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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.
Hard to argue with that. Humans have the unique ability, whether God given or otherwise, to choose to make things better. Mostly though, we seem to have made things worse.
I figure that if a dog has a soul, then so does even the simplest creature, down beyond even an insect. Maybe we are blessed with more of the stuff of which souls are made. Maybe there are creatures in other worlds or universes who are blessed with even more of it than us.
Can anybody out there let me in on the joke? Is this guy for real?
There was (and is) a Hebrew word for ball, kadur. Isaiah knew the word; he used it in another verse (22:18).
Most of us think effdot is someone's AI project turned loose of FR. This is based on the response pattern, which takes a word or phrase from your post and embeds it in hysterical nonsense about Satan and aliens. Note that, as a computer program, it doesn't even generate English sentences. Except when doing a cut and paste.
You mean f.Christian or DittoJed2?
Quoting from the last chapter of The Origin of Species
To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
Looks pretty theistic to me
Darwinian evolution as it is taught and believed today is godless and it was Darwinian evolution that I said 55% of scientists believed in in my post.
Darwinian evolution is no more godless than freshman chemistry. We don't invoke a creator to explain how iron rusts, or how airplanes fly. Why invoke God in biology?
It is not fallacious. There was no word for "sphere" in ancient Hebrew (and I have had Hebrew as well).
Just because there is no word for sphere (I understand there is a word for ball) does not mean that they used circle to mean sphere. In fact, the verse of Isaiah which refers to the circle of the earth, also describes the heavens as a curtain and as a tent. You don't have a currtain around a sphere; you don't pitch a tent on one.
Your accusations of prejudice on my part are ad hominem and unjustified.
I disagree.
Then, since you will neither justify them nor withdraw them, I'll write them off as juvenile name calling.
A flat earth was never held by the church as a whole or even in majority.
You initially wrote that Christians never believed in a flat earth. Some Christians clearly did. If you wish to change that statement to a claim that a majority of Christians never did, I think you're going to have a tough time proving it. Gallup wasn't around in the 6th century.
The utter refusal to admit that the earth shows intelligent design and that this design could have even possibly come from God is the epitomy of prejudice and close-minded bigotry and is not worthy of a scientist. On the contrary; if one compares the gene sequences of related animals, the evidence for random mutation followed by selection is clear; on the other hand, many aspects of the human genome are clearly not at all intelligently designed.
For example, unlike most mammals, we can't synthesize vitamin C. The gene that codes for one essential step in vitamin C synthesis is actually present in humans and the great apes, but it is defective. Now why, if you were to design a human intelligently, would you eliminate the ability to make an important nutrient that most other mammals can make; and yet still include a defective gene for that ability?
The human genome also includes retrotransposons. Retrotransposons are pieces of retrovirus DNA that got accidentally incorporated into the host DNA, and can be passed on to progeny. We share some retrotransposons with the great apes and monkeys; evolution says this is because one of our common ancestors got infected, and passed on the gene. Makes sense! But why would a designer put in a functionless fragment of a virus into a series of related species in such a way as to make it look like they had a common ancestor?
I'm a scientist. Looking at the genomes of humans and other animals, I can see no logical explanation for them except evolution. If there were a designer, he would have had to have been drunk.
Continueing to fixate on untenable positions such as 'young earth' just drives people away from God and I think it does a horrible disservice to Christianity. Jesus only requires that we believe in him, not that we believe interpretations of the bible.
Many Christian denominations do not share your insecurity; they accept the possibility of evolution without worrying that it invalidates Christian belief. But in any case, it's hardly going to convince any of the rest of us we should abandon a useful scientific theory because it disagrees with your particular sectarian belief. That's your problem.
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