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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.
I "obsess" on things that enable a violation of civility. I "obsess" on things that allow people to name-call and belittle under the guise of harmony.
You may shrug off what you like. If my observations are wrong I'm sure that someone will point that out.
If it isn't pulled in another hour!
Gee and when I ask a question about zero gravitional fields within a sphere, my motivation is "stump the dummy" or last man standing.
Actually, that sounded correct as written (unless I have a wrong idea about your geometry), because the gravitational energy is negative. If you double the gravitational energy, it's correct to say you are decreasing it.
The part that didn't sound right to me is where you said something about the field decreasing inside the shell.
Ooops! I was figuring the shell is pulling up on some guy standing on the surface of B. But I know now what you're going to say. The net addition is zero inside the shell by symmetry, so the guy on the surface of B weighs the same.
At least, I think that's what you're going to say. (It's not hard to prove I'm not a physicist.)
Sorry for the delay, out mowing the lawn.
You seem to harbor some misunderstandings about astronomy. I have assumed a constant speed of light, because it works. If you change the speed of light, physics changes. The most fundamental equations in physics are based on the speed of light, and if that changes, strange effects would be observable, such as the visible spectra of stars and galaxies would be unrecognizably different (unlike the recognizably different effects you get from redshifts), as well as other effects. Remember, a certain type of star in another galaxy looks exactly the same in every observable catagory measurable is the same type of star in our galaxy. This means that the physical laws that exist in that part of space is the same as the physical laws in our part of space.
I'm not saying speed=distance. What I'm saying, since the speed of light is constant, is that for every light year a photon travels, we are looking back one year in time. That means if a star is 3.16 light years distant, we are seeing photons 3.16 years from when they were emitted.
Remeber, that laboratory experiments concerning the speed of light take place in a special medium, which is not the same medium as that which exists in space. If that medium were to exist in space, it would have to exist in a finite sphere, only around our sun and no other (I'll leave that thought experiment to the reader), and not exist around any other star. Why would you think that physical phoenomenon would take place like that?
There is also some evidence that the speed of light is in fact slowing and it has been measured to have slowed down over time.
I'm assuming you are referring to Setterfield's work on C-decay. It doesn't work, for the reasons I explain above. It's impressive, though, the contortions he tries to go through to get it TO work, however unphysical they might be.
Yes! That's it exactly.
For those of you who reading don't follow what VadeRetro just said, let me try to explain.
Let's suppose you're sitting on the surface of the Earth, and disagreeable aliens suddenly enclose the Earth in a very big, very massive, spherical shell. What would you feel? In any direction away from you, you would be pulled by some part of the shell. Which part would win? In what direction would you be pulled?
Let's draw a cone of some angle, in some direction, with its vertex (the pointy part) right at your center of mass, and consider the part of the sphere that falls within the cone. It lies a certain distance from you, it has a certain size, and its mass is proportional to that size. Its pull is counterbalanced by some other piece of the sphere, lying in the opposite direction, which has some other size, mass and distance. The size (mass) of each piece increases as the square of its distance from you, but the gravitational pull decreases as the square of the distance. These factors cancel, so the pulls from these two pieces cancel exactly.
This same trick works in every direction, and at every point within the sphere, so you--and everything else within the sphere--feel no net gravitational pull from it. All you feel is the pull of the Earth, just as before.
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