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Posted on 08/13/2003 9:02:05 PM PDT by nwrep
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2 hours, 55 minutes ago
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By RAMOLA TALWAR BADAM, Associated Press Writer
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.
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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.
India has seen quite a few paleontological discoveries recently.
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.
No they are not, but you're welcome to present your argument as to why you think they are.
You are further invited to explain why:
1. Independent (repeat, independent) dating methods which rely on no common assumption give the same date results for the same samples.
2. Dating methods give correct dates for items of known age.
Any bets on whether He Who Must Not Be Addressed would run to the moderators again because I was "engaging him in my discussion" by daring to refute his words, thus abusing his right to be unaffected by my existence?
Because that's what multiple independent tests and lines of evidence indicate.
I already asked for a ruling from the moderators in my prior post on this matter. This so infuriated He Who Must Not Be Addressed that he escalated the matter to Jim Robinson before waiting for a response from the moderators. Go figure. If JR fails to respond in a timely fashion, perhaps He Who Etc. will appeal to the Pope next.
Really? Holy crow! That was about '84 or '85, wasn't it?
This is on the level of telling Christians that "all they REALLY know is that they have found some words in a book".
There is, to put it mildly, much more evidence regarding fossils than simply, "oh look, a bone".
My reaction as well. Seeing the concerns that an AiG article might somehow be discounted for coming from a creationist site, I was about to say something along the lines of "Given the arguments presented in ... [several AnswersInGenesis-based posts, including but not limited to 1375] ... how many times do we have to catch someone presenting risible arguments before we're allowed to discount them as bad thinkers, maybe even dishonest?"
(AiG, as they themselves like to note, aren't as bad as most other creationist sites as they have publicly discarded a few bad arguments. Still, we've seen a flood of AiG material on this thread and almost none of it has stood up to scrutiny.)
RadioAstronomer (who has been doing double duty at work, and will be for some time) says hi, and asks in hurt tones why we haven't been pinging him, and whether it's his breath? Or that insufferable propeller beanie? Anyway, Rades, this ping's for you!
I don't know about you all, but it's nice to get back to refuting the familiar old creationist canards, after the long spell of cheap, imported rancor. It's rather like rooting through an old box of Wacky Packages.
"Hey, I remember this one!"
"I remember laughing really hard at this one as a kid."
"You know, this one didn't make sense to me when I was 10, and it still doesn't."
"What the hell makes these things stick, anyway?"
Problem is, the first MRI paper was published by Lauterbur in 1973.
Image formation by induced local interactions. Examples employing nuclear magnetic resonance. Lauterbur, P. C.. Dep. Chem., State Univ. New York, Stony Brook, NY, USA. Nature (London, United Kingdom) (1973), 242(5394), 190-1.
Abstract: A new imaging technique called zeugmatog. is disclosed which takes advantage of induced local interactions to overcome the wavelength-dependence limitation of normal imaging systems. In the presence of a 2nd field that restricts the interaction of the object with the 1st field to a limited region, the resoln. becomes independent of wavelength, and is instead a function of the ratio of the normal width of the interaction to the shift produced by a gradient in the 2nd field. As an example, NMR zeugmatog. was performed with 60 MHz (5 m) radiation and a static magnetic field gradient corresponding, for proton resonance, to 700 Hz/cm. The test object consisted of two 1-mm inside diam. thin-walled glass capillaries of H2O attached to the inside wall of a 4.2-mm inside diam. glass tube of D2O.
End quote
By 1977, Mansfield and Ernst had also independently published imaging methods; Ernst's is the one mostly used today.
You're kidding, right?
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