The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Historical insights & thoughts about the world we live in - and the social conditioning exerted upon us by past and current propaganda.
I, Gestalta
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by I, Gestalta »

Regarding #3, indeed. The demand of a complete solution is one of the 25 Rules of Disinformation.

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”


― Stephen Hawking
anonjedi2
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by anonjedi2 »

Oh man, I cannot stop laughing at this story! Chalk up another win for "science" ... :rolleyes:

Researcher suggests odd arrangement of marine fossils was stockpiled by enormous, tentacled beast.
An explanation presented this week for a famed and enigmatic jumble of marine reptile fossils has blurred the lines between science and science fiction. The latest proposal suggests that the jumbled remains of these vast marine reptiles were stockpiled by an even more immense creature: a squid-like 'kraken' estimated to be around 30 metres long -- more than twice the size of today's largest known cephalopod.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... chthyosaur

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Dcopymope
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by Dcopymope »

arc300 wrote:
I, Gestalta wrote:Well, I've been meaning to look into radio-carbon dating, myself, but I've kept it on the back-burner for several months.

Nevertheless, here is a video I came across last year which briefly touches on the subject:

edit: Please do not be alarmed by the "UFOTV" logo, as this video is not an adventure into the land of Oz. I have not watched anything else which is affiliated with this "UFOTV", so I cannot speak to whether or not their operation is completely/partially controlled. The content of this specific video, however, deserves attention as per its relation to this thread, in my opinion.


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Wr-lXLGCxQ

Much like the commonly-accepted notions of the rotation of the earth, the science behind radiometric dating is, at the very least, questionable.

Whether primarily wrong or partially right, I find that the most productive manner of approaching any accepted method of the modern scientific community is to relate its approach to that of the catholic church during the dark ages. In doing so, we can recognize that there is a huge historical precedent for the proliferation of mass confusion via perceived authority, proprietary language and general acceptance of non-testable hypotheses; and, so doing, we can feel even more intellectually comfortable in challenging our own "common-sense" indoctrination(s) without feeling like idiots. (raise your hand if you have once felt stupid for even humoring the idea that the earth may not be moving, or that 9/11 was basically the sequel to The Long Kiss Goodnight!!!!!!!!).

If this thread is going to reach any degree of scientific respectability, I truly think that the "gateway drug" will be a complete understanding of the history, accuracy and practicality of radiometric dating. No matter how much circumstantial evidence we might collect, if we do not demonstrate that we understand the "science" (scientism, more like) behind the ideology, most people will regard the "dinosaur hoax" position as "conspiratorial" and/or "heretical", if not ignoring it outright after reading a few posts.
The full title of Richard Milton's book is The Facts of Life (-) Shattering the Myths of Darwinism. As mentioned, the author is non-religious and non-creationist. It is a very well-written, easy to read book, and I recommend anybody read it. I had an uneasy feeling about Darwinism back in the mid 90's after reading (High Priest) Richard Dawkins' book about evolution,The Blind Watchmaker. About 6 months after reading that book, I stumbled upon The Facts of Life, read it, and didn't feel so alone anymore. Off the top of my head, I can tell you that I learned 4 things from this book:

1. Darwinism, evolution, and its attendant 'sciences' like carbon dating etc. is NOT established fact.
2. To disbelieve in the above does NOT necessarily make you a religious nutcase, or ANY type of nutcase.
3. As Milton mentions in the video, if you reject Darwinism, there is NO onus on you to provide a better theory. It's OK to simply NOT KNOW whence life came. I don't know how life as we know it originated, I have absolutely no idea, yet I can still dress myself, tie my own shoes and get myself off to work each day. This demand that you provide a 'better' theory to explain something you don't believe in will be familiar to most readers of this forum.
4. Life is much more interesting and beautiful than the keepers of the musty charnel houses we call museums would have you believe.
1. Darwinism, evolution, and its attendant 'sciences' like carbon dating etc. is NOT established fact.
The real reason for the lack of any scientific basis for evolution is because it never was a scientific theory in the first place. Evolution wasn't something that so called geniuses like Darwin "discovered" on a remote island, the idea is as old as written history. Even modern evolutionists like Henry Osborn acknowledged that Darwin was not its originator, tracing it back to ancient pagan societies like the Greeks.
“When I began the search for anticipations of the evolutionary theory….I was led back to the Greek natural philosophers and I was astonished to find how many of the pronounced and basic features of the Darwinian theory were anticipated even as far back as the seventh century B.C.” - the Greeks to Darwin, p. xi
In essence, what you have is an ancient religion of materialism hiding in science books. Like the ancient belief systems of antiquity, the old-school pantheists and atheists, they believe that the universe exploded into existence out of nothing by chance and that it will eventually collapse onto itself, only to explode into another big bang without end. This "oscillating Big-Bang" theory as its called today is called 'kalpas' in Hinduism, where the idea of reincarnation is applied to the universe itself. Like the beliefs of their ancestors, we all arrived from the primordial chaotic abyss spontaneously appearing under multiple forms from the beginning, like those old Egyptian gods like RA, which is called "abiogenesis" today. Yes, this is all a "scientific" fact today that is absolutely without question. Me being a Christian, I find the theistic evolutionists who apply this pagan crap to Biblical Christianity to be even more insulting than anybody else.

Exposing the Pagan Roots of Evolution:
full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhlm_PK7Uw4
DeeJay
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New member for the dinosaur club

Unread post by DeeJay »

Fossils discovered in Utah are those of the newest member of the club, Nasutoceratops titusi aka "the devil dinosaur" :lol: which roamed the earth around 76 million years ago.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... -Utah.html

DeeJay
DeeJay
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Oh Boy, now we have those with replicating teeth

Unread post by DeeJay »

These guys had rows of teeth in reserve because they were munching too much.

https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology ... h-to-spare

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DeeJay
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T-Rex, a biter... No way...

Unread post by DeeJay »

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... -prey.html

Apparently our friendly T-Rex actually bit a Hadrosaur (plant-eater) in the tail and left behind a tooth!

What's with all these recent reports about dinosaurs? Are paleontoligists fearing for their bread and butter?

DeeJay
guivre
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by guivre »

Dinosaurs as big business:

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/ ... le-auction

This November, auction house Bonhams has something a little unusual coming on the block: Two fighting dinosaurs.

Well, their bones anyway.

First discovered back in 2006, the fossils could be a major discovery for the scientific community, with the remains locked in what appears to be fighting positions, buried together. But after some negotiations with museums like the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, the fossils will now be sold to the highest bidder, for somewhere in the range of $7 million.
Here's the NYT piece that spawned the article: (Note it is not stashed under "Science" but Art & Design ...)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/arts/ ... wanted=all
But scientists may never know for sure. Going against the hopes of many paleontologists, these two nearly complete skeletons, found by commercial prospectors on a private ranch, are not going directly to a museum for further study. Instead, billed as the “Montana dueling dinosaurs,” they will be auctioned in November by Bonhams in New York, for a projected price of $7 million to $9 million, which would be one of the highest prices ever paid for dinosaur fossils.

...

Neither institution plans to participate in the auction. The Field Museum of Chicago, which won a $8.36 million auction for a T. rex fossil in 1997, said it had been offered the dueling dinosaurs but was also not interested.

Mr. Larson said he hoped that the fossils would eventually be bought by a museum, or by a philanthropist who would donate them to an institution. He said that their sheer size — they are still mostly encased in huge blocks of sand weighing thousands of pounds — required an owner with institutional space.

“It is so big, it seems unlikely it would go anywhere else.”

Thomas E. Lindgren, who is advising Bonhams on the sale, said that a high price is warranted by the quality of the find.

“There will never be a finer dinosaur specimen available anywhere in the world,” said Mr. Lindgren, who also runs GeoDécor, which supplies fossils for interior design,

“The price,” he said, “could go anywhere.”
Also the tone of the articles tries to build up a kind of mythology around "Dino Cowboy" Phipps.

Image

https://www.nytsyn.com/images/photos?ke ... zed#987656
lux
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by lux »

The photos in the NYT article don't match the story.

"The fossils apparently show two dinosaurs locked together in mortal combat ..." it says, but the few photos accompanying the article don't show that at all.
guivre
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by guivre »

You're right. Unhelpfully but unsurprisingly, the duelingdinos site is offline, so nothing there. (Here's the image free capture from archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/201205061105 ... dinos.com/ )

I can't seem to find any photos of the actual "specimen", just the digsite photos. There are some blogs with uncited photos that could be of them or not.

This is an artist's rendition of them. It looks very simplified:

Image

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sci ... 5821.story

I do like this common sense quote from the LA Times article:
"If they were extracted and mounted, forget about it," Chiappe said. "You’re never going to figure it out."

Also, analyzing the sediment around the bones can help determine where these two fossils originated – because it isn’t yet entirely clear that they were fighting, Chiappe said, "dueling" nickname notwithstanding.

"If you want to prove or determine whether these animals died in some kind of combat, you really need to look carefully at the sediments," Chiappe said. "There are a number of things that need to be determined before you say, 'Oh, these animals killed each other in a duel.'"

Also they're trying to prove that one of the animals in this fossil is of a new dinosaur, a kind of triceratops, which is the type that has been reclassified quite a lot in recent years as it was decided that some of the different species were the same but immature animals within that species.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Ad ... ne.0032623


To me the fossil hunters seem like con-men, lower on the scale or unrelated to any grander scheme (if there is one.) This one though, with the amount of money being thrown around seems more like the stories of art fakes that we're used to. We'll have to see if any photos surface from the auction or any news that it brings.
lux
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by lux »

It looks like they paint the "bones" black now -- or alleged bones, I should say. I hadn't noticed that paint before.

Since it's all rock really, they could carve and paint anything they want. And, since the people who do this "restoration" work (or whatever they call it) are few in number and evidently have no standardizations by which they work and, we're told, can't even teach what they do to others -- we are in the position of having to accept at face value whatever they present. Neat.
guivre
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by guivre »

This article implies that they now don't even have to open/eat away at the rock:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2009 ... ur-fossils
New technology such as CT ("computerised tomography") scanning means that fossils may be studied within rocks without needing to expose the fossil first - very helpful if, for example, you wish to scan a fossilised egg to see if there's an embryo inside. The resulting digital image can then be manipulated without ever having to touch the egg. It may even be possible to create a 3D plastic cast from the computer image, by using light sensitive resin and an ultraviolet laser.
This was in the news the other day, not quite cutting out the middle man:

http://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/ ... -dinosaurs

3D printers being used to "reconstruct" the dinosaurs, the program specifically called: “Capturing Dinosaurs: Reconstructing Extinct Species Through Digital Fabrication.”

So we'll have cgi bones and digitally constructed dinosaurs, both.

Oddly enough, the org behind the program ( http://htink.org/main/?page_id=127 ) also has a program called "makery". Interesting choice of word, and first letter, for that matter.
lux
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by lux »

I like this portion of the guardian article quote:
New technology such as CT ("computerised tomography") scanning means that fossils may be studied within rocks without needing to expose the fossil first - very helpful if, for example, you wish to scan a fossilised egg to see if there's an embryo inside. The resulting digital image can then be manipulated without ever having to touch the egg.
guivre
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by guivre »

In today's news an example of that very technology:

Three 'Parrot Lizard' Dinosaur Species Were Actually The Same; Groundbreaking Laser Technology Could Lead To Reclassification Of More Fossils


http://www.hngn.com/articles/9901/20130 ... nology.htm
"Because of the vagaries of fossilization, no two fossils are the same," senior author Peter Dodson, professor of anatomy in Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine and professor of paleontology in the School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Earth and Environmental Science, said, according to a University of Pennsylvania press release. "Animals are alive and they die, but what's crucial in paleontology is what happens to the animals after they die."
"Vagaries." Hmm, well here's the study:

Lujiatun Psittacosaurids: Understanding Individual and Taphonomic Variation Using 3D Geometric Morphometrics

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Ad ... ne.0069265
Psittacosaurus is one of the most abundant and speciose genera in the Dinosauria, with fifteen named species. The genus is geographically and temporally widespread with large sample sizes of several of the nominal species allowing detailed analysis of intra- and interspecific variation. We present a reanalysis of three separate, coeval species within the Psittacosauridae; P. lujiatunensis, P. major, and Hongshanosaurus houi from the Lujiatun beds of the Yixian Formation, northeastern China, using three-dimensional geometric morphometrics on a sample set of thirty skulls in combination with a reevaluation of the proposed character states for each species. Using these complementary methods, we show that individual and taphonomic variation are the joint causes of a large range of variation among the skulls when they are plotted in a morphospace. Our results demonstrate that there is only one species of Psittacosaurus within the Lujiatun beds and that the three nominal species represent different taphomorphotypes of P. lujiatunensis. The wide range of geometric morphometric variation in a single species of Psittacosaurus implies that the range of variation found in other dinosaurian groups may also be related to taphonomic distortion rather than interspecific variation. As the morphospace is driven primarily by variation resulting from taphonomic distortion, this study demonstrates that the geometric morphometric approach can only be used with great caution to delineate interspecific variation in Psittacosaurus and likely other dinosaur groups without a complementary evaluation of character states. This study presents the first application of 3D geometric morphometrics to the dinosaurian morphospace and the first attempt to quantify taphonomic variation in dinosaur skulls.
Pug
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by Pug »

Hey guys,

And the publicity machine for the fourth Jurassic Park movie is in full swing...

http://moviehole.net/201367297colin-tre ... -dino-mite - moviehole.net

Director, Trevorrow says he’s currently “designing” the movie – crafting the dinosaurs, deciding on what their skin colour should be, and so on. He says there’s a “new [dinosaur], that’s pretty cool” in his film. “It’s pretty bad-ass”".

an audio interview can be listened to here:

full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6vnBYPfJ5o

:D
I, Gestalta
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by I, Gestalta »

There have been quite a few attempts at hammering down a premise and script for a fourth Jurassic film. One of my favorites, however, was the "plot" in which the research responsible for the first theme park was then used in human experimentation, creating dino-human hybrids through splicing.

I think said script was penned by David Icke, with Michael Tsarion intended to head up the production department and Dan Aykroyd set to direct. :P

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblo ... half-human

In all seriousness, though---well, kinda---it would have been amusing to see the whole "reptilian" thing being played up in the mainstream, as it no doubt certainly would have been. Likely, it would have resembled Prometheus in its heavy-handed approach toward culture creation/fomentation.

If people can be prepped and conditioned by countless zombie films to believe that "bath salts" turn people into flesh-eating monsters, I suppose it's only a matter of time until they'll jump at the opportunity to believe in "greys" and "reptilians" en masse via Hollywood programming.

Grrr. I really wish that version of the film had begun shooting!
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