, that they were mummified from the Flood, or some such argument. Maybe Noah mummified the dinosaur, since it was his favorite!