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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.
In all of them.
Do you have nothing more than belittling in your descriptions? I thought you in good faith agreed not to do this sort of thing.
No, since in astronomy, there is something called the distance scale. It is a series of experiments and observations that use a variety of astronomical phoenomenon to build a reliable set of distances from sources as close as the nearest star to distant quasars and galaxies.
The Key Project of the Hubble Space Telescope was to minimise the amount of error in the distance scale and to use those measurements to determine the Hubble Constant to a good deal of precision.
The distance scale starts off with a fairly straightforward trigonometric relation called the Parallax Distances using parallax are rock solid. However, they aren't good to very far, only about 10,000 light years. However, given a constant speed of light, that age of the universe already gives contemporary creationist theory fits.
Next on the distance scale utilizes statistics, and basic observations of a large amount of stars to come up with a constant diagram (called the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram) which shows that stars of a certain color and brightness tend to lay along a certain region of it. Give the spectrum of a star and its brightness in the sky, you can find the distance of it to about 20%.
From there, you can hook up with Cepheid variables. These variable stars have a period dependent on the mass of the star. Mass depends on absolute luminosity of the star, and from there you can determine a distance. This measurement to several nearby galaxies was the first relationship that the Hubble Key Project used to find the distances to several nearby galaxies.
To check their distances, they used a number of other distance measurements such as the Thully-Fisher relationship, Type-1a Supernovae, and other, more esoteric methods.
So you see, the concept of things at large distances (and because of the speed limit of light, large ages) is something that is not built on by a whim, but is an interconnected set of concepts and evidence. You can't just knock one down and expect it to fall like a house of cards. It is here to stay.
This is ridiculous! When a guy misses, you can tell him he missed. If you can't say that, you can't say anything.
When you cancel the mass/energy of the universe with the gravity of the universe, you get a sum very close to zero. Hawking calls it the biggest free lunch ever.
Choose different words.
Every one of those.
Why such a preoccupation with me joining the agreement? You do not seem so interested in having Sabertooth join the agreement.
The discovery of any one of these would be very, very cool. However, you do realize of course that the Theory of Evolution concerns itself with when species split off from one another - it doesn't care how long a species will last before it becomes extinct?
You don't think that finding a small population of living dodo birds or carrier pigeons or Tasmanian wolves would invalidate theories of how they came about in the first place, do you?
Your link gives me pause. Suppose you have 2 masses A and B separated by some distance R1. Is there a non-zero gravitational field between them?
They're in far worse shape than the Evo-atheists.
I thought motive guessing was also prohibited by the agreement.
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