The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

[lux]

Coming soon ...


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7lBKBxIwGM

[Libero]

Othniel Charles Marsh was mentioned briefly earlier in this thread, but the information from his wiki along with his rich uncle's is somewhat in-your-face comical.

Born into a modest family, Marsh was able to afford higher education thanks to the generosity of his wealthy uncle George Peabody. After graduating from Yale College in 1860 he traveled the world, studying anatomy, mineralogy and geology. He obtained a teaching position at Yale upon his return. From the 1870s to 1890s he competed with rival paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope in a period of frenzied Western American expeditions known as the Bone Wars.

He graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover in 1856 and Yale College in 1860. He then studied geology and mineralogy at Yale's Sheffield Scientific School (1860-1862), and afterwards paleontology and anatomy in Berlin, Heidelberg and Breslau (1862-1865). He returned to the United States in 1866 and was appointed professor of vertebrate paleontology at Yale University. He persuaded his uncle George Peabody to establish the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale.

Marsh and his many fossil hunters were able to uncover about 500 new species of fossil animals, which were all named later by Marsh himself...

"So, Uncle George... Yale made me a professor <wink>. Can you build me a museum (affiliated with your name, of course) if I promise to personally fill it up with tons of specimens? <wink, wink>"


George Peabody looks to have been a big time banker.

In February 1867, on one of several return visits to the United States, and at the height of his financial success, Peabody's name was suggested by Francis Preston Blair, an old crony of sixth President Andrew Jackson and an active power in the smoldering Democratic Party as a possible Secretary of the Treasury in the cabinet of seventeenth President Andrew Johnson. At about the same time, his name was also mentioned in newspapers as a future presidential candidate. Peabody described the presidential suggestion as a "kind and complimentary reference", but considered that he was too old for either office (age 72).

...His will provided that he be buried in the town of his birth, Danvers, Massachusetts, and Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone arranged for Peabody's remains to be returned to America on "H.M.S. Monarch", the newest and largest ship in the Royal Navy, arriving at Boston.

...Peabody took Junius Spencer Morgan (father of J. P. Morgan) into partnership in 1854 to form Peabody, Morgan & Co., and the two financiers worked together until Peabody’s retirement in 1864...

...In 1862, Peabody was made a Freeman of the City of London.

...A statue sculpted by William Wetmore Story stands next to the Royal Exchange in the City of London, unveiled by the Prince of Wales in July 1869: Peabody himself was too unwell to attend the ceremony, and died less than four months later. A replica of the same statue, erected in 1890, stands next to the Peabody Institute, in Mount Vernon Park, part of the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland.

[lux]

Alleged scientists in a fake jaw studded with purported tooth fossils.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140501160 ... paleo.html


A FISH STORY ...

A television program called Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives was recently presented by The Discovery Channel. It marked their second show in the new (for television) pseudo-documentary genre and yet another step downward in media “scientific” reporting. The show “makes the case” that prehistoric, Greyhound bus-sized, Great White shark-like predators still roam the world's oceans today by presenting admittedly fake evidence and testimony.



A pseudo-documentary is a documentary-style production that the producers admit is fiction but this admission is cleverly and stealthily presented in such a way that many viewers will likely not notice, credit, or comprehend that little detail. It is also a show which presents falsities that even the most whorish of the scientific establishment won't corroborate. This is Discovery's second pseudo-documentary, the first one being about mermaids called Mermaids: The Body Found which pseudo-presented the pseudo-evidence that mermaids pseudo-exist. What makes this new “documentary” genre more insidious is that it is presented by an entity, The Discovery Channel, that purports to be an avenue of scientific knowledge.

These Discovery Channel shows present completely fake actor-experts who present completely fake evidence to make a completely fake case about the show's topic and they include “Blair Witch” type “found video footage” and fake photographs to lend credence to the fakery.

Now, a cluesforum member might ask: How is this different than every other “documentary” shown on television? Well, that's a very good question. Actually, the only significant difference is that the show's producers admit, though only covertly, that it is fake. The sad thing is that it doesn't seem to make much difference in the minds of much of the viewing public who seem to swallow it anyway.

Case in point:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130804054 ... n-poll.htm

Here is the poll results after airing the show of public opinion about the existence of megalodons.


Do you believe that megalodon is still alive?

YES: 30%
MAYBE: 47%
NO: 23%

So, that's a whopping 77% of the public who think that this animal does or might still exist – a job well done by the fakery-meisters, I'd say!

Here's a clip from the show:


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XFLh-pY6nA

And, here's its Blair Witch “footage”:


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJMguH9NaaE
****************************************

So, what's the truth about megalodons?

The only fossil evidence of this animal is teeth and a few bits of vertebrae. The teeth do resemble those of a Great White shark, only larger, so I can see a logical hypothesis that the megalodon may have looked like a larger version of that fish but as is stated in this National Geographic documentary from last year ...



… by the guy from Wright University, “We truly don't know what the megaladon looked like. We can only assume how it looked and how it killed.”

And, of course, there is no evidence that the megalodon still exists today.

But, this Nat-Geo documentary is not without its own fakery. I love the “serendipitous” discovery right on camera of a perfect megalodon tooth sticking out from the cliff face within easy reach of the “scientist” as the narrator says,

“Incredibly, on the one day cameras are there to record their fossil hunt, Godfrey extracts a rare ten to twelve million year old megalodon shark tooth.”

Yeah, right, Godfrey.

*************************

So, my point is that all of this data about what megalodons looked like and how they behaved is really pure speculation yet it is hardly presented that way by the media. All they really have is some big teeth.

But, can you tell what an animals looks like just from looking at some teeth?

Well, the teeth of horses, donkeys, cows and sheep look a lot like human teeth, only larger. So, if someone had never seen these animals and only found some of their teeth, what might they conclude?

[guivre]

Catastrophic Comets for everyone!

Extending the myth, as well as increasing fear, etc.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/anim ... ec-science

Did a Comet Really Kill the Mammoths 12,900 Years Ago?

Why did mammoths, mastodons, and other mega-beasts vanish from North America?


Was it because:

1) humans killed them;


2) they couldn't hack the climate after the Ice Age ended; or

3) an exploding comet ignited continent-wide wildfires, sent hundred-mile-an-hour winds and tornadoes howling across the land, and shattered the North American ice sheet, while also maybe gouging out the Great Lakes?

Let's talk about option number three.

The idea that a comet struck Earth 12,900 years ago, at the beginning of a strange interlude of climate cooling called the Younger Dryas was first proposed in 2007. In the bitter scientific debate that has flared sporadically ever since, the latest evidence includes:

Tiny, glassy "spherules" of rock found in a Pennsylvania flowerbed by a woman who had seen a NOVA program about the comet hypothesis. In a paper that got wide coverage last week, Dartmouth researchers argue that those spherules were hurled to Pennsylvania by an impact in Quebec 12,900 years ago.


Traces of platinum deposited on the Greenland ice cap at about the same time. Harvard researchers argue that the platinum probably came from an extraterrestrial object—not a comet, however, but a rare type of iron-rich meteorite.


Spherules in Syria. In their latest paper, some of the original proponents of the impact hypothesis now say it deposited 10 million metric tons of spherules over an area of 20 million square miles, stretching from Syria through Europe to the west coast of North America.

Some opponents of the hypothesis—and there are many—want so badly for it to go away that they have attempted to declare it dead. "My only comment is that the pro-impact literature is, at this point, fringe science being promoted by a single journal," one of them, Nicholas Pinter of Southern Illinois University, said last week. The journal in question is Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Other researchers are trying to keep an open mind.

Keeping in mind that there are plenty of people who think that the National Geographic is a scientific journal, and compared to the Discovery Channel it very nearly is.

Now, why is this being trotted out again, when three years ago we see this:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/ ... tists.html

Comet impact did not cause mammoths to die out, say scientists

A mass extinction that caused the death of giant species of mammal including mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers and giant beavers was not caused by a comet impact, scientists have concluded.

Researchers have previously suggested that the last mass extinction of animals on Earth was triggered by a comet colliding with the planet and sparking a sudden drop in temperature around 13,000 years ago.
This sudden change in climate, known as the Younger-Dryas climate reversal, saw many species of large mammals die out and also brought humans to the brink of extinction.
But scientists now claim to have disproved the controversial theory after finding a key piece of evidence used to support the comet impact idea could have been created by a more mundane process.
Another theory, which proposes that fresh water from a giant glacial lake glaciers poured into the North Atlantic, upsetting the ocean's currents which had helped keep most of the planet ice free, is now the most likely explaination for the shift in climate, which triggered the extinctions.
Scientists first put forward the idea that a comet was behind the extinctions after tiny crystals of carbon, known as nanodiamonds, were found in 12,900 year old sediment layers.
They claimed these nanodiamonds were formed by the massive forces and temperatures created by an impact strike.
Experts said the presence of these nanodiamonds were evidence of a devastating impact by a comet or meteor, which threw millions of tonnes of dust into the atmosphere, causing the planet to cool.
However, researchers at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and Royal Hollway University of London, have found that these carbon crystals are not diamonds at all and are in fact clumps of another form of carbon known as graphene which commonly forms in sediments.

So what has changed in the last three years? Why, someone is using the Iridium model I posted about earlier, concerning Luis and Walter Alvarez.

To put the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis to a rigorous test, Michail Petaev, Shichun Huang, Stein Jacobsen, and Alan Zindler of Harvard decided to look for iridium in one of the ice cores from Greenland. Their results appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July. "We expected to find nothing," said Petaev.


And indeed they found next to no iridium.

But to the researchers' surprise, they found a pronounced spike in platinum that started exactly 12,900 years ago. Over the next 20 years or so the platinum concentration in the ice rose more than a hundredfold, then subsided again.


It's about the profile you'd expect, Petaev said, from dust settling out of the stratosphere after a meteorite impact, or perhaps a series of impacts.

Most meteorites contain about as much iridium as they do platinum. A rare kind called a magmatic iron meteorite, however, is platinum rich but iridium poor.


It's possible that a very small meteorite of that type happened to fall right on the part of Greenland that humans would extract an ice core from 12,900 years later. In other words, the platinum spike may be real, but it may be a coincidence that has nothing to do with mammoths or the Younger Dryas.

But it's also possible that there's a global platinum layer waiting to be discovered, like the iridium layer that proved there had been a Cretaceous impact.

To deposit as much platinum worldwide as it did on Greenland—around 30 parts per trillion—the meteorite would have had to be around half a mile across, the Harvard team calculates.


A rocky object that size would have left a substantial crater—but again, no Younger Dryas crater has been found. "I would bet on the event not being global," said Melosh.

The key test, though, will be whether the platinum spike turns up in Younger Dryas layers of Antarctic ice cores. Scientists are sure to be looking there soon.

Deus In or Ex Machina?

Opponents of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis have raised all sorts of objections to it, besides the absence of a crater.


Perhaps the simplest is that there seems to be no need for such a deus ex machina to explain the drama that unfolded on Earth 13 millennia ago. Human hunting or climate change or both can explain the demise of mammoths and other Ice Age megafauna.


Internal lurches of Earth's climate machine suffice to explain the Younger Dryas itself—and besides, the ice-age climate record contains evidence of many other abrupt shifts similar to but earlier than the Younger Dryas. "You can't imagine every change had an extraterrestrial cause," Broecker said.

But the fact that an impact isn't needed at the Younger Dryas, or that some scientists may seem to want one too much, doesn't mean an impact didn't happen.


If an impact did happen at the Younger Dryas, it may just have amplified Earth's own internal sources of upheaval—extraterrestrial and terrestrial causes are not mutually exclusive. "The idea is that the system is drifting toward instability, but can't quite make it," Broecker said. "Then an impact comes along and it's like a knockout punch.

"But if it hadn't been for the impact, then the Younger Dryas would have just happened later,” he said. “It would have gone off by itself."

Researchers are only beginning, Broecker added, "to figure out what an impact did or didn't do. It's going to take a lot of people a lot of time."

So, there's nothing even close to conclusive, but this new story seems to be on track to becoming the current theory.

BTW, I see Richard A. Muller has his name on a paper regarding Greenland ice cores and iridium. Would not be surprising to find these new researchers have been propped up somehow. I'll keep reading and post what I find in either this or the Richard A. Muller thread per relevance.

Edit --

The more I poke this, the more disgusting it gets. This may take some time. I won't edit this particular post again, though.

[fbenario]

But to the researchers' surprise, they found a pronounced spike in platinum that started exactly 12,900 years ago. Over the next 20 years or so the platinum concentration in the ice rose more than a hundredfold, then subsided again.

There is no possible way that an ice core can date anything with this much specificity.

[anonjedi2]

An interesting writeup about the secrecy behind dinosaur DNA research.

http://www.icr.org/article/dinosaur-dna ... e-wagging/

[lux]

“… how do they [dinosaur DNA researchers] know when they're on the right track, given that there are no living dinosaurs to provide a handy sample of DNA for comparison? The answer is that they rely on paleontological theory, which (according to most researchers) holds that dinosaurs and crocodiles came from the same stock, and that the dinosaurs' only living descendants are birds. Therefore researchers look for DNA that is similar, but not identical, to DNA from these groups of organisms.


“In other words, only DNA research that provides dinosaur DNA sequences similar to those of birds and crocodiles is allowed.”

I think that pretty much says it for me.

I don't doubt that animals existed millions of years ago but I doubt that their form is being correctly represented by our scientific establishment and that many, if not all, were neither crocodile-like nor bird-like.

[Farcevalue]

"Masiakasaurus knopfleri, was named after the musician Mark Knopfler, whose music inspired the expedition crew."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masiakasaurus_knopfleri

This turned up in a recent query about Dire Straits. Whoda thunk?

Maybe they will discover a Shacktosaurus one day

[simonshack]

Maybe they will discover a Shacktosaurus one day

Aww...!!! I'd rather be hieroglyphed on a cro-magnon cavern wall !



"The Elephant in the room"

[brianv]

A Dinosaur named after Mark Knobfler - well that's fucking fitting.

[simonshack]

"Masiakasaurus knopfleri, was named after the musician Mark Knopfler, whose music inspired the expedition crew."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masiakasaurus_knopfleri

This turned up in a recent query about Dire Straits. Whoda thunk?

Woah - Farcevalue!

I thought you were joking - but it appears that they have ACTUALLY named this "vicious lizard" after Mark Knopfler ...

In Malagasy, masiaka means "vicious"; thus, the genus name means "vicious lizard".
The type species, Masiakasaurus knopfleri, was named after the musician Mark Knopfler, whose music inspired the expedition crew.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masiakasaurus_knopfleri

Well - I'm glad that I am no - and never will be - a rock star!

[lux]

This is a Kootenichela deppi, named after actor Johnny Depp because of its Edward Scissorhands type claws.

[Flabbergasted]

Here are some more examples of organisms named after famous people:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_or ... ous_people

Eristalis gatesi

[Flabbergasted]

To keep it in the fossil department, here are seven "fabulously named" fossils:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/31406/7- ... ed-fossils


Bambiraptor feinbergi

[Flabbergasted]

Sorry, but I couldn´t resist this one:




Obamadon gracilis
--- named in honour of Obama's toothy grin!

Don´t ask me which is real and which is fake!