New Dinosaur Species Found in India

BOMBAY, India - U.S. and Indian scientists said Wednesday they have discovered a new carnivorous dinosaur species in India after finding bones in the western part of the country.

The new dinosaur species was named Rajasaurus narmadensis, or "Regal reptile from the Narmada," after the Narmada River region where the bones were found.

The dinosaurs were between 25-30 feet long, had a horn above their skulls, were relatively heavy and walked on two legs, scientists said. They preyed on long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs on the Indian subcontinent during the Cretaceous Period at the end of the dinosaur age, 65 million years ago.

"It's fabulous to be able to see this dinosaur which lived as the age of dinosaurs came to a close," said Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. "It was a significant predator that was related to species on continental Africa, Madagascar and South America."

Working with Indian scientists, Sereno and paleontologist Jeff Wilson of the University of Michigan reconstructed the dinosaur skull in a project funded partly by the National Geographic (news - web sites) Society.

A model of the assembled skull was presented Wednesday by the American scientists to their counterparts from Punjab University in northern India and the Geological Survey of India during a Bombay news conference.

Scientists said they hope the discovery will help explain the extinction of the dinosaurs and the shifting of the continents — how India separated from Africa, Madagascar, Australia and Antarctica and collided with Asia.

The dinosaur bones were discovered during the past 18 years by Indian scientists Suresh Srivastava of the Geological Survey of India and Ashok Sahni, a paleontologist at Punjab University.

When the bones were examined, "we realized we had a partial skeleton of an undiscovered species," Sereno said.

The scientists said they believe the Rajasaurus roamed the Southern Hemisphere land masses of present-day Madagascar, Africa and South America.

"People don't realize dinosaurs are the only large-bodied animal that lived, evolved and died at a time when all continents were united," Sereno said.

The cause of the dinosaurs' extinction is still debated by scientists. The Rajasaurus discovery may provide crucial clues, Sereno said.

In 1997, villagers discovered about 300 fossilized dinosaur eggs in Pisdura, 440 miles northeast of Bombay, that Indian scientists said were laid by four-legged, long-necked vegetarian creatures.

Indian scientists said the dinosaur embryos in the eggs may have suffocated during volcanic eruptions.

As I suspected, some of the plumper targets have been sniped at, so I'll pick some remainders. Give AiG credit, they seem to have been trying to find some new stump-the-dummies material.

Before I start in, here's a good by-the-numbers treatment of the standard stuff. Comets are number 3. The magnetic field is number 11. Helium is 14. Mud is 21. Salt is 24. History is number 28. I recommend a thorough read of the whole thing, however.

To business (what is left of it), then!

2. Not enough mud on the sea floor.

I know, I already said "Mud is 21." But I want to add something.

Like the salt and helium arguments, the mud arguments ignores that the substance being surveyed does not stay around. At least, mud does not stay mud forever. Under pressure, muds of different sorts turn into sedimentary rocks of different sorts, mostly shales.

5. Many strata are too tightly bent. I don't remember seeing this one before, so I'll amuse myself by guessing the gimmick rather than looking for a refutation researched by a real scientist. You see, it's always a Stump-the-Dummies gimmick with these things.

I think the gimmick is that the speed of bending probably influences whether or not a seemingly brittle object cracks under bending forces. Let's get the whole text of that one.

In many mountainous areas, strata thousands of feet thick are bent and folded into hairpin shapes. The conventional geologic time-scale says these formations were deeply buried and solidified for hundreds of millions of years before they were bent. Yet the folding occurred without cracking, with radii so small that the entire formation had to be still wet and unsolidified when the bending occurred. This implies that the folding occurred less than thousands of years after deposition.

It isn't just the degree of bending being cited as the problem, it's the lack of cracks. But I assume the AiG-ers are modeling the crack/non-crack behavior of the strata based upon the bending occurring over some very short interval.

Why does your camera's shutter spring get "tired" if you put it away in the cocked position for two years? (That is, when you take it out and try to take pictures, the spring doesn't move the shutter fast enough for the marked exposure times anymore.)

The molecules adjust themselves slowly, under pressure. You can almost think of the spring re-hardening into a new position. Many substances exhibit a slow but observable molecular memory as they "adjust" to a certain physical relationship. By doing this, they slowly bleed and dissipate physical pressures on them.

That's without wondering about at what temperature the particular strata were metamorphosed. I suspect AiG assumes a cold process, but most metamorphosing is done under pressure and heat with a lot of time involved.

6. Injected sandstone shortens geologic 'ages'.

A big deal is made over the ability of a sandstone layer to intrude into another layer. Here's another creation-oriented site that treats the alleged problem in more detail: Clastic Dykes.

From that site:

One series of dikes of special interest to one seeking to determine the age of sediments in the earth is found in the Front Range of Colorado north of Pikes Peak (Gross 1894, Roy 1946, Vitanage 1954, Harms 1965). In this case, sand from the Cambrian Sawatch sandstone has intruded into the Precambrian Pikes Peak granite during the Laramide Orogeny. This orogeny is the main uplift forming the Rocky Mountains which occurred relatively late in geologic time. There is disagreement as to whether the intrusions forming these dikes are from below or from above; in this case the time discrepancy is so great that this point makes little difference. The sandstone dikes contain fragments from the Permian-Pennsylvanian Fountain Formation, indicating that at least this formation was present at the time of intrusion. On a geologic time scale this represents a period of at least 250 million years during which the Sawatch sandstone remained uncemented. This seems especially unusual since just above the Sawatch are several carbonate layers that could provide an abundant source of cement for the Sawatch. If, as field evidence indicates, intrusion took place during the Laramide Orogeny, the Sawatch sandstone would have had to remain uncemented for more than 400 million years. On the other hand, if, as expected, dikes are formed at approximately the same time as their host rock, or at least the cracking of the host rock during the Laramide Orogeny in the Pikes Peak granite case, then there must not be much time difference between the Cambrian and the Laramide Orogeny which supposedly occurred more than 400 million years later!

I have highlighted the section which says that there is uncertainty whether the Cambrian sandstone intruded into the Precambrian granite from below or above. It's supposedly unimportant, but since it's almost like asking whether or not the Precambrian was before or after the Cambrian, let's clear it up.

This photo shows the Cambrian Sawatch Sandstone overlying the Precambrian Pikes Peak Granite. Like the unconformity near the bottom of the Grand Canyon or in the Tetons or near Ogden, Utah, this one consists of Cambrian sandstone overlying Precambrian igneous or metamorphic rock. Its difference is that here, the sandstone was deposited slightly later in the Cambrian than in the other places mentioned. It is younger because the shoreline was moving eastward as the ocean transgressed. By the same reasoning, we can guess that the Cambrian sandstone above the unconformity in Wisconsin is even younger. It is.
A Website on the Unconformity.

So we see that the sandstone lies over the granite whose cracks it intrudes, which makes sense since a quick check confirms that the Cambrian is still considered later than the Precambrian.

Now, let's go back to the issue of bending and cracking. We have a granite layer that was brittle enough to develop cracks during mountain-building. We have a sandstone layer which was "somehow" viscous enough to flow in to fill the cracks.

I don't know about you, but I can see why real geology is not agonizing over this one. Either the sandstone is "hardened" or it isn't. But even a "cemented" sandstone will seem viscous compared to the highly crystalline and rather solid granite. At any event, the sandstone overlies the granite and is much younger. If the underlying granite cracks, the sandstone isn't going to float on nothing, especially under the kind of pressures involved.

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