Men and dinosaurs

[gillianren]

Thats an appeal to popularity. "Surely all those people can't be lying". Well, yes, they can, actually. Are Scientologists telling the truth? 25% of Americans over 18 believe in astrology. It's still bunkum, no matter how many believe in it.

And, hell, they don't have to be lying to be wrong.  I believe, for example, that the majority of those people really do believe in Scientology and astrology and so forth.  They're still wrong.  There is such thing in this fine world as just being mistaken.

[smartcooky]

http://www.genesispark.com/exhibits/evidence/historical/dragon
gillianren, all those ppl are lying you think?

what would convince me is how they knew to draw on caves long necks, for example..flying birds artefacts looking like later discovered flying dragons...

The Japanese and Chinese have depicted dragons in their traditional art for thousands of years. Does this mean that dragons actually existed then? Of course it doesn't.

When you see "here be dragons" depicted on an old map, it does not mean there are actually any there!

[bknight]

The Japanese and Chinese have depicted dragons in their traditional art for thousands of years. Does this mean that dragons actually existed then? Of course it doesn't.

When you see "here be dragons" depicted on an old map, it does not mean there are actually any there!

And thus comes the tale of "Poof" the magic dragon.

[ka9q]

The quote "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" very clearly predates personal computers.

Or at least the RDRAND instruction.

[ka9q]

what if it is like this fish, thought to be extinct since the time of dinosaurs, but then found alive with very minor evolution

Many of today's organisms are little changed from their ancestors, some who lived long before even the dinosaurs. Bacteria, for example. They were among the earliest life forms and are still by far the most numerous. And the great majority of bacteria species are still undiscovered and unstudied by science.

But none of this says humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, because they didn't.

[bknight]

The quote "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" very clearly predates personal computers.

Or at least the RDRAND instruction.

I had to look that one up, and I agree.

[Peter B]

Jason,
maybe they were rare, so you don't expect that extensive encounters, but they would have left humans impressed.

The problem with this idea is that dinosaurs simply disappear from the fossil record about 65 million years ago. They're found across a range of about 160 million years, and then suddenly they're not there.

Now it's true that only a tiny fraction of animals and plants survive long enough after death to be fossilised, so it's likely that there are many creatures which walked the Earth which we have no fossil record of. But the more common something is, the more likely it is that it'll appear in the fossil record. What this means is that if some dinosaurs survived the event 65 million years ago which wiped out most of them, the surviving population would have been small, and it would have likely remained small for the next 65 million years until recent times. The problem with this is that small populations of any organism are far more at risk of extinction from any unexpected event - bad weather, volcanic eruption, disease, predation, or simply in-breeding.

So while it's possible that a small population of dinosaurs survived the extinction event of 65 million years ago until now-ish, it's statistically extremely unlikely. A very simple comparison is with human families, especially in the time before modern medicine - families where the parents had lots of children were more likely to survive over long periods of time than families where the parents had few children. And stretching this concept out over 65 million years simply makes it even more unlikely.

[Peter B]

There is also a world of difference between the original claim and the coelocanth. Humans and coelocanths each live in parts of the world that are hostile to the other. The original claim is about humans not only living at the same time as dinosaurs but actually co-existing to the point of humans and dinosaurs encountering each other regularly. Under those circumstances we would expect to see a lot more evidence of dinosaur/human coexistence than a few mythical representations and anecdotes of 'dragons and beasts'.

Maybe he will understand this better than what I have posted.  Goalpost shifting to meet the CT's perspective is.

EDIT: Correct spelling

She.  And if you find a way to get her to listen to opposing opinions, I'd be very interested in finding out what it is.  No one else has ever managed.

you notice how you pop up to create trouble?

Gillianren is not creating trouble, LionKing, she is stating a valid point. In all the years you have been posting here you have never grasped what science actually is all about despite numerous attempts by scientists on this discussion board to get you to understand, and you still pull up arguments like 'scientists say' and 'it would take only one find' to overturn a scientific idea.

yes she is. what would be expected as a result of such an aggressive post? love and peace? scientists say..yes..who else would we resort to? and didn't it take only one find to declare the fish unextinct? it would depend on issues debated

Yes, it only took one live coelacanth to prove that they must have survived from the time the latest known fossilised coelacanth had died.

However there's an important difference between coelacanths and most dinosaurs - ceolacanths live in the ocean, quite often at depths below 100 metres. This means that most coelacanths died in places where their fossilised remains will be very hard to find - in the deep ocean. By comparison most dinosaurs lived on land, and most of this land is still above sea level. This makes dinosaur fossils comparatively much easier to find than coelacanth fossils.

Despite this, scientists have found no record of any dinosaurs after the extinction event of 65 million years ago, except for a couple of questionable fossils dating to less than a million years after the extinction event (that is, still 64 million years before now). Instead, the fossil record of the last 65 million years is full of mammals expanding through the evolutionary niches previously occupied by dinosaurs - plant eaters, scavengers, top predators and so on.

[Peter B]

http://www.genesispark.com/exhibits/evidence/historical/dragon
gillianren, all those ppl are lying you think?

LionKing

The people running the Genesis Park website are Christian Creationists. They believe the Book of Genesis is factually accurate - that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, that all humans are descended from the three sons of Noah, that all animals on Earth are descended from the animals on the Ark, and so on.

These people are well documented as saying things that are considered untrue by scientists. This takes a variety of forms - quoting scientific documents out of context, lying about articles published, or simply making up answers to questions. Regardless of their behaviour, they seem to believe that anything is justified in the pursuit of what they see as their higher goal - the promotion of Christian Creationism and its strongly conservative Protestant Christian theology. Examples of the sorts of things they've done are available here: http://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/from_a_frog_to_a_prince.htm And here's a link to a page where there's evidence that creationists even lie about their own credentials: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/credentials.html

Therefore, anything written on a creationist site needs to be treated with extreme caution - it simply can't be relied upon to be accurate.

[Cat Not Included]

When you speculate about dinosaurs and humans co-existing, its probably a good idea to define which dinosaurs co-existed with humans. "Dinosaur" covers an incredibly diverse range of creatures of many sizes and types, which lived over a very long period of time - any given dinosaur didn't even co-exist with many other dinosaurs!

Here, it seems you are mostly talking about the classic big dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurs, stegosaurus, diplodocus, plesiosaur, etc. The cool attention grabbing ones.

what if it is like this fish, thought to be extinct since the time of dinosaurs, but then found alive with very minor evolution

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-living-fossil-coelacanth-fish-left-behind-by-evolution-8577129.html

And here's where there's a big problem with thinking that the big cool dinosaurs could be around today, just like the coelacanth. They are big and cool. There's a temptation to imagine some Hollywood style expedition to a remote part of the ocean discovering the long-lost coelacanth, but it was nothing like that. Local fishers caught them regularly - and generally threw them back because apparently they taste terrible. You see, by and large, a coelacanth looks pretty much like a fish.

People were seeing and interacting with coelacanths. They just didn't know there was anything special or unusual about them, because honestly nobody without a specific background would be likely to know that.

But dinosaurs, like the tyrannosaurus and diplodocus? They are NOT fish. They are much bigger than most animals we see. They look radically different from most animals we see. Nobody is going to see a tyrannosaur and think "Oh, I guess its just a big bird and nothing interesting". Even if the viewer has no clue what a dinosaur is, they will damn well know its SOMETHING unusual.

And by virtue of people being pretty much everywhere, if there were big dinosaurs around, we'd have spotted them by now.

As for Loch Ness...people have been looking for a monster there for close to a hundred years now, and have nothing to show for it but blurry photos and exposed fakes. As more and more people carry cameras everywhere and camera quality improves, we don't get any better photos. There's no monster. Luke thought it was maybe a giant catfish...I think even that is putting too much substance to it. Like the "supernatural" everywhere, Nessie is easily explainable by pareidolia and wishful thinking.

Here's an interesting interview with the world's most dedicated Nessie-hunter. Even he dismisses most of the claims and sightings.
http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/alone_on_the_loch_one_mans_search_for_nessie/

[twik]

Excellent summary, Cat Not Included. And I should point out that coelecanths are generally deep-water fish. They've probably been leaving fossils for millions of years, but those fossils are at the bottom of the sea right now.

Land animals such as T. Rex or Brontosaurus (yes, the name's making a comeback!) should be leaving fossils on land, just like mastodons, and fossil horses, and camelids, that were hunted by humans. And yet, despite their huge size, they pretty well disappeared from the fossil record 65 million years ago. Heck, if humans had been hunting them I'd expect to find T. Rex teeth or sauropod bones used as tools by humans.