Posted on 07/18/2002 8:21:03 PM PDT by AM2000
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have found the remains of one of the weirdest creatures ever discovered -- a big flying reptile that lived during the time of the dinosaurs that snapped up fish with a scissors-like beak as it skimmed over the water and had a head crowned by a huge, bony crest.
Brazilian ( news - web sites) scientists Alexander Kellner and Diogenes de Almeida Campos on Thursday described a previously unknown type of pterosaur (pronounced TER-oh-sawr), winged reptiles that were cousins of the dinosaurs.
The find is important both for the oddity of its cranial crest and for the insight that the animal offers into how pterosaurs hunted for food, the researchers said. They named it Thalassodromeus sethi (pronounced thal-ahs-oh-DROH-mee-us SETH-ee), meaning "sea runner" and "Seth," for the ancient Egyptian god of evil and chaos.
Kellner said Thalassodromeus, which lived 110 million years ago, had a head that measured 4-1/2 feet long due to the size of its crest, a wingspan of nearly 15 feet and a body length of about 6 feet.
"If you didn't have the fossils, you wouldn't believe that such an animal would have ever lived," Kellner said in a telephone interview from Rio de Janeiro.
"Can you imagine such an animal just cruising over the water and skimming over the surface in your direction? It must have been, really, a vision of hell," added Kellner, of the National Museum in Rio.
Searching for food, Thalassodromeus probably glided low over the water in a brackish inland lagoon, its lower jaw skimming the surface of the water, ready to nab any tasty fish or crustaceans it encountered, said Kellner, whose findings were published in the journal Science.
Similarities between this pterosaur's flattened jaws, which end in a scissors-like beak, and the beak of a type of living bird called Rynchops prompted the belief that Thalassodromeus, like these so-called skimmer birds, skimmed over the water's surface, with the lower jaw slightly submerged, Kellner said.
"The new pterosaur from Brazil gives us important information about the feeding strategy of pterosaurs," Fabio Dalla Vecchia, a pterosaur expert at the Paleontological Museum of Monfalcone, Italy, told Reuters.
A REMARKABLE FAMILY CREST
The most eye-popping characteristic of Thalassodromeus is its large, thin, cranial crest that looks with its V-shaped end like a giant spearhead or knife blade. The bony crest makes up about three-quarters of the animal's head. Proportionately, it is the largest such crest of any known extinct or living vertebrate, with the exception of one other type of pterosaur.
"This is pretty close to the far end of weird," said Christopher Bennett, a pterosaur expert at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut who has seen the new specimen. "But pterosaurs are really weird animals."
The crest is covered by a network of grooves that Kellner said represented an extensive system of blood vessels that the pterosaur may have employed to regulate its body temperature -- in this case, cooling off.
Bennett called this "a reasonable conclusion," but said there is "an awful lot of evidence to suggest that crests were used for sexual display" in other pterosaurs.
Pterosaurs were not dinosaurs, although both were highly successful types of reptiles. Both appeared about 225 million years ago during the Triassic Period and flourished until 65 million years ago, when an asteroid or other big extraterrestrial object slammed into Earth. Some fossils suggest that pterosaurs had a fur-like body covering.
Pterosaurs were the Earth's first flying vertebrates, appearing many millions of years before birds or bats.
Thalassodromeus lived in the middle of the Cretaceous period -- the final chapter of the age of dinosaurs.
Little is known about pterosaurs because their lightly built bones do not lend themselves to fossilization. Kellner describes Thalassodromeus in the journal Science based on a well-preserved skull found in 1983 at the fossil-rich Santana Formation in northeastern Brazil. He said bones from other parts of the body have been found there, allowing him to determine the animal's wingspan and body size.
Good points! I think the scientific community that still pushes evolution know that their argument is filled with holes, yet they push forward hoping something will turn-up that will solidify their theory. The problem is, every time the Paleo's unearth something new, it seems to further disprove evolution. And I think most individuals that can think for themselves realize that micro-evolution is occurring around us all the time, by many species --the ability to adapt to our surroundings and environment was designed! What the evo's can't prove is MACRO-evolution.
But back to the 'find'. What a wonderful creature! I want more pics. Keep 'em flowin everyone. What other beautiful masterpieces does the Creator have in store for us to unearth? We can only wait and see.
MM
Commonly called the McAfee V shield.
True dinosaurs fells into the orders Saurischia and Ornithischia (bird-like dinosuars). Other important extinct orders contained the Pterosauria (pterydactyls, etc.), Ichthyosaurs and Sauropterygia (aquatic reptilians), and Placodontia. There are several other less important orders.
All of these orders (living and extinct) belong to the class Reptilia. They are properly referred to as "Reptilians." When you use the term "reptiles" today, most herpetologists (scientists who study reptiles and amphibians) will assume you are talking about the four modern orders.
It is also important to note, as in an earlier post, the bone structure of many of the dinosaur genera suggest warm-bloodedness (i.e. much more bird-like than reptile-like).
The long and the short of it is that both statements are correct - from a point of view.
http://www.joebates.com/
Check out the fourth picture down! Pretty good match you made, I'd say!
Amazing!
As I say, reptiles are cold blooded, and dinosaurs were not. Therefore, dinosaurs were NOT reptiles, although they had been mistakenly classified as such since their first discovery in the 1700s.
Outer Limits ...
What kind of shot should you use for something like that, bird or buck?
The story goes that two old boys named Luke and Ray-Bob had themselves a truck and were buying watermelons in Fla. and Ga. for $2 and trucking them to Chicago and Detroit and selling them for $2. After awhile, they noticed that they were not making any money; naturally enough, they had a big business meeting and came to the conclusion that they needed a bigger truck.
Evolutionists, of course, are using time in precisely the same manner in which the two rednecks are using truck size, and there is no real reason for anybody to take them any more seriously than they would take the two rednecks.
Now, You couldn't easily prove that Luke and Ray-Bob couldn't possibly make money buying and selling for $2 since they could always say they merely needed the next size bigger truck. There is one thing which would really demolish their case however: that, God forbid, would be for somebody like Algor to get elected president and immediately outlaw the internal combustion engine; after THAT, guaranteed, nobody would ever make money trucking watermelons from Florida to Chicago and selling them for what they paid for them.
Likewise, If comebody could provide a coercive case for the fact that American Indians dealt with dinosaurs on a regular basis, then the time-frames which evolutionists so love to use as a magic wand to enable their doctrines would be demolished, the entire doctrine of evolutionism, broken. Not that there is any lack of logical proofs that no amount of time would suffice for macro-evolution but, without those time scales, no version of evolution is even thinkable, much less possible.
In this regard, evolutionists and geologists would appear to have developed a sort of a dinosaur-in-the-livingroom problem over the last few years. Take the case of Mishipishu, the "Water panther" for instance.
Petroglyphs show him with the dorsal blades of the stegosaur and Indian legends speak of him using his "great spiked tail" as a weapon. Remarkably, the Canadian national parks which maintain these pictographs are unaware of the notion of interpreting Mishipishu as a stegosaur, and refer to him only as a "manatou", or water spirit.
Vine Deloria is probably the best known native American author of the last half century or so. He is a past president of the National Council of American Indians, and several of his books, including the familiar "Custer Died for Your Sins", are standard university texts on Indian affairs.
One of Vine's books, "Red Earth, White Lies", is a book about catastrophism and about the great North American megaufauna extinctions which occurred around 12000 years ago (using conventional dating). In this book, Vine utterly destroys the standard "overkill" and "blitzkrieg" hypotheses which are used to explain these die-outs.
Vine informs me that "Red Earth, White Lies" is one of several books which arise from decades of research including conversations with nearly every story-teller and keeper of oral traditions from Alaska down to Central and South America. He tells me that, if there was one thing which used to completely floor him early on in this research, it was the extent to which most of these tribes retain oral traditions of Indians having to deal not only with pleistocene megafauna, but with dinosaurs as well. In "Red Earth, White Lies", he notes (pages 242-243) that:
Indians generfly speak with a precise and literal imagery. As a rule, when trying to identify creatures of the old stories, they say they are "like" familiar neighborhood animals, but then carefully differentiate the perceived differences. I have found that if the animal being described was in any way comparable to modern animals, that similarity would be pointed out; the word "monster" would not be used.Only in instances where the creature bears no resemblance to anything we know today will it be described as a monster. Since no dinosaur shape resembles any modern animal, and since the reports are to be given literal credibility I must suggest that we are identifying a dinosaur. Thus, in the story of large animals at Pomme de Terre prairie in southwestern Missouri, a variant of the story suggests that the western animals were megafauna and the creatures who crossed the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and invaded the lands of the megafauna were dinosaurs. The dinosaurs thus easily displace the familiar, perhaps Pleistocene, megafauna and move west, where we find their remains in the Rocky Mountains today
In numerous places in the Great Lakes are found pictographs of a creature who has been described in the English translation as the "water panther" This animal has a saw-toothed back and a benign, catlike face in many of the carvings. Various deeds are attributed to this panther, and it seems likely that the pictographs of this creature which are frequently carved near streams and lakes are a warning to others that a water panther inhabits that body of water. The Sioux have a tale about such a monster in the Missouri River. According to reports, the monster had ". . . red hair all over its body . . . and its body was shaped like that of a buffalo. It had one eye and in the middle of its forehead was one horn. Its backbone was just like a cross- cut saw; it was flat and notched like a saw or cogwheel" I suspect that the dinosaur in question here must be a stegosaurus.
Then there is the case of the Brontosaur Pictograph on rough stone.
This petroglyph, in fact, first came to light with the Doheney Expedition to Java Supai, the report of which comes not from the National Enquirer, but from the Peabody Muscum of American Ethnology at Harvard University.
Then there is the case of the man and brontosaur petroglyph at the Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah:
A book on Indian rock art sold atthe park visitors center notes:
"There is a petroglyph in Natural Bridges National Monument that bears a startling resemblance to dinosaur, specifically a Brontosaurus, with a long tail and neck, small head and all." (Prehistoric Indians, Barnes and Pendleton, 1995, p.201) The desert varnish, which indicates age, is especially heavy over this section.
Then again, there is the picture which the people at Bible.ca snapped of Don Patten with the petroglyph of the triceroptops:
And the pterodactyle at San Rafael Swell in Black Dragon Wash, Utah:
Like I say, it's never been easy to be an evolutionist, and it's not getting any easier.
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