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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 told the story in overlong fashion here. The capsule version:
Setterfield claims that Adam can be standing in the Garden of Eden on Day 6 of Creation Week and everything works the same as it does now, despite light being 11 million times faster than now and the sun and the earth experiencing nuclear reactions speeded by a similar factor. That's why the earth and the sun "look" old according to Setterfield: when light was fast, nuclear reactions went fast.That could be a problem because Adam is getting bombarded with vastly more radiation than a person standing in a garden would be today. Setterfield's answer--never mind how he gets there--is to say that each photon has proportionately lower energy.
My main objection was that human eyes don't see photons of such low energy, since they are very long-wave. And I never got a convincing answer to why that's not a problem.
Ahh, but did Setterfield include the errors of the experiments that he used as data points? No, he did not. Remember that the measurements he is using, some of them are fairly old? What do you think the errors are of those measurements? Just because Joe Bob Physicist came up with 320,000,000 meters per second 100 years ago doesn't mean a thing if his error was +/- 40,000,000. Here's a A HREF="http://homepage.mac.com/cygnusx1/cdecay/cdecay.pdf">work that I've found useful when thinking about the cdk model. Unlike Setterfield's work, it actually goes through the math and shows WHAT the effects of a changing light speed would do to physical constants, and observable effects that astronomers can detect. Setterfield doesn't do this. Note that even the ICR has problems with Setterfield's work, see ICR Impact 179.
Also, Setterfield likes to quote Tifft's quantized redshift work. Remember, the only person to every have observed quantized redshift is Tifft, and Guthrie and Napier. Here's a paper using a larger sample of galaxies, and they don't find any quantization. Their sample size is an order of magnitude larger, and they find zero quantization.
Hmmm... Then if I drill down 100 miles, then as far as the net gravitational pull on me goes, it would be like I was standing on a planet whose diameter was 200 miles smaller than Earth's? Because all the mass located farther out from the center than myself would be like that massive sphere in your example?
But time as we define it began at the Big Bang. "Always" is a finite quantity.
This looks like a good time to repost a response I've used before on physics threads that might help you to understand:
The question, "what happened before Archduke Ferdinand was shot" is a well-formed question, as is, "what is south of Topeka, Kansas." The question, "what happened before the big bang" is an ill-formed question, as is, "what lies south of the south pole."
Imagine you are travelling south, down to the south pole. As you get closer to the pole, the east-west direction does a curious thing: it curls back upon itself in an ever-tightening circle, disappearing completely as you reach the point of the pole itself. At that place, the ground is as smoothly two-dimensional as anywhere else on Earth, but every possible direction points north, even directions that lie at right angles to each other.
Imagine that you can go backwards in time, back to the big bang. As you get closer to the big bang, space does a curious thing: the spatial dimensions curl back upon themselves in an ever-tightening circle, disappearing completely as you reach the singularity itself. At that event, spacetime is as smoothly four-dimensional as at any other event in history, but every possible direction points towards the future, even directions that lie at right angles to each other.
I stress that what I have laid before you is not an analogy, but two separate examples of the same phenomenon.
There may exist events that are external to the space and time dimensions of our universe, but none of them can be said to come before or after any events of our universe; they cannot be included in any causal framework such as history. Time itself is strictly internal to our universe. If we want to use words like "cause" and "before", we must needs keep our game pieces on the board.
Moreover, the energy that existed at the instant of the Big Bang was arbitrarily close to zero in quantity. You needn't be philosophically troubled by all the stuff you see in the universe, as it provably cancels to a large number of decimal places.
Some of your compatriots obviously believe in the beginning was "nothing" and cause isn't even neccessary.
Cause isn't necessary in any case. There are demonstrably uncaused events in the universe as it exists today. But the real point is that philosophically, the very idea of causality is subordinate to the notions of space and time, which are physical things that themselves are subordinate to the Big Bang. Demanding that the Big Bang have a cause puts the cart way before the horse.
What if Adam's eyes were detecting the slower, less-energetic cosmic rays?
Not to mention AOE II and Ghost Recon :-)
And all this time I thought it meant a year that isn't a leap year, so it's "light" and has only 356 days. Golly, live and learn!
Yeah, that I understand. But it sounds like, as you go deeper & deeper the gravitational pull is rather easy to calculate: It's directly proportional to your new distance from the center. (Ignoring the real-world problem of mass concentrations along the way, melting calculators, air-conditioner failing, attacks by the mole people, etc.)
Think of it this way. G decreases at a linear rate as you approach the center of the Earth if it was a uniform density. (as the radius "r" decreases from the center)
Geek alert: Since the density is not uniform and much of the mass is contained near the center, G would initially increase.
Ah, just wait 'till you get a DV camcorder & a FireWire card. You'll wish you could afford a StarTrek-capacity memory disk!
Huh. Now that's interesting!
Try tandoori chicken, if there's a reliable Indian restaurant near you. Wonderful stuff.
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