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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.
From everything I have ever read, creationism is a faith-based philosophy. On the other hand, there are many tests and mountains of evidence to support evolution.
A great place to start (even if you don’t buy it at least you will be exposed to the concepts that are being presented) are these two sites:
Not what's in vogue. Theories are revised as new evidence comes to light.
Please state your supporting evidence for this belief.
Then lonely little Behe doesn't help you with his credentials or his tiny little handful of ID brothers.
What you're missing about the progress of science is that it is progress. Because your belief system was discredited 140 years ago, you comfort yourself that science simply veers here and there and can be expected to come back to you. But science doesn't simply thrash about. It converges upon an increasingly accurate description of reality.
We used to think fire was a substance called phlogiston that rushes out when a substance burns. Now we think fire is oxidation, a chemical reaction.
Things change in science, but don't bet on phlogiston theory ever coming back. Some things are really wrong.
Codswallop. In the 19th century, it was believed that the Earth was no more than 30 million years old. The geological evidence that the Earth was several billion years old came as a bolt from the blue. Far from an assumption, the fact of Earth's enormous age obtruded itself in spite of what the theorists believed.
Are horses, donkeys, zebras, etc. the same or different 'kinds'?
Conventionally, they're considered different species in the same genus.
As has been pointed out to many creationists here already, Behe does NOT disagree with most of the theory of evolution.
We discuss phenomenology of extra time dimensions in a scenario where the standard model particles are localized in \our" time, whereas gravity can propagate in all time dimensions. For an odd number of extra times, at small distances, the (real part of the) Newtonian potential is \screened" by tachyonic Kaluza-Klein gravitons. In general, the gravitational self-energy of objects acquires an imaginary part. This complexity may either be interpreted as an amplitude for the disappearance into \nothing", leading to the causality and probability violation in low-energy processes, or as an artifact of the ctitious decay into the unphysical negative energy tachyons.Never mind how you fit it in, I just want to know how you can read that stuff! "Tachyonic Kaluza-Klein gravitons!" Then, if you can wade through the English, there's the math!
I'll wait for the layman's version. ;)
What he actually said was
It would be nice if the creationists would simply stop trying to 'witness' on the science threads
Which I interpreted as asking for scientific evidence, as opposed to Scriptural interpretations. The precise meaning of Genesis is not a scientific question, it's a theological one, and doesn't belong in a discussion of science.
A little tidbit though, the Kaluza-Klein theories are the basis for superstring theory and the reason why people speak of the extra dimensions being all rolled up into tiny vibrating strings. Actually it is not necessary to visualize an extra time dimension as compactified.
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