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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.
Evolutionists? I thought they preceded Darwin
This is false. The relative ordering is determined by the fossils. The absolute dates depend on other observations
To learn as much as I can from these people.
Me too!
Pardon me, may I interject?
You can "wish", till the cows come home, for your garage to miraculously become more organized. You will be waiting 30 billion years and then realize the obvious, this world is suffering from degeneration.
Bo knows degeneration!
Oh yeah, I forgot, life is an exception. Maybe Bo don't know.
That's pretty much par for the course for most the evos around here. And this USMMA fella - someone who I have never seen on these threads, but yet has the cajones to come in here and ridicule someone who has put a lot of thought and work into their posts. Typical of most the evos in here, and their fan club. Question the 'establishment' and get hammered on. Then once you defend yourself...BAM....banned. It's becomming pretty predicatable.
I commend you for sticking to your guns.
FRegards, MM
I see: So any theory about who invented baseball must also explain how the universe got started!The point is, you keep bringing up arguments against the Big Bang as if they were arguments against biological evolution. Evolution got started when the first replicating self-contained biochemical set ("protocell" or whatever) first split in two. That was something like 10 billion years after the universe came into existence.I don't follow what you are saying here.
Evolution has nothing to do with the origin of the universe! If the universe came about because of a Big Bang, then evolution would still be the best scientific explanation available, given the clear evidence before our eyes. If the universe always existed (the steady state theory), evolution would still be the best scientific explanation available, given the clear evidence before our eyes. If the Big Bang came about as a result of a prior Big Crunch, in an infinite progression of Big Bangs/Big Crunches, then evolution would still be the best scientific explanation available, given the clear evidence before our eyes.
So why do you insist on arguing against biological evolution in an area in which it says nothing? It's like thinking you can discredit some mainstream theory of the origin of baseball by discrediting the Big Bang. (Was baseball invented by Abner Doubleday? No, because the Big Bang never happened, so there!)
If I may expand a bit, as I recall, the physicists scoffed for what they thought were good reasons. Namely, Lord Kelvin had rather carefully calculated that the sun could be no older than 30 million years, based on the assumption that what powered the sun was the gravitational energy of the matter that had fallen together to form it in the first place - you add up how much gravitational energy a mass the size of the sun would have, and divide by the rate at which the sun is radiating away energy. Simple, no? Aided, no doubt, by the fact that Lord Kelvin was one of the pre-eminent physicists of the day, even Darwin conceded that this was a huge flaw in his theory, since he estimated that at least ten times that many years would have been necessary for certain geological features to have formed.
Alas, Lord Kelvin will have to be remembered as the discoverer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics - which is also popular in these parts - and not as the man who drove a stake through the heart of Darwinian evolution. Although his calculations were undoubtedly correct, his assumption about what powered the sun was completely wrong. Lord Kelvin simply had no idea about the process of nuclear fusion, being sixty years too early for Eddington, and eighty years too early for Bethe ;)
And yet...here you are. Strange...
In the linked article, the authors immediately proceed down the compactification path though I do not believe this is necessary and I really hadn’t considered how you would approach the eigen decomposition for 5D with 2 time dimensions or how you would figure a Minkowski metric with an extra dimension.
Strangely, everytime I get into researching brane theory I keep coming back to the University of Pennsylvania ala Physicist, Tegmark, Ovrut and now Tianjun Li on a Time-Like Extra Dimension and Cosmological Constant in Brane Models
I haven’t completely waded through that article yet, but so far it sounds like it is heading in the direction I was pondering concerning dark energy. Hmmmm….
USMMA_83, we're all trying to suppress the flames on these threads, and trying not to make our arguments personal. You should check out the following & hopefully sign on:
For your information: many of the regulars on the science threads here on Free Republic have joined in the AGREEMENT OF THE WILLING to promote civil discourse and to avoid flame wars which lead to excessive use of the abuse button, transfer to the Smokey Backroom, and ultimately ... thread deletion. I respectfully ask that you read the linked agreement so that you will know what the willing parties expect of one another and their dealings with others.
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