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

Unread post by Dcopymope »

simonshack wrote:
simonshack wrote: Dear Dcopymope,

You wrote:
Dcopymope wrote:I'm trying to keep it as "non-religious" as the subject allows me to be, just briefly setting the record straight on what should have been known as a long debunked accusation that was ripped straight out of Freemasonic/Theosophical/New Age material, especially from someone who spews out of his orifice the terms "PsyOp!!!!" and "bullshit!!!" with such undeserved authority.
With what 'deserved authority' do YOU keep entertaining your religious beliefs - to yourself and to this forum?
Quoting myself:

With what 'deserved authority' do YOU keep entertaining your religious beliefs - to yourself and to this forum?
Regarding this particular thread, the theory of evolution that uses dinosaurs as its main foundation gives me my authority to trace its true origins going back to Hindu beliefs, the root of the entire problem concerning what is called "science".
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by simonshack »

Dcopymope wrote: Regarding this particular thread, the theory of evolution that uses dinosaurs as its main foundation gives me my authority to trace its true origins going back to Hindu beliefs, the root of the entire problem concerning what is called "science".
Well, Dcopymope,

Your response seems to me as coming straight out of the NASA (Never A Straight Answer) manual. Are you not one of the few members of this forum to hold the Holy Bible as the absolute Truth of this planet? Correct me if I'm wrong. Thanks.
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by Dcopymope »

simonshack wrote:
Dcopymope wrote: Regarding this particular thread, the theory of evolution that uses dinosaurs as its main foundation gives me my authority to trace its true origins going back to Hindu beliefs, the root of the entire problem concerning what is called "science".
Well, Dcopymope,

Your response seems to me as coming straight out of the NASA (Never A Straight Answer) manual. Are you not one of the few members of this forum to hold the Holy Bible as the absolute Truth of this planet? Correct me if I'm wrong. Thanks.
Well, how is that not a straight answer? Obviously, I am a Bible believing Christian, and there might be others who claim to be. I am also aware that the Bible is not a repository of everything that can possibly be known about the universe, but of the origin of it. Anything claiming to hold the answer to our origins like the theory of evolution is not science, its not even really a theory in fact as it cannot be observed, it is a religious philosophy posing as science, and there is nothing new about it except the language.
nonhocapito
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by nonhocapito »

Dcopymope wrote:Well, how is that not a straight answer? Obviously, I am a Bible believing Christian, and there might be others who claim to be. I am also aware that the Bible is not a repository of everything that can possibly be known about the universe, but of the origin of it. Anything claiming to hold the answer to our origins like the theory of evolution is not science, its not even really a theory in fact as it cannot be observed, it is a religious philosophy posing as science, and there is nothing new about it except the language.
It is probably wrong to defend science against religion considering that the next future will be most likely ruled by neither, technology and superstition taking the lion's share while true spiritual beliefs and true scientific knowledge will be more and more confined to niches and elites. Personally, I have an enormous respect for religion and spirituality -- and I have a great respect for science as well, because I recognize all around me the enormous benefits that we reaped from it.

That said: evolution does not claim to hold the answer to our origins at all. It just provides an answer to how the differentiation in life came about. Why there is so much variety in life? Because of adaptation to different necessities and instances and environments and accidents. That's what the study of evolution is about. (The implication of progress inherent to the word "evolution" makes it probably the wrong word. A better one is "adaptation", because where required a species could turn simpler and dumber to survive, and you would not call that "evolution").
There's a lot of evidence to point out that this adaptation really happened and still happens. It is a much more fitting and clever explanation than saying that all this variety came about by design, when its essence is so visibly frail and unstable.

I don't understand at all the need to make this a mortal clash between beliefs. Why religious people should feel threatened by it? Why scientists should feel threatened by spiritual questions? This is the best way to destroy two useful things at once.

As to the Bible: I respect a belief but the way I see it the book provides no answer either, because real answers must be persuasive, and there is nothing persuasive in saying that it went that way because it went that way.
rusty
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by rusty »

nonhocapito wrote: That said: evolution does not claim to hold the answer to our origins at all. It just provides an answer to how the differentiation in life came about.
When I just started my computer, my original intention was to contribute to this thread by writing about the nature of science and how so many scientists who spend millions of hours researching things can get it wrong in so many ways...but I think i have to step in here. I think that the whole question about the truth of the dinosaurs is directly intertwined with the concept of Darwinian-Lyellian geology and evolution.

Just like "love" can mean a thousand different things to different people, "evolution" can do as well. It has many different aspects and everyone looks at it from a different angle. I absolutely agree that there is much truth in the concept of evolution, and most of it is not contradictory to any religious world view at all. The main question is not so much, IF there is evolution, but rather the inner workings and the extent of it. And this, dear nonhocapito, leads directly to the question about our origins.

As far as I understand it, there is an inherent ability in every living being to adapt to new challenges and environments. That alone is a miraculous feat. It can bring out the best in everyone of us and ensure the survival of species. But it tells us nothing about how living beings with these miraculous features came about. Also, it tells us nothing about how many different species with very different features can come to live. Some call one thing "micro-evolution" and the other "macro-evolution". These are two very different things. Darwinian science tries to tell us, that they are essentially the same. It tries to tell us, that miraculous, complex living things can come about if there's just enough time for it to happen, and that it happens purely by chance and circumstance (mutation and selection). This is where our bullshit-o-meter should start ringing very loud and clear.

The tale of the millions-of-years-old dinosaurs and the billions-of-years-old-earth and universe is necessary just to keep up this illusion, that it could be possible somehow, if time is only long enough.

I'm pretty sure fossils are for real. Granted, there's much poesy involved when paleontologists try to figure out details about these creatures, and I don't doubt there's a lot of outright fraud as well. But the biggest fraud in my book is the long time-span. For any living being to fossilize there's one very important prerequisite: It must get sealed from oxygen very quickly. It cannot be done by slow sedimentation in millions of years. And this leads to the direct consequence of large, catastrophic events on a global scale. Something like the big flood. But that's not something the Darwinian-Lyellian world-view is going to allow in its book yet.
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by anonjedi2 »

This is great. :)

PALAEONTOLOGISTS FEAR DINOSAURS MAY NEVER HAVE EXISTED

https://web.archive.org/web/20130405031 ... -side.html

Now why would that be something to fear? Shouldn't any new discoveries around the existence of dinosaurs (or lack thereof) be embraced in a scientific manner, regardless of the implications of such discoveries? If science is to be believed and respected, there should be no "fear" that new discoveries might disprove the old ones. Unless of course one's job depends on the old beliefs.

Could it be that if it was scientifically proven to be the case, we'd have a lot of out of work paleontologists, mired with disgrace and ridicule even among their peers in other fields of science? I guess they'd better double their efforts and find some more bones and create some more evidence! God forbid they become the laughingstock of the scientific community! What a shame it would be if the entire dinosaur industry came crashing down in a blink of an eye! No more movies, museums, TV shows, toys, video games, books, theme park rides, stuffed animals, themed clothing, etc, etc. How much do you suppose the Dinosaur Industry makes per year? We already know Jurassic Park has profited well over a billion dollars alone, and apparently Spielberg is working on another movie! Calling all Paleontologists - please begin working on new papers to support our scientific beliefs! We have a multi-billion dollar industry we must uphold! The best theories, ideas, concepts and studies will be rewarded with publication and prestige. <_<
For over two hundred years, since the first complete dinosaur fossils were scientifically described, the massive beasts from our planets past have haunted and inspired the imaginations of millions. Books, movies, videogames, and children’s toys have all evoked our passion for the long-dead animals which once ran the planet and carved a path for the rise of mammals and eventually our own existence. Every year millions of people flock to museums to wonder at a land long left to history where dinosaurs ruled the Earth.
And every year, millions of people are duped into believing that what they are seeing in these museums are actually real fossils. In reality, it seems most of these structures are created by "scientists" and made out of plastic or other materials. Take the Carnegie museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh as an example. It is widely recognized as one of the best dinosaur museum on the planet. From their website:
The dinosaurs on display in Dinosaurs in Their Time are only a few of the fossil skeletons that make up one of the world's best dinosaur collections. Our dinosaurs are the real deal: Of the 19 skeletons on display, 15 contain at least some real fossil material, making Carnegie Museum of Natural History home to the country's third largest display of real mounted dinosaurs.

Four of the museums' real mounted dinosaurs are holotypes of their respective species, meaning they are specimens that forever define a species, usually because they were the first or most complete ever found. Many more holotypes are held in the museum's research collections.
http://www.carnegiemnh.org/exhibitions/dinosaurs.html

So their dinosaurs are "the real deal." Are they claiming that other museums dinosaurs aren't the real deal? 15 contain at least some real fossil material? What does that mean? Can that be one bone that belonged to an alligator or a whale? From what I've read, there are no real skulls you can see, and the museum claims that all of the real fossils are locked away in a vault somewhere because they can't be exposed to air. Apparently "air" causes degradation of the fossils that have otherwise managed to survive for 66 million years in the earth on their own just fine. I am supposed to imagine that the elements of "air" are more damaging than the minerals and other elements of the earth? I'm sure the complexities of soil, time, climate and other aspects of Earth are no match for the fierce destructive power of modern day "air." Maybe I should bury my valuables such as my camera and laptop in the backyard to protect them from this annihilative compound we call "air." :rolleyes: I recently read an account of a skeptic asking to see real fossils at the museum. The response he received was that they are sealed away and nobody can see them because of the reason mentioned above. When the skeptic asked the museum curator why they couldn't just put the fossils in airtight glass so that the public could view them, he was met with scorn.

They claim that there were thousands of different species of dinosaurs yet they only claim to have a small handful of skulls and we've already seen in this thread that skulls have been faked. How can they claim thousands of different species from only a handful of skulls? Surely there must be a scientific explanation for this wild claim?
Of course dinosaurs, like anything, haven’t come without controversy. Despite strong physical evidence confirming their existence, many have disputed their very existence when it flies in the face of their own beliefs. Specifically the existence of dinosaurs has cast doubt in the direction of religion which uniformly makes no mention of the great animals that once roamed the Earth. Now a new discovery by a group of American Palaeontologists may give weight to those objections. A research team has brought a controversial conclusion to the table, suggesting that there were in fact far fewer species of dinosaur than previously believed, a conclusion that is causing many to question the existence of the animals altogether.
Scientists conducting actual science? Someone call the Carnegie Museum, quick! We must put a stop to this! But alas, could this just be a clever way to prop up the lies? Okay, maybe they faked some of the photos on the moon, but that doesn't prove we didn't go to the moon! Maybe the plane was faked but surely the victims are real.
“In this ten-year project we were able to collect a very good growth series that no one
had ever seen before, and see this transformation that occurs. We could document the extreme changes that occur with growth, [like] the direction that the horns are pointing,” said Palaeontologist Mark Goodwin of the University of California. “We believe now that many of the animals we thought were individual species are in fact existing species in different levels of maturity. This means that up to a third of the species on record may in fact not have existed at all. This is part of the learning curve of science especially as it relates to such incomplete records. We are sure though that the majority of dinosaurs did in fact exist.
:o

Ahh yes, I see. So they admit that they may have been wrong about the number of dinosaurs to begin with, but only to bolster their initial conclusions that they're definitely and undoubtedly real. If a third of the species may in fact not have existed at all, aren't they off by a factor of several hundred thousand dinosaurs? How can that be? But not to worry! We were so astronomically wrong before, by the count of several hundred thousand but we are sure that the majority of dinosaurs did exist! Nevermind that we were just as sure before! We can't show you any of the fossils to prove our claims so you'll just have to take our word for it because we're scientists. Nevermind the pink elephant in the room that is our conflict of interest. In fact, it's actually not an elephant, it's a woolly mammoth! Trust us!
Others aren’t so sure. A growing movement within the United States has grabbed hold of the new conclusions and, already in opposition to the idea of dinosaurs at all, citing it as evidence of the inability to trust science.
“This is simply further evidence that science has been pulling the wool over our eyes
for years. We have known for a long time that these so-called dinosaurs never existed and now we have very clear evidence of that. If dinosaurs had existed the scientists would have had it right but now they admit they were wrong, which is the same thing as lying,” said David Chambers of the anti-dinosaur group RAWR. “Science expects us to simply accept their word on these things without question. They make movies and toys and brainwash children into believing g their lies meaning future generations will be unable to escape the cycle of scientific belief. Now we know they have been lying for centuries and we will hold them accountable.”

Chambers also went on to state that his group believes dinosaur fossils and bones that have been uncovered are a result of an elaborate system of fakery by the scientific community.
I like this Chambers fellow, he takes a very scientific approach!
“Because dinosaurs are in essence such ridiculous animals it’s reasonable that people would have doubts as to their existence but that is why we have the scientific process. It allows us to postulate theories and then eliminate them as possibilities once the evidence has been collected. The elimination of such evidence does not necessarily mean that other things are untrue,” said Scrape TV Science analyst Dr. Howard Poe. “Of course that doesn’t make them true either. This is an interesting theory that could lead to a whole scale renovation of the way we have thought about prehistory. It’s unlikely that we will find that the Earth is 6000 years old and that the Sun revolves around it but stranger things have happened.”

Steven Spielberg, director of the ‘Jurassic Park’ movies, has reportedly put a rumoured sequel on the backburner citing a desire for scientific responsibility.
Funny, that didn't stop Spielberg before. <_<

Let's face it. This massively profitable dinosaur industry is almost entirely geared towards children. Adults are just sort of along for the ride. They've never really researched the matter for themselves and, as per our usual agreement, just take the scientists word for it because they're the smart ones and they do science and stuff. <_<

EDITED to add a sentence and fix some grammar.
Dcopymope
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by Dcopymope »

rusty wrote:
nonhocapito wrote: That said: evolution does not claim to hold the answer to our origins at all. It just provides an answer to how the differentiation in life came about.
When I just started my computer, my original intention was to contribute to this thread by writing about the nature of science and how so many scientists who spend millions of hours researching things can get it wrong in so many ways...but I think i have to step in here. I think that the whole question about the truth of the dinosaurs is directly intertwined with the concept of Darwinian-Lyellian geology and evolution.

Just like "love" can mean a thousand different things to different people, "evolution" can do as well. It has many different aspects and everyone looks at it from a different angle. I absolutely agree that there is much truth in the concept of evolution, and most of it is not contradictory to any religious world view at all. The main question is not so much, IF there is evolution, but rather the inner workings and the extent of it. And this, dear nonhocapito, leads directly to the question about our origins.

As far as I understand it, there is an inherent ability in every living being to adapt to new challenges and environments. That alone is a miraculous feat. It can bring out the best in everyone of us and ensure the survival of species. But it tells us nothing about how living beings with these miraculous features came about. Also, it tells us nothing about how many different species with very different features can come to live. Some call one thing "micro-evolution" and the other "macro-evolution". These are two very different things. Darwinian science tries to tell us, that they are essentially the same. It tries to tell us, that miraculous, complex living things can come about if there's just enough time for it to happen, and that it happens purely by chance and circumstance (mutation and selection). This is where our bullshit-o-meter should start ringing very loud and clear.

The tale of the millions-of-years-old dinosaurs and the billions-of-years-old-earth and universe is necessary just to keep up this illusion, that it could be possible somehow, if time is only long enough.

I'm pretty sure fossils are for real. Granted, there's much poesy involved when paleontologists try to figure out details about these creatures, and I don't doubt there's a lot of outright fraud as well. But the biggest fraud in my book is the long time-span. For any living being to fossilize there's one very important prerequisite: It must get sealed from oxygen very quickly. It cannot be done by slow sedimentation in millions of years. And this leads to the direct consequence of large, catastrophic events on a global scale. Something like the big flood. But that's not something the Darwinian-Lyellian world-view is going to allow in its book yet.
The thing is, neither mutation nor natural selection act as creative forces as they do not add any new information to the genetic code, but the theory of evolution as taught in the textbooks will tell you otherwise. They call it Abiogenesis which in a nutshell attempts to explain the origin of life, from non-life, or organic compounds, much like Hinduism, also referred to as the Prebiotic soup. It is a mathematical impossibly as it suggests that zero plus zero can equal one and then produce further additions, which is absurd as it has never been observed when it comes down to it. Its basically like the movie 'The Princess and the Frog', that a frog can magically transform into a prince given enough time. In other words, macro-evolution has never been proven.

They claim natural selection is the cause of evolution when it is nothing more than a stabilizing process that removes any defective organisms to keep the species functional, much like an anti virus software for a computer. So its actually a loss of genetic information, not an addition. A mutation is just the rearranging of existing genetic information resulting in many different variations of a species as nonhocapito points out, but like natural selection it does not add any new genetic information as any real biologist will tell you. This is what can be observed and is what the Bible says, that everything was created after its kind, making nonhocapito's statement below null & void.
nonhocapito wrote:As to the Bible: I respect a belief but the way I see it the book provides no answer either, because real answers must be persuasive, and there is nothing persuasive in saying that it went that way because it went that way.
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by guivre »

AmongTheThugs wrote:We grow up believing that the world can end. If something can kill all the dinosaurs then we don't stand a chance.
Okay, hopefully bringing something non religious of interest to the discussion:
The Alvarez hypothesis posits that the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and many other living things was caused by the impact of a large asteroid on the Earth sixty-five million years ago, called the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. Evidence indicates that the asteroid fell in the Yucatán Peninsula, at Chicxulub, Mexico. The hypothesis is named after the father-and-son team of scientists Luis and Walter Alvarez, who first suggested it in 1980. In March 2010 an international panel of scientists endorsed the asteroid hypothesis, specifically the Chicxulub impact, as being the cause of the extinction. A team of 41 scientists reviewed 20 years of scientific literature and in so doing also ruled out other theories such as massive volcanism. They had determined that a 10–15 km (6–9 mi) space rock hurtled into earth at Chicxulub. The rock's size could be approximately the entire size of Martian moon Deimos (mean radius 6.2 km); the collision would have released the same energy as 100 teratonnes of TNT (420 ZJ), over a billion times the energy of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvarez_hypothesis
Luis W. Alvarez (June 13, 1911 – September 1, 1988) was an American experimental physicist and inventor, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968. The American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez (1911–1988) was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century."[1]
After receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1936, Alvarez went to work for Ernest Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Alvarez devised a set of experiments to observe K-electron capture in radioactive nuclei, predicted by the beta decay theory but never observed. He produced 3H using the cyclotron and measured its lifetime. In collaboration with Felix Bloch, he measured the magnetic moment of the neutron.

...

In 1940 Alvarez joined the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he contributed to a number of World War II radar projects, from early improvements to Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) radar beacons, now called transponders, to a system known as VIXEN for preventing enemy submarines from realizing that they had been found by the new airborne microwave radars. The radar system for which Alvarez is best known and which has played a major role in aviation, most particularly in the post war Berlin airlift, was Ground Controlled Approach (GCA). Alvarez spent a few months at the University of Chicago working on nuclear reactors for Enrico Fermi before coming to Los Alamos to work for Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan project. Alvarez worked on the design of explosive lenses, and the development of exploding-bridgewire detonators. As a member of Project Alberta, he observed the Trinity nuclear test from a B-29 Superfortress, and later the bombing of Hiroshima from the B-29 The Great Artiste.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Walter_Alvarez

https://web.archive.org/web/20130720024 ... php?uid=90

Seems like more fantasies being weaved together, as in one fantasy's legitimacy giving enough weight to the author to prop up the other. I read the book Nemesis a long time ago in school, but too long ago to remember enough to comment.
anonjedi2
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by anonjedi2 »

This thread is derailing quickly. I think we can learn a lot if we stick to the thread's title and leave the religious aspect out of the discussion. Granted, I do believe there is a religious tie in to all of this which can be touched upon but the discussion is quickly becoming focused on that aspect instead of having it be a sidebar. Otherwise, I am really enjoying this thread and I'm sure Jesus is as well.
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by hoi.polloi »

You struck gold with that Richard A. Muller of Berkeley shit. Holy moly, guivre.

He's got a .gov address, but he's spouting out both the official and alternative conspiracy theories on the same web page about 9/11. He allegedly teaches nuclear science to our latest Presidents?!

He deserves to get his own thread on the forum! We may have pegged one of those clever folks who write it all. NASA (satellites and shuttles), Nukes (nuclear physics), 9/11 (al Qaeda), the Big Bang (cosmic background radiation) ... wow! He writes it all, and he teaches it, too.

Muller's interest in photography and "magic" indeed.

Speaking of divine sparks, what made you write about Nemesis, guivre? It's a brilliant connection you made. Remind us again of what this particular excerpt you linked to (which brings us to Richard A. Muller's site) has to do with the dinosaur issue? You're saying Muller's connected to the same Alvarez who claims the terrible lizards bit the dust due to an enormous ass-terror-oid collision?
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by guivre »

hoi.polloi wrote: Speaking of divine sparks, what made you write about Nemesis, guivre? It's a brilliant connection you made. Remind us again of what this particular excerpt you linked to (which brings us to Richard A. Muller's site) has to do with the dinosaur issue? You're saying Muller's connected to the same Alvarez who claims the terrible lizards bit the dust due to an enormous ass-terror-oid collision?
This is the official link between Muller, Luis and Walter Alvarez, from a general review of the book, Nemesis:

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/cienc ... esis02.htm
Muller's idea for Nemesis came to him 1983. Luis Alvarez, then an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and his son Walter had recently put forth the theory that a giant impact had wiped out the dinosaurs. (This idea, like so many others that are now widely accepted, met with staunch criticism when it was introduced because it, too, was not mainstream).

Around the same time, two other researchers had suggested yet another controversial idea, that mass extinctions occurred at regular intervals -- every 26 million years or so. Scientists immediately folded the ideas into a new and breathtaking possibility: Impacts by space rocks were causing massive global species destruction every 26 million years.

Luis Alvarez was Richard Muller's mentor, and he suggested that Muller try to debunk the periodicity argument. Pondering this, Muller dreamed up the fanciful companion to the Sun as a possible cause, and with Berkeley's Piet Hut and Marc Davis of Princeton, worked out the details.

Muller gave the object the name of the Greek goddess of retribution -- fitting for a killer star that roamed stealthily beyond the solar system flicking comets at dinosaurs.

In the end, the idea looked surprisingly plausible to Muller and his colleagues, and the results of their work were ultimately published in the journal Nature in 1984. Muller then wrote a book about Nemesis, and he has pursued the companion star, while also doing other research, ever since.
The premise of the companion star is not currently accepted mainstream science now, but the iridium theory is.

From the Smithstonian, this is a run down of what is accepted as the dinosaur's extinction event:

http://www.paleobiology.si.edu/dinosaur ... why_2.html
Alvarez Hypothesis: Origin and Evidence
In the late 1970's geologist Walter Alvarez, and his father, Nobel-prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez, identified an unusual clay layer at the K/T boundary in Italy. This clay contained an unusually high concentration of the rare-earth element iridium ­ 30 times the level typically found in the Earth's crust. Why was the discovery of iridium so important? Although iridium is rare in the crust, it is abundant in many meteorites and asteroids as well as the Earth's core. With this evidence, Alvarez hypothesized that an asteroid must have struck the Earth right at the K/T boundary. Further investigation has revealed that this iridium-rich layer of clay occurs at more than 100 sites around the world, providing evidence that this was truly a worldwide event.

It was estimated that to produce the amount of iridium in the clay layer, the impact object would have been 10 km in diameter. Further evidence of an impact was discovered in the form of small grains of impact-shocked quartz and beads of impact glass (tektites) within the clay layer. Shocked quartz is formed by high-pressure shock waves, and is found at nuclear bomb sites and in meteor craters. Tektites are formed from the condensation of vaporized meteorite particles. Although shocked quartz has been found in K/T layers worldwide, tektites decrease in size with increasing distance from the impact site until they are altogether absent.

These pieces, along with high levels of iridium, provide evidence for an extraterrestrial impact at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Thus, the end of the dinosaurs’ reign may have been caused by an asteroid, not by sea level change or volcanism. Initially this theory was highly controversial, but today an extraterrestrial impact is considered to be a key factor in the K/T extinction event.

One of the main objections to the Alvarez theory was the absence of a 65-million-year-old crater anywhere on the Earth’s surface. Surely such an enormous asteroid impact would have left a sizable crater behind. In 1991, geologists discovered evidence for a huge crater at Chicxulub (pronounced CHIK-shoo-loob), on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Although the crater had long since been buried by hundreds of meters of sediment, surveys of magnetic and gravitational fields revealed its circular structure. In addition, recent sensitive topographic mapping has shown a low mound that represents part of the crater’s rim. At 180 km across, and dated to 65 mya, the crater is of the right size and age to have been caused by a 10 km asteroid hitting Earth at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
(Personally, I read a lot of science/medical books and journals, pop and otherwise, at the start of my art career I had planned to go into scientific illustration. Yes, I felt duped after reading Physics for Future Presidents because of the 9/11 material and having already been familiar with September Clues at that point. It did make me wonder how much I could trust other scientific theories among other things.)
Last edited by guivre on Fri Apr 12, 2013 9:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
daozen
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by daozen »

So before I read the whole thread more carefully I'll just say that if Dinosaurs did not exist I will develope a mild depression, I mean you cold f"ckers this is my childhood heroes you are talking about! :o :(

...emotionality aside... ;)

So far I have 2 questions...

If dinosaurs never existed wouldnt it be just a matter of picking up any fossil and checking if it's real or not. I mean does it possess the characteristics of a real bone. If they weren't real someone must have noticed, no?

Is the thread also questioning evolution?! I think that is a bit far fetched even for this forum, but if needed shouldn't take long to put to rest.

My two cents on the Bible? It's just a bunch of fictional stories that have been used for generations to manipulate people into servitude, nothing else.

The problem with respecting religion stems form the fact that people fail to diferentiate religion and spirituality. The latter is a deep, beautiful and intrinsic part of our humanity and comprises our most treasured instictual feelings towards life. Unfortunately that is why people feel empathic to tolerate religions to the point where they are granted a special kind of respect in the world of political corectness.

Ironically, spirituality is also what all religions hijack as they are based on faith. Faith that what they are told happened and is the ultimate truth about the universe which consequently dictates their thinking and behaviour. (including that a 2,000 page book is sacred and is the written words of a god that lived 2,000 years ago that contains the absolute truth about the origins of the universe.)

If we stick to the definitions of both though, we realize that they are in fact opposites in pragmatic terms. Religion is the foremost enemy of spirituality as its comprised of dogmas which in most cases strengthen the ego, which creates nothing but wounded beings that become dependant on their religion and hence continue the vicious cycle. Given their age most of them have developed a vast incongruency with reality and contemporary knowledge to a laughing degree. I think a forum that promises rationality should by definition be absolutely intolerant of religion. Note I don't say religious *people*, as they are not to blame for the parasitic programming that was installed in their psyche.

pd, sorry im not the best at expressing my thoughts with letters...
hoi.polloi
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by hoi.polloi »

Well, I don't think a deranged millionaire is running around stamping trilobite imagery into the rock. You can find real fossils. What do you mean by 'checking if it's real' exactly?

Do you mean touching it, looking at it, smelling it, licking it? What would help you determine it's real?

I think what we're discussing is the fact that living tissue cannot survive for millions of years; it breaks down and transforms into other things rather quickly. So the idea that we would find anything but petrified (i.e.; completely stone) remains seems strange. Add to that the sculptural pieced-together appearance of the skulls compared with the bones, which are indeed stone carved out of stone, and you have the makings of a very controlled and incestuously referenced science.

It almost looks as though, in some instances, some real creatures of various sizes have been comically stitched together as a single creature, forming an improbably long neck or tail by arranging diminishing instances of related bones. This is a postulation on my part in cases of things like Brontosaurus (now declared a fraud), but even the T-Rex does somewhat resemble a rearranged and modified elephant skeleton.

Or else, if they genuinely are a sculptural phenomenon to begin with, the 'saurs could simply be concocted on paper, then chiseled out, just as a sculpture is. After all, we had the masterful works of classicists, Donatello, Michelangelo and a host of grottos long before any "dinosaurs" were uncovered. It must feel rather God-like to make something out of the Earth and claim you just discovered it after it lay there for millions upon millions of years.

Questioning evolutionary theory is a fantastic practice of modern science. To this day, debates are held, conferences arranged and books are published yearly to argue the various impossibility of aspects of evolution or creationism such as timeframes, design flaws, problems with "mutation", and so on. It's no more "far out" to question Darwinism than it is to question Buddhism or any other ism.

And since We're Back on the topic of dinosaurs, I presume, let's please post about that now! Enough with the Religious opinionatin'.

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

Unread post by anonjedi2 »

From December, 2000:

Dinosaur exposed as fake
Officials at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff thought the fossilised creature - which has been on display for more than a century - was a perfect specimen of the marine reptile Icthyosaurus.

But when they decided the skeleton needed a modern facelift it was discovered the fossil was a forgery.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/1059825.stm

I think it's time for a full audit on all alleged fossils claiming to be those of a completely fictional animal pieced together by artists and "scientists" that we have been calling "dinosaur."
simonshack
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by simonshack »

hoi.polloi wrote: It's no more "far out" to question Darwinism than it is to question Buddhism or any other ism.
Heh - it just occured to me that the motto of this forum of ours could be: "Questioning sims and isms". :P
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