The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

[Libero]

The relevant article is here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Ad ... ne.0032623

Editor: Daphne Soares , University of Maryland, United States of America

[fbenario]

Editor: Daphne Soares

What's up with the blushing emoticon? Should we know her name?

[Libero]

Editor: Daphne Soares

What's up with the blushing emoticon? Should we know her name?

Soar-es

saur-us

[guivre]

^^^ Well isn't that tricky...

Speaking of tricks, The Bonham Auction has come and gone and the "Dueling Dinosaurs" (as mentioned in this post and a few following: http://cluesforum.info/viewtopic.php?f= ... 5#p2386619) failed to sell.

The article has photos of the specimen, the photo linked in the previous post was a model, photos of the actual item were not available.

https://www.foxnews.com/science/2-nearl ... ated-7m-9m

A pre-sale estimate had predicted that the skeletons, offered as a single lot, could fetch between $7 million and $9 million — a price out of the reach of most museums. There were hopes that a wealthy buyer would donate the skeletons to a public institution but the price failed to meet the reserve at the Bonhams auction; the highest offer was $5.5 million.

I thought these comments were mildly interesting. They seem a bit skeptical, for whatever that's worth.

Lindgren said scientists will have to determine whether the ceratopsian was indeed a new species, but either way, it would “still be one of the rarest ceratopsians of all time.”

“It is either the most complete and oldest triceratops that had lived at the end of the Cretaceous or it’s a brand-new species,” he said.

But Jack Horner, a paleontologist at Montana State University, called the promoters’ claims a means “to enhance the price of the specimen.”

“These fossils are not worth anything because they were collected to sell and not specifically for their science,” he said.

Johnson said the skeletons would need to be extracted from their enclosing sandstone and compared to other skeletons in various museums to determine their “actual completeness.” But he said finding a carnivore and herbivore together is still “very unusual.”

[Evil Edna]

The BBC and MSM has gone massive with the latest Dinosaur Hoax story.

Up for auction with a guide price of just £400,000 - £600,000 is the gigantic skeleton of a "Diplodocus longus". The 160 million year old Jurassic beast, nicknamed 'Misty', is reputed to be "one of only six complete diplodocus skeletons in the world". Purportedly found "almost completely intact in 2009 by the sons of palaeontologist Raimund Albersdoerfer near a quarry in Wyoming in the US."


BBC: "The diplodocus was assembled in Rotterdam before being taken to Sussex to be auctioned"

Elsewhere in the meeja, however, "the skeleton" is described as being just 40% original, and 60% fake ("copied from previous specimens"). The meaning of "fake" is clear enough. But what in this context does "original" mean? Original what? Inventively fashioned from original elephant bone, perhaps?


FAMILY SCAM? German palaeontologist Raimund Albersdoerfer, his wife and their teenaged sons Benjamin and Jacob.
Painstaking delicate work, unearthing Misty's skeleton Using a pickaxe?? And what's with the old tyres??!


FAMILY SCAM?: German palaeontologist Raimund Albersdoerfer, his wife and their two sons Benjamin and Jacob
"digging out the giant bones"


MISTY'S DISCOVERER RAIMUND ALBERSDORFER: Geologist, President of Dinosauria International LLC, and owner-manager of Albersdörfer Fossils

The Independent reports that after being dug out from the site in Wyoming, the skeleton was sent to Rotterdam to be fitted in its metal frame by Aart Walen, an expert “dinosaur builder”.


AART WALEN: expert dinosaur-builder and "owner of a casting and moulding company. His lab is in a recondite village in Holland."

Aart is, himself, no stranger to "surprising finds". In 2005, while on annual vacation to the fossil-rich Lourinhã Formation in western Portugal, Aart found a whole clutch of dinosaurs eggs. "He just stumbled across some eggshells, and he traced the eggshells up the cliffs and he found there were not only isolated eggshells, there was also an entire nest up there," said Ricardo Araújo, a doctoral candidate in paleontology at Southern Methodist University in Texas. Such a find is "extremely rare," Araújo said. "There's probably a handful of situations like this in the world."

Some people (like Aart) have all the luck!


"Dinosaur Eggs"


A tiny morsel of truth is burped out by the BBC which reports:

"The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, said it would not buy the dinosaur despite its own diplodocus only being a cast of one displayed in Pittsburgh [nicknamed "Dippy"]. And that skeleton cast [of Dippy] is itself made up of two different diplodocuses."

And digging a bit deeper, the "Dippy" fake in the NHM was, in fact, cast from a further four Diplodocus "specimens"...

Sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-25094101
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/gi ... up-2855370
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 67153.html
https://sites.google.com/site/ricardoar ... %26friends
http://www.livescience.com/36971-dinosa ... vered.html
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/dippy-th ... sMkMwCMIJ4

[anonjedi2]

Dinosaur asteroid 'sent life to Mars'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25201572

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs may have catapulted life to Mars and the moons of Jupiter, US researchers say.

They calculated how many Earth rocks big enough to shelter life were ejected by asteroids in the last 3.5bn years.

Really? How did they calculate that? What methods were used?

The Chicxulub impact was strong enough to fire chunks of debris all the way to Europa, they write in Astrobiology.

Thousands of potentially life-bearing rocks also made it to Mars, which may once have been habitable, they add.

They write, they add. Do they prove anything or provide any evidence? Of course not.

"We find that rock capable of carrying life has likely transferred from both Earth and Mars to all of the terrestrial planets in the solar system and Jupiter," says lead author Rachel Worth, of Penn State University.

Has likely? How likely? Based on what methods of calculation?

"Any missions to search for life on Titan or the moons of Jupiter will have to consider whether biological material is of independent origin, or another branch in Earth's family tree."

Panspermia - the idea that organisms can "hitchhike" around the solar system on comets and debris from meteor strikes - has long fascinated astronomers.

But thanks to advances in computing, they are now able to simulate these journeys - and follow potential stowaways as they hitch around the Solar System.

Ahh yes, computer modeling. Not real science, you see. Just feed a bunch of variables into a computer program until you get the desired results. Since the "idea" that organisms can "hitchhike" around the solar system has long fascinated astronomers, then why wouldn't they do everything they can to prove this idea that is so fascinating to them? This, of course, is not science.

In this new study, researchers first estimated the number of rocks bigger than 3m ejected from Earth by major impacts.

Three metres is the minimum they think necessary to shield microbes from the Sun's radiation over a journey lasting up to 10 million years.

They then mapped the likely fate of these voyagers. Many simply hung around in Earth orbit, or were slowly drawn back down.

Others were pulled into the Sun, or sling-shotted out of the Solar System entirely.

Yet a small but significant number made it all the way to alien worlds which might welcome life. "Enough that it matters," Ms Worth told BBC News.

About six rocks even made it as far as Europa, a satellite of Jupiter with a liquid ocean covered in an icy crust.

"Even using conservative, realistic estimates... it's still possible that organisms could be swimming around out there in the oceans of Europa," she said.

Sounds like a lot more guesswork and just making shit up as they go along.

Travel to Mars was much more common. About 360,000 large rocks took a ride to the Red Planet, courtesy of historical asteroid impacts.
Continue reading the main story


"I'd be surprised if life hasn't gotten to Mars. It seems reasonable that at some point some Earth organisms made it”

Rachel Worth Penn State University

Reasonable? In what twisted world of logic does ANY OF THIS seem reasonable? These people are mad.

[Flabbergasted]

anonjedi2,

that´s a prime example of wishful thinking of the worst kind. Evolutionists can get away with murder!

The discussion on evolution, to the extent that such a discussion is still considered a possibility, has lately been drawn towards things Lilliputian, that is to say “molecular”, and away from the arena of gross, palpable things every man has himself some relation to and can appreciate with an acceptable degree of common sense. Even when the layman heroically labors to reduce his ignorance regarding things like extra-genomic DNA, chromosomal rearrangements, transposons, exon shuffling, plasmids, viral transformation and the p-fourhundred-fifties the molecular world is packed with – eye-glazing technical vocabulary scientists have come up with over the past twenty years – he still cannot hope to master the discipline of evolutionary biology well enough to judge how likely – or viable – are the evolutionary scenarios so profusely presented to him through the media. But then, of course, the great popularity of Dawkins' “blind watchmaker concept” among professional scientists is not exactly a flattering assessment of the powers of reasoning of that distinguished class either.

What has happened to yesterday’s arguments in response to the proposed theory of evolution? Has molecular biology offered solutions to problems like the Cambrian Explosion? to the complete absence of undisputed transitional forms in the fossil record? To the absence of nascent organs in living creatures? To the impossibly long odds (calculable by any high school student) required by the Neo-Darwinian model of mutation and natural selection to produce new species? To the paleontologically attested contemporaneousness of man and his supposed ape-like ancestors? To mimicry, convergence and a plethora of other well-known and easily observable facts of nature? No, these basic questions remain unanswered by evolutionary science, but have been belittled and nonchalantly swept off the table as if no longer relevant to the issue. The theory of evolution is now plainly declared a fact one must take for granted and exempt from any further need of proof.

Well, if one is sneered at and ridiculed for bringing into discussion the troublesome boulders which have always barred evolutionists from indulging in unrefrained wishful thinking, the question remains: Are there similar illogicalities and discrepancies to be found in the wonderful world of molecular biology to which one is so often referred for enlightenment? The answer is, needless to say, a resounding yes. In his book “Darwin’s Black Box”, Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, shows us just how many statistical miracles and mythological creatures lurk under the cover of evolutionary science and its pompous nomenclature. His point of departure is the existence of irreducibly complex molecular systems everywhere in living forms, systems comparable to a mousetrap: several heterogeneous components brought together and finely adjusted for the execution of a highly specific task. Behe’s central argument is very clear and certainly irrefutable: One cannot conceive of a mousetrap as produced stepwise through a random, evolutionary process, not just because of the horrendously remote probability of chance producing such a providential result, but even more simply because all the mousetrap’s components will have to be in place and perfectly adjusted to each other before it can catch the first mouse and thus fulfill its objective in existence. Behe frankly asks us what an only partially finished mousetrap might have been doing for eons while waiting for all the parts to come together in a functional unit. Yes, what indeed?

Unfortunately, most advocates for evolutionism think that all resistance to their philosophy must of necessity come from the Young-Earth or Biblical Creationist school. Thus, any discussion of the logical and scientific viability of evolutionist claims is marred by this preconception and reduced to an arbitrary duel between what we are supposed to believe are rational and highly learned scientists on one side, and desperately fanatical and uneducated Protestants on the other. I don’t know exactly what has been done or said to make Behe’s exertions seem compatible with Biblical Creationism – I fail to see why they should not merely be read for what they are – but disbelievers in Neo-Darwinism should not be surprised to see their names inscribed into that religious body. One can only hope that more people will look out beyond the intellectually stifling Neo-Darwinist/Young-Earth Creationist dichotomy and realize they have been oversimplifying the matter, measuring it with the yardstick of their own noses.

Below is an excerpt from Behe’s “Darwin’s Black Box”. It shows that wishful thinking is synonymous with modern science even in the highest academic circles, miles above the pages of tabloids and popular science magazines spewed out to quench the thirst of the puerile. Like the mousetrap spoken of above, the blood clotting cascade and the amusing Rube Goldberg machines are excellent instances of irreducibly complex systems.

Sorry if this is a bit long

Rube Goldberg in the blood
(Excerpt from pages 90-97)


In this section I'll reproduce an attempt at an evolutionary explanation of blood clotting offered by Russell Doolittle. What he has done is to hypothesize a series of steps in which clotting proteins appear one after another. Yet, as I will show in the next section, the explanation is seriously inadequate because no reasons are given for the appearance of the proteins, no attempt is made to calculate the probability of the proteins' appearance, and no attempt is made to estimate the new proteins' properties.

Russell Doolittle, a professor of biochemistry at the Center for Molecular Genetics, University of California, San Diego, is the most prominent person interested in the evolution of the clotting cascade. From the time of his Harvard Ph.D. thesis, "The Comparative Biochemistry of Blood Coagulation" (1961), Professor Doolittle has examined the clotting systems of different, “simpler” organisms in the hope that that would lead to an understanding of how the mammalian system arose. Doolittle recently reviewed the state of current knowledge in an article in the joumal Thrombosis and Haemostasis. The journal is intended for professional scientists and doctors of medicine who work on aspects of blood clotting. Essentially, the audience for the journal is those people who know more about blood clotting than anyone else on earth.

Doolittle begins his article by asking the big question: “How in the world did this complex and delicately balanced process evolve? ... The paradox was, if each protein depended on activation by another, how could the system ever have arisen? Of what use would any part of the scheme be without the whole ensemble?”

These questions go to the heart of this book’s inquiry. It is worth quoting Doolittle’s article at length. (The reader will find it helpful to refer to Figure 4-3.) I have changed some technical terms in the quote to make it more readable for a general audience.



Blood clotting is a delicately balanced phenomenon involving proteases, antiproteases, and protease substrates. Generally speaking, each forward action engenders some backward-inclined response. Various metaphors can be applied to its step-by-step evolution: action-reaction, point and counterpoint, or good news and bad news. My favorite, however, is yin and yan.

In ancient Chinese cosmology, all that comes to be is the result of combining the opposite principles yin and yang. Yang is the masculine principle and embodies activity, height, heat, light and dryness. Yin, the feminine counterpoint, personifies passivity, depth, cold, darkness and wetness. Their marriage yields the true essence of all things. Keeping in mind that it’s only a metaphor, consider the following yin and yang scenario for the evolution of vertebrate clotting. I have arbitrarily designated the enzymes or proenzyrnes as the yang, and the nonenzymes as the yin.


Yin: Tissue Factor (TF) appears as the result of the duplication of a gene for [another protein] that binds EGF domains. The new gene product only comes into contact with the blood or hemolymph after tissue damage.

Yan: Prothrombin appears in an ancient guise with EGF domain(s) attached, the result of a [...] protease gene duplication and [...] shuffling. The EGF domain serves as a site for attachment to and activation by the exposed TF.

Yin: A thrombin-receptor is fashioned by virtue of the duplication of a gene for a [protein region that will stick in a cell membrane]. Cleavage by the TF-activated prothrombin effects cell contractility or clumping.

Yin, again: Fibrinogen is born, a bastard protein derived from a thrombin-sensitive [elongated] father and a [protein with a compact structure for a] mother.

Yin, again: Antithrombin III appears, the product of a duplication of a [protein with a similar overall structure].

Yang: Plasminogen is generated from the vast inventory of [...] proteases already on hand. It comes with [...] domains that can bind to fibrin. Its activation by binding to bacterial proteins [...] reflects a previous role as an antibacterial agent.

Yin: Antiplasmin arises from the duplication and modification of [a protein with a similar overall structure], probably antithrombin.

Yin and Yang: A thrombin-activatable [cross-linking protein] is unleashed.

Yang: Tissue Plasminogen Activator (TPA) springs forth. Variously shuffled domains allow it to bind to several substances, including fibrin.

Marriage: The modification of prothrombin by the acquisition of a “gla”-domain. The ability to bind calcium and bind to specific [negatively-charged] surfaces is conferred.

Yin: The appearance of proaccelerin as the result of duplicating the [gene for a protein with a similar, overall structure] and the acquisition of some other [gene pieces].

Yang: Stuart factor appears, a duplic[ate] of the recently gla-anointed prothrombin; its ability to bind to proaccelerin can bring about [...] activation of prothrombin, independent of the [...] activation by TF.

Yang again: Proconvertin is duplicated from Stuart factor, liberating prothrombin for better binding to fibrin. When combined with tissue factor, proconvertin is able to activate Stuart factor by [cutting it].

Yang again: Christmas factor from Stuart factor. For a period, both bind to proaccelerin.

Yin: Antihemophilic factor from proaccelerin. Quickly adapts to interact with Christmas Factor.

Yang: Protein C is genetically derived from prothrombin. Inactivates proaccelerin and antihemophilic factor by limited [cutting].

Divorce: Prothrombin engages in an exchange [of gene pieces] that leaves it with [domains] for binding to fibrin in place of its EGF domains, which are no longer needed for interaction with TF.



HOW’S THAT AGAIN?

Now let’s take a little time to give Professor Doolittle’s scenario a critical look. The first thing to notice is that no causative factors are cited. Thus tissue factor “appears,” fibrinogen “is born,” antiplasmin “arises,” TPA “springs forth,” a cross-linking protein “is unleashed,” and so forth. What exactly, we might ask, is causing all this springing and unleashing? Doolittle appears to have in mind a step-by-step Darwinian scenario involving the undirected, random duplication and recombination of gene pieces. But consider the enormous amount of luck needed to get the right gene pieces in the right places. Eukaryotic organisms have quite a few gene pieces and apparently the process that switches them is random. So making a new blood-coagulation protein by shuffling is like picking a dozen sentences randomly from an encyclopedia in the hope of making a coherent paragraph. Professor Doolittle does not go to the trouble of calculating how many incorrect, inactive, useless “variously shuffled domains” would have to be discarded before obtaining a protein with, say, TPA-like activity.

To illustrate the problem, let’s do our own quick calculation. Consider that animals with blood-clotting cascades have roughly 10,000 genes, each of which is divided into an average of three pieces. This gives a total of about 30,000 gene pieces. TPA has four different types of domains. By “variously shuffling,” the odds of getting those four domains together is 30,000 to the fourth power, which is approximately one-tenth to the eighteenth power. Now, if the Irish Sweepstakes had odds of winning of one-tenth to the eighteenth power, and if a million people played the lottery each year, it would take an average of about a thousand billion years before anyone (not just a particular person) won the lottery. A thousand billion years is roughly a hundred times the current estimate of the age of the universe. Doolittle’s casual language (“spring forth,” etc.) conceals enormous difficulties. The same problem of ultra-slim odds would trouble the appearance of prothrombin (“the result of a [...] protease gene duplication and shuffling”), fibrinogen (“a bastard protein derived from ...”) plasminogen, proaccelerin, and each of the several proposed rearrangements of prothrombin. Doolittle apparently needs to shuffle and deal himself a number of perfect bridge hands to win the game. Unfortunately the universe doesn’t have time to wait.

The second question to consider is the implicit assumption that a protein made from a duplicated gene would immediately have the new, necessary properties. Thus we are told that “tissue factor appears as the result of the duplication of a gene for [another protein].” But tissue factor would certainly not appear as the result of the duplication – the other protein would. If a factory for making bicycles were duplicated, it would make bicycles, not motorcycles; that’s what is meant by the word duplication. A gene for a protein might be duplicated by a random mutation, but it does not just “happen” to also have sophisticated new properties. Since a duplicated gene is simply a copy of the old gene, an explanation for the appearance of tissue factor must include the putative route it took to acquire a new function. This problem is discreetly avoided. Doolittle’s scheme runs into the same problem in the production of prothrombin, a thrombin receptor, antithrombin, plasminogen, antiplasmin, proaccelerin, Stuart factor, proconvertin, Christmas factor, antihemophilic factor, and protein C – virtually every protein of the system!

The third problem in the blood-coagulation scenario is that it avoids the crucial issues of how much, how fast, when, and where. Nothing is said about the amount of clotting material initially available, the strength of the clot that would be formed by a primitive system, the length of time the clot would take to form once a cut occurred, what fluid pressure the clot would resist, how detrimental the formation of inappropriate clots would be, or a hundred other such questions. The absolute and relative values of these factors and others could make any particular hypothetical system either possible or (much more likely) wildly wrong. For example, if only a small amount of fibrinogen were available it would not cover a wound; if a primitive fibrin formed a random blob instead of a meshwork, it would be unlikely to stop blood flow. If the initial action of antithrombin were too fast, the initial action of thrombin too slow, or the original Stuart factor or Christmas factor or antihemophilic factor bound too loosely or too tightly (or if they bound to the inactive forms of their targets as well as the active forms), then the whole system would crash. At no step – not even one – does Doolittle give a model that includes numbers or quantities; without numbers, there’s no science. When a merely verbal picture is painted of the development of such a complex system, there is absolutely no way to know if it would actually work. When such crucial questions are ignored we leave science and enter the world of Calvin and Hobbes.

Yet the objections raised so far are not the most serious. The most serious, and perhaps the most obvious, concerns irreducible complexity. I emphasize that natural selection, the engine of Darwinian evolution, only works if there is something to select – something that is useful right now, not in the future. Even if we accept his scenario for purposes of discussion, however, by Doolittle’s own account no blood clotting appears until at least the third step. The formation of tissue factor at the first step is unexplained, since it would then be sitting around with nothing to do. In the next step (prothrombin popping up already endowed with the ability to bind tissue factor, which somehow activates it) the poor proto-prothrombin would also be twiddling its thumbs with nothing to do until, at last, a hypothetical thrombin receptor appears at the third step and fibrinogen falls from heaven at step four. Plasminogen appears in one step, but its activator (TPA) doesn’t appear until two steps later. Stuart factor is introduced in one step, but whiles away its time doing nothing until its activator (proconvertin) appears in the next step and somehow tissue factor decides that this is the complex it wants to bind. Virtually every step of the suggested pathway faces similar problems.

Simple words like “the activator doesn’t appear until two steps later” may not seem impressive until you ponder the implications. Since two proteins – the proenzyme and its activator – are both required for one step in the pathway, then the odds of getting both the proteins together are roughly the square of the odds of getting one protein. We calculated the odds of getting TPA alone to be one-tenth to the eighteenth power; the odds of getting TPA and its activator together would be about one-tenth to the thirty-sixth power! That is a horrendously large number. Such an event would not be expected to happen even if the universe’s ten-billion-year life were compressed into a single second and relived every second for ten billion years. But the situation is actually much worse: if a protein appeared in one step with nothing to do, then mutation and natural selection would tend to eliminate it. Since it is doing nothing critical, its loss would not be detrimental, and production of the gene and protein would cost energy that other animals aren’t spending. So producing the useless protein would, at least to some marginal degree, be detrimental. Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection would actually hinder the formation of irreducibly complex systems such as the clotting cascade.

Doolittle’s scenario implicitly acknowledges that the clotting cascade is irreducibly complex, but it tries to paper over the dilemma with a hail of metaphorical references to yin and yang. The bottom line is that clusters of proteins have to be inserted all at once into the cascade. This can be done only by postulating a "hopeful monster" who luckily gets all of the proteins at once, or by the guidance of an intelligent agent.

Following Professor Doolittle’s example, we could propose a route by which the first mousetrap was produced: The hammer appears as the result of the duplication of a crowbar in our garage. The hammer comes into contact with the platform, the result of shuffling several popsicle sticks. The spring springs forth from a grandfather clock that had been used as a timekeeping device. The holding bar is fashioned from a straw sticking out of a discarded Coke can, and the catch is unleashed from the cap on a bottle of beer. But things just don’t happen that way unless someone or something else is guiding the process.

Recall that Doolittle's audience for the article in Thrombosis and Haemostasis are the leaders in clotting research – they know the state of the art. Yet the article does not explain to them how clotting might have originated and subsequently evolved; instead, it just tells a story. The fact is, no one on earth has the vaguest idea how the coagulation cascade came to be.

[hoi.polloi]

Great post! I agree that the theory of evolution without any further explanation likely requires a much longer age to the universe.

So does one extend the age of the universe or come up with explanations? Since we don't seem to have many branches of such specialized sciences capable of talking with one another to the depth that each of them specializes in their own subject, we must wait for random academic collisions to evolve the theory of evolution by chance and thereby construct the true, fully branched extent of the theory of evolution over time, as an accidental result of human interest. (Please forgive a tongue-in-cheek analogy).

The typical hypothesis for an accelerated (but unobserved) series of 'mouse traps' is that there are particular co-evolutionary processes that come out of undiscovered but potent, chemical reactions. I find the idea a bit like the Hunt for the Snark, and a much simpler explanation for the die-hard conventionalists is to just assume the universe (and Earth) is infinity (arbitrary units) old.

I am not treating such a notion with deliberate preference; I just find it easier to rationalize and visualize. Right now, the big bang presumes the universe's behavior can be traced from a single point based on units of time that are infinitely valuable into the past and present, dismissing the idea of time warping or changing if one were to actually observe it from those points. However, please permit me a notional exercise that may seem flighty and New Agey, I'm afraid.

I think if we are to follow the pattern of human observation logically, we could consider this single "big bang" point more like a dot on the horizon of a rounded time-space-physics (that we observe), past which our perceptive abilities are not able to calculate. That is, if we were able to be in bodies that could go back in time to this point, we would find it more and more resembling not a hot, infinitely dense mass in a pin point of time but a full, infinitely old universe already in existence, and the new extreme point would seem yet another universe's lifetime away in the relative past. Our universe we left behind would seem like the infinitely accelerating, menacingly cold postulation we have for our own situation's future. Similarly, if one could be in a body capable of traveling into the future, we might find the accelerating expanse of the void contract down to a manageable, universe-size level again.

What is this place and time we call "here" and "now" but a moment of some time — perhaps infinite — as seen through the lens of a human body with its own perceptive limitations, even with the aid of technology (after all, based upon and catered to our senses)?

Now what kind of body could be capable of traveling to distant past or future in this scenario gets too into metaphysics and is hardly even hypothetical, but I think it just goes some way of explaining how there might be no "beginning", and never will there be. Hence, in this scenario, if time-space were mathematically rational and therefore could be negative (i.e.; time flows the other way around from a different perspective), there is no "end". Might there be some limit or end in the "future"? Who knows? Very imaginative, I guess, but I think useful for considering again just how much we don't know when we claim to know so much about one particular path of knowledge.

In such a case only, I think, is something like "evolution" possible given the immense times needed. But this would throw out a great deal of conclusions from geological research, observation of the stars/radiation and so on, so obviously the subject is very very complicated and not easily placed on a pedestal for no reason.

[Flabbergasted]

While I´m at it...

In 1957, barrister and ornithologist Douglas Dewar published (posthumously) the first edition of “The Transformist Illusion” (DeHoff Publications, Murfreesboro). The book was eventually reprinted in 1995 by Sophia Perennis et Universalis (New York). As a contribution to the debate on Darwinism it may at first sight seem outdated. It contains no hi-tech molecular biology jargon or abstruse phylogenetic discussions. In addition, our knowledge of the fossil record has obviously been expanded enormously since its publication, whether the “new” fossils are legitimate or contrived. But Dewar takes us on a delightful tour de force of refreshing simonshackian common sense, which is really our best ally in the journey through the labyrinth of media-hyped scientific mythology. The usual army of naysayers and professional debunkers have of course been busy discrediting the book by pointing out factual errors and all sorts of shortcomings, but Dewar´s arguments remain valid with regard to their overall application of common sense.

I realize it´s a bit long, but the following excerpt (pp. 235-241) is well worth the read.

The gradual transformation of a lower animal into a human being

Man is unique among animals. If we regard only his anatomy, he is merely a family, represented by one species of the primate sub-order Simioidea, which includes the monkeys and apes. If we take into consideration his psychic characters it seems necessary to place him in a separate kingdom. That such a creature -- one that lords it over all the others -- should have arisen in the ordinary course of evolution is prima facie improbable.

His chief asset is his brain, which is far larger than is needful to enable him to hold his own against all other animals. What natural force can have caused his great brain to have developed?

On the other hand, while his brain was yet on the same level as those of the creatures from which he is supposed to have evolved, it is difficult to understand how he could have competed against powerful predacious animals. Physically he is no match for them. He is a comparatively poor climber. He is not so fleet of foot as most quadrupeds. His teeth and nails are contemptible weapons. He lacks protective armour. Owing to his nakedness he is more sensitive to changes of temperature than are most animals. His great assets -- his brain and hands -- would not suffice to set off his disabilities until they had attained considerable development. If he once possessed other weapons of offence, why did he lose them? He needed them to fight against his fellow-men, and natural selection should have maintained their efficiency. If he evolved in some part of the globe free from large apes and carnivores, what led to the enormous development of his brain?

Nor are the above the only difficulties of the theory that man is derived from a lower animal. No matter what view be held of man's origin, the exercise of a little common sense should convince anyone that none of man's ancestors can have had any of the following characters (the account of which that follows repeats what I wrote in "The Man From Monkey Myth" in the issue of "The Nineteenth Century and After" of April 1944):

1) A hairy coat to which the young could cling, thus allowing the mother full use of all four limbs for locomotion.
2) Quadrupedal gait.
3) An opposable great toe.

Let us consider these. As to the hairy coat, Darwin must have realized that, if this were lost, this must have happened in spite of Natural Selection. Instead of admitting this, he suggests to his readers that the loss took place in the tropics. He writes (Descent of Man, 1901, p. 86):

"Mr. Belt believes that within the tropics it is an advantage to man to be destitute of hair, as he is thus enabled to free himself of the multitude of ticks (acari) and other parasites, with which he is often infested, and which sometimes cause ulceration. But whether this evil is of sufficient magnitude to have led to the denudation of his body by Natural Selection may be doubted, since none of the many quadrupeds inhabiting the tropics have, so far as I know, acquired any specialized means of relief. The view which seems to me the most probable is that Man, or rather primarily woman, became divested of hair for ornamental purposes, as we shall see under Sexual Selection; and, according to this belief, it is not surprising that man should differ so greatly in hairiness from all other primates, for characters, gained through Sexual Selection, often differ to an extraordinary degree in closely related forms.”

Darwin here ignores the fact that the main function of the body hair of apes and monkeys is to provide a kind of mat to which the young clings when carried by the mother, allowing her full use of all four limbs for brachiation or other forms of locomotion. The young New World monkey hangs on to the back hair of the mother; young Old World monkeys and apes cling to the hair of the mother's underparts. Le Vaillant records that he shot, in British Guiana, a monkey carrying a young one on its back. The youngster, which was not injured by the shot, continued to cling to its mother's dead body while this was being taken to the camp. In order to tear it away Le Valliant had to get the help of a Negro. When disentangled the young one made a dart for a peruke on a wooden block. It embraced the peruke with all four hands and could not be induced to quit it for four weeks [1].

Now consider the case of a species of ape, of which the body hair grew gradually shorter and finer. The shorter the hair became the more difficult it would be for the young to hang on and the greater would be the mortality resulting from them falling to the ground when the mother was moving fast; and ex hypothesi Natural Selection would prevent the shortest-haired females rearing young, for, said Darwin (Origin of Species, p. 63): "We may be sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed." The only way in which the unfortunate species of which the body hair was becoming progressively shorter could avoid extinction would be for mothers to take to using one of their limbs to hold the young one. As this would allow only three limbs for locomotion, the mothers when fleeing from enemies would be sorely handicapped and so be eliminated by Natural Selection.

The foregoing considerations show why Darwin made Sexual Selection responsible for the nudity of man. He promised that when speaking of Sexual Selection he would explain how this feat was accomplished. But those who turn to the part of the book on Sexual Selection for enlightenment will find no mention of the matter. This is particularly disappointing because of Darwin's assertion that “primarily woman became devoid of hair for ornamental purposes” does not tally with his oft-repeated declaration that Sexual Selection modifies the male rather than the female, owing to the greater and more promiscuous “eagerness” of the male who “usually accepts any female” (Descent of Man, pp. 348, 640, 683, 796, 825). In this case there was no reason why Sexual Selection should cause the female to lose her hair, such loss not being necessary for her to attract males, but there was every reason why Natural Selection should operate to prevent the loss of the hair so greatly needed for the carrying of her young. Darwin evidently found himself in difficulty. He could hardly expect to be believed if he asserted that the prehominid male suddenly acquired an aesthetic preference for short-haired females, and had an eye keen enough to distinguish between one of which the average length of the body hair was, say, 13 mm, and one whose hair measured 12 mm, and mated only with the latter, so that the body hair of the female became progressively shorter until eventually the present nude condition was reached.

Nor could Darwin, even though fortified by his belief that acquired characters are inherited, assert that, just as girls today pluck their eyebrows to attract men, so did the female prehominids heroically pluck the whole body, because human beings have many body hairs, probably as many as anthropoid apes have, but the human hairs are very much shorter and finer. Neither of these theories accounts for the nakedness of the males. Darwin, profiting by our ignorance of the laws of inheritance, asserted that the characters acquired by one sex as the result of Sexual Selection are transmitted to the other sex, but, even so, he had to explain how the naked females contrived to transmit to the males long beards, moustaches and whiskers which they themselves lacked. These troublesome male ornaments also made it difficult for Darwin to change his theory by asserting that the males were the first to be denuded because the females suddenly acquired a predilection for naked males, for, in that case, he would have had to tell us why Natural Selection permitted the males to transmit their nudity to the females and so deprive them of their means of carrying the young. He would also have been up against Natural Selection had he asserted that the males and females acquired their nakedness contemporaneously, either by mutual selection, or by plucking or scratching off their own hair, or that of the opposite sex. No wonder, then, that Darwin did not fulfill his promise to show us how mankind lost the hairy coat. So does Darwin's theory that Sexual Selection brought about the nudity of mankind collapse, and with it the theory that man's ancestors had a coat of long hair.

The supposition that man is descended from a quadrupedal ancestor is, I submit, unsustainable. Man's upright posture and gait mark him off very sharply from all other types. That great comparative anatomist, L. Vialleton, goes so far as to assert (op. cit., p. 281) that man is as far separated from his supposed simian relatives as bats and whales are from all other animals. Professor F. G. Parsons, who is a transformist, writes (Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 15, p. 990): there is “a greater gap between the musculature of man and that of the other primates than there is between many different orders.” Darwin did not appreciate this. The change from quadrupedal to bipedal gait presented no difficulty to him. He wrote (Descent of Man, p. 78): “We see [...] in existing monkeys a manner of progression between that of a quadruped and a biped.” This is not so. Monkeys are quadrupedal, but, as they spend most of their time in trees, they are more agile, more supple than creatures which rarely leave the ground. Hence those who derive man from a quadruped naturally assert that this ancestor was a tree-dweller, be it ape, tarsier or lemur. They have to get man's ancestor up a tree. How it got there, how it became transformed from a ground to a treedweller, they make no attempt to explain. Darwin starts off with an ape living in the trees and then makes it descend to the ground. Having got it back to terra firma, Darwin has to get it on its hind legs. Accordingly he writes (op. cit., p. 76):

“As it became less arboreal [...] its habitual manner of progression would have been modified; and thus it would have been rendered more strictly quadrupedal or bipedal [...] Man alone became a biped; and we can, I think, partly see how he has come to assume his erect attitude [...] Man could not have attained his present dominant position [...] without the use of his hands [...] But the hands and arms could not have become perfect enough to have manufactured weapons or to have hurled stones, as long as they were habitually used for locomotion [...] From these causes alone it would have been an advantage to man to become a biped [...] To gain this advantage the feet have been rendered flat; and the great toe has been peculiarly modified, though this has entailed the almost complete loss of its power of prehension.”

What will scientific men of the future think of this poppycock? What a picture Darwin draws of this prehominid, which, with commendable foresight and noble self-denial, abstains from using its forelimbs for locomotion, and suffers agonies in its gallant efforts to balance itself and walk on its hind legs! How its spine, hip-, leg- and foot-bones, to say nothing of the great toes must have ached while they were being reconditioned to adapt themselves to erect posture. Nor did these aches and pains entirely cease when, at last, the erect position was acquired. Dr. John Murphy solemnly assures us (Primitive Man, p. 76) that “When the upright posture was new to the precursor of man, the necessity for frequent rests from it would be greatly felt.” Even Natural Selection must have been moved to pity by the plight of this prehominid and so refrained from destroying it; otherwise, according to our evolutionists, man would never have come into being.

In addition to the handicap imposed by the change of gait, the incipient hominid would have suffered from the shortening and weakening of the arms. Baumann's dynamometer tests showed that a male chimpanzee is 4.4 times and a female chimpanzee 3.6 times as strong as a physically developed fit young man.

We have now to consider the supposed loss of the power of opposing the great toe. The corresponding toe of an ape may be compared to one of the blades for a pair of scissors, the other being represented by the remaining toes, these last being bound together by a band of fibers known as the transverse ligament. In man this ligament embraces the great toe as well as the other four, thus the human foot, as compared with that of the ape, is like a pair of scissors so tied that it cannot be opened. The hind limb of the ape is an efficient grasping organ, which the human foot is not [2]. Now, the transverse ligament must either embrace the great toe, or not embrace it; no intermediate condition is possible. If, then, man be derived from an animal having the great toe opposable, this non-opposability of his great toe must have arisen suddenly, per saltum, as a sport. As this would have imposed a great handicap in the struggle for existence, the Darwinist seems compelled to believe that after a definite date almost every individual had this disability, because, had only a few suffered from it, they would have been, in Darwin's words “rigidly destroyed”; In other words, the loss of opposability must have been a miracle affecting thousands of prehominidae. The theory of evolution is supposed to obviate the necessity for miracles. It does nothing of the sort. It merely substitutes miracles of transformation for those of special creation. The transformist, W. Beebe, writes (The Bird, p. 97): “The idea of miraculous change, which is supposed to be an exclusive prerogative of fairy tales, is a common phenomenon of evolution.”[3] The fact that the peasants of Landes and some Orientals can oppose, to some extent, the big toe to the others is, as Broderip stated, a trap for the unwary. Haeckel caused Darwin to fall into it. The latter writes (op. cit., p. 77): “With some savages, however, the foot has not altogether lost [4] its prehensile power, as shown by their manner of climbing trees, and of using them (sic) in other ways.”

As Wood Jones points out, in Man's Place among the Mammals, “the human mobility of the big toe is effected by movement at the metatarsal-phalangeal joint, whereas in the monkey and ape the movement is largely at the saddle-shaped tarso-metatarsal joint.” In less technical language, as the transverse ligament in man binds together the bones of the sole of the foot, the toes jointed on these are capable of a little independent movement varying in extent with the individual, just as the fingers of the hand are. In apes the big toe and the sole bone on which it is hinged can move at the joint with the ankle.

In conclusion, as Vialleton puts it (op. cit., p. 284), “there is absolute opposition between the attitude and the locomotion of man and those of the apes.” No amount of wishful thinking or special pleading can dispose of this fact. He criticizes a picture drawn by T. H. Huxley showing a series of skeletons of anthropoid apes and man, all upright or almost so, differing only in size, the dimensions of the cranium and the arms, and a slight inclination of the spinal column. “This drawing,” he writes (Membres et Ceintures des Vertebres tetrapodes, p. 640), “which dissembles the contrast between anthropoids and man, has done much to impress on the minds of the incompetent the notion of perfect continuity between these two groups; it is one of the most striking examples of the schematism so often employed in support of transformist ideas.”

Notes
1 - To provide a baby orangutan captured in Borneo, with something to cling to, A R. Wallace made out of a piece of buffalo hide an artificial mother, but he had to remove this because the young orangutan, in its efforts to extract milk therefrom, was nearly choked by the hair it swallowed.
2 - In all anthropoid apes and a few monkeys the foot is a more efficient grasping organ than the hand. Hartmann, who objected to their feet being called hind hands, had to describe them as prehensile feet.
3 - Professor J. Lefevre writes (Manuel Critique de Biologie [1938], p. 85): “Grace a Haeckel le transformism est a son apogee. Il a repandu partout sa foi; la parole ardente des maitres entraine irresistiblement les eleves. Dans leur lecons chargees de la mystique nouvelle. Il n’est question que d'animaux se battant, s'allongeant, se ramassant, se tordant, se retournant, se pliant, redressant leurs bras, s'ornant d'appendices, se creant des organes. se fabriquant des tentacules et des yeux, se transformant les uns dans les autres, se differenciant et se perfectionnant a volunte: prodiges plus merveilleux et beaucoup plus miraculeux que l'idee creatrice elle-meme.”
4 - Notice the question-begging word 'lost'.

[hoi.polloi]

Now consider the case of a species of ape, of which the body hair grew gradually shorter and finer. The shorter the hair became the more difficult it would be for the young to hang on and the greater would be the mortality resulting from them falling to the ground when the mother was moving fast; and ex hypothesi Natural Selection would prevent the shortest-haired females rearing young, for, said Darwin (Origin of Species, p. 63): "We may be sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed." The only way in which the unfortunate species of which the body hair was becoming progressively shorter could avoid extinction would be for mothers to take to using one of their limbs to hold the young one. As this would allow only three limbs for locomotion, the mothers when fleeing from enemies would be sorely handicapped and so be eliminated by Natural Selection.

I like a lot of the writing about the different species' uses and modifications of the thumb. Thought provoking. But this part about hair seems simple to refute from an evolutionist perspective; the mere admission that we don't know exactly what practices or instinctual habits 'evolved' to compensate for hair or why hair became less important indicates the above example is a kind of straw man.

What if, at the point hair began to leave human bodies, the need to flee from enemies was diminished? What if, as seems to be the case now, this was part of the beginning of humans being the only major predator to humans? In that case, it stands to reason that four or three limbs for locomotion wouldn't make much difference since the murderer is living in the very village where the victim lives.

Another point is: did we walk on two legs before we lost our hair? In that case, the three or four limb example of fleeing is moot. One would flee on two legs, with babe or not, end of story. And at this point, baby baskets may have been figured out. So, I feel the imaginative refutation is fun and well intentioned, but not adequate for strict Darwinists to reject the Darwinian "magic bullets" of selection through breeding and speciation to happen at the point two creatures lose the ability to breed as explanation for all lifeforms' structures.

Of course it is taken on faith since the rates needed to evolve creatures have not been individually tested for many creatures (let alone every single creature, which would be true scientific method) but most everyone starts their sweeping generalizations to explain their world somewhere. I know I do it.

[anonjedi2]

First Dinosaur Fossils Ever Found in Saudi Arabia Reveal a T. Rex Relative and a Massive Plant-Eater

https://web.archive.org/web/20160410231 ... .jpg?w=600

Scientists working in Saudi Arabia have formally identified the first dinosaur fossils ever to have come from the nation. The find is not only a rarity for Saudi Arabia, but for the entire Arabian Peninsula, where to-date only a handful of bone fragments have been found. Like all other dinosaur bones found in the region, the specimens from Saudi Arabia were fragments as well, excavated in the northwest part of the country along the coast of the Red Sea.

So, they found fragments of really old bones which probably came from a whale, elephant, rhino, etc. and called them dinosaurs. Same old story.

[guivre]

I swear, now it's just like every dinosaur story is like an April Fool's joke. I keep looking to see if I didn't click on a link to the daily mash or something but no, it's supposed to be real news. I'm sorry I don't have better commentary, but you'll see why when you see the story:

Scientists strap fake dinosaur tail on chickens to discover how T-Rex walked

With scientists having named the chicken as the closest living relative of the mighty T-Rex, a second group of researchers have decided to put the findings into practice - by strapping a fake dinosaur tail to the birds.

Despite decades of study, scientists are still not entirely sure how exactly bipedal dinosaurs such as the T-rex moved and stood.

In an attempt to solve the mystery, researchers from the University of Chile and the University of Chicago, took the notion that birds inherited the way they move from their dinosaur ancestors and reared a number of chickens wearing artificial tails from birth.

Looking like a bizarre school science experiment, the prosthetic limbs were made from a wooden stick and modeling clay and attached to the birds by velcro fasteners.

The tails were then replaced every five days as the chickens grew, with the scientists careful to keep the tail mass at 15 per cent of the chicken’s weight - the probable tail/body mass proportion of smaller theropods, the suborder of dinosaurs to which the T-Rex belonged.

"Here we show that, by experimentally manipulating the location of the centre of mass in living birds, it is possible to recreate limb posture and kinematics inferred for extinct bipedal dinosaurs," the research, published in the Plos One journal, said.

"Chickens raised wearing artificial tails, and consequently with more posteriorly located centre of mass, showed a more vertical orientation of the femur during standing and increased femoral displacement during locomotion."

The research found that the chickens wearing the artificial tails developed legs with a more vertically oriented femur and a more horizontally oriented tibiotarsus, due to the ankle joint becoming more flexed.

"We have shown that the addition of an artificial tail during ontogeny can produce postural and locomotory changes in chickens, consistent with the posture and kinematics inferred for non-avian dinosaurs," the scientists said.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 17384.html


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGOQ1Igy6Do

It's like a tiny toilet plunger stuck on a chicken's butt. Come on.

I don't really grasp how a wooden stick on a domestic bird raised to be heavy for food consumption is similar to a dynamic tail on a carnivore.

This is the explanation for it in the abstract:

Chickens raised wearing artificial tails, and consequently with more posteriorly located centre of mass, showed a more vertical orientation of the femur during standing and increased femoral displacement during locomotion

It's so shaky.


This is the full paper:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi ... ne.0088458

This is the foundation that funds the journal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_and ... Foundation

Is it supposed to be so absurd that people point and laugh at that, and then voraciously consume all the other "legitimate" dinosaur science, or have we really gone into the area of the Emperor's New Clothes?

The funding is Chilean:

http://www.conicyt.cl/sobre-conicyt/que-es-conicyt/

Partnered with Cambridge:

http://www.cambridgetrust.org/partners/conicyt-chile

When I hear "Chile" I think global warming research. Which is speculative on my part and not really on topic, either. Another phantom connection, perhaps.

[anonjedi2]

An amusing article which discusses the discovery of fossilized "dinosaur dung." In a nutshell, this scientist claims that she has evidence of fossilized dinosaur dung. How did this come about? She found a fossilized specimen and made an assumption.

http://nautil.us/issue/7/waste/reading- ... toric-dung

[Karen] Chin is an undisputed leader in the field, and her work has brought new insights to scientists’ understanding of Mesozoic Era, when towering reptiles walked the earth. “I think it’s fair to say I’ve studied more dinosaur feces than most,” she says modestly.

I thinks it's fair to say that she's studied what she believes are dinosaur feces.

Since a world full of dinosaurs would naturally involve a lot of dung, scientists had presumed there were organisms that recycled that material back into the ecosystem. But no direct evidence had been found of how that process occurred.

Naturally! There should be dung everywhere, right? I mean there should certainly be many more fossils of dung than actual dinosaur bones, should there not? But scientists have never been able to explain why they haven't found massive amounts of fossilized dung. So they just "presume" that there must have been other organisms that recycled the dung back into the environment. Of course, this presumption is made specifically under extreme bias so as to find an explanation to fit their pre-existing beliefs (of which their evidence is likely based on forgery).

But she found her smoking gun, she says, when she began slicing up the fossils and found what looked like small burrows inside. Could they be dung beetle burrows?

Aha! The part I've been waiting for...the evidence! Well this should be fascinating for all of us who have a healthy respect for science while maintaining a responsible amount of skepticism! Naturally, she wants this fossil/rock pile of anything to be proof of dinosaur dung and thus validate her professional existence. Thus, I think it's safe to say that her mind will work in a way that tries to confirm her bias. That's just instinctual, human survival skills. Could they be dung beetle burrows? Of course, in real science, we start at a neutral position and let the evidence lead us in whichever direction it leads. In the world of pseudo-science, we start from an assumption - "this is dung," and collect evidence that supports that assumption. So, how was she able to verify that it was actually X million year old dung beetle burrows?

She called a leading dung beetle expert in Canada and explained her research question, and they agreed to meet when Chin was in Toronto for a conference. The meeting took place over a coffee table in a generic Toronto hotel room. “He had brought some dung beetle balls from Africa, and I had brought the coprolites,” Chin remembers. The expert compared the burrows in each of the materials, and showed Chin the obvious similarities. In the middle of this scene, the housekeeper came in to make up the room, but the two scientists barely looked up. “He was showing me why the burrows in the coprolite were characteristic—and he got really excited and I got really excited,” says Chin. The two scientists started waving their arms around, exclaiming enthusiastically that it must be dung, it just must be! All the while, the housekeeper dutifully tidied.

So there you have it. "It just must be." No lab work, no experiments, no empirical evidence of any kind. 2 scientists in a hotel room confirming each others' biases, and that's it!

"It looks like it and it confirms our bias so by the scientific power invested in us and our position of authority as scientists, we shall declare that it is dung and thus make it so."

Chin’s discovery was the first evidence of dung beetle activity before the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event. “To me, that was the coolest implication of this research,” says Chin. “Here we had evidence of interaction between the dinosaurs and the beetles.”

Really? Maybe I missed the part where they discussed the evidence. The only evidence they have are the assumptions they're making. It looks like the holes could have been made by dung beetles, and thus we shall declare it so because we are the experts. Nevermind that those holes could have been made by another living organism or even something else like gas. Perhaps it actually is the fossilized dung of another animal such as a large elephant? Or that it could be something other than dung alltogether?

IT JUST MUST BE, BECAUSE WE WANT IT TO BE! With this piece of "evidence", we can now make the leap that this is definitely dinosaur dung!!! Even though we don't have any actual scientific way to verify it other than sitting in a hotel room and confirming each others biases!

How ridiculous. This is how science is done today to convince the world of tall tales such as giant lizards roaming the Earth.

"Maybe this is dinosaur poo. It has holes in it that look like the type dung beetles make in modern day piles of poop. Perhaps I should show it to a dung beetle expert and get his opinion on the matter. He agrees! We shall now tell the world that this is evidence of dinosaur poo!"

It continues with more interesting assumptions and language such as the following snippet which attempt to paint the "extinction event" (asteroid, comet) theory as fact:

Researchers believe the collision sent vast clouds of dust and ash into the atmosphere, enough to block the sun and prevent photosynthesis in green plants. The die-off of flora led to the destruction of the fauna that fed on it, and Pearson’s sunny grasslands became a bleak landscape of rotting vegetation and corpses.

The article goes on to talk about Chin's "discovery" of earthworm like burrows in assumed fossilized dinosaur dung.

Together they determined that the burrows, which were horizontal and of uniform shape and width, were strikingly similar to the tunnels created by modern-day earthworms. When Chin found minuscule pellets of clay within the burrows, the case was closed. The dirt that passes through earthworms’ digestive tracts comes out as clay-rich feces. Chin realized she was staring at coprolites from worms that had writhed through the wreckage in the aftermath of a holocaust.

Holocaust?

Okay, if we accept that they did some experiments in the lab to confirm their assumptions (debatable), maybe we can agree that perhaps these are real fossils of animal dung of some sort. Still, there is no mention at all as to how they can confirm exactly what type of animal this dung came from. But we want it to be a dinosaur so badly, that we shall make it so.

“I think worms rebounded immediately after the impact,” says Chin. She believes they were largely protected from the initial blast in their underground burrows, and more importantly, they were able to find sources of food in the long hungry time that followed. “People have surmised that the organisms that survived were in the detritus food web,” she says.

Yes, yes. More thinking, believing, and surmising.

So, we basically have some scientists, operating from the starting point of a "mass extinction event," which may or may not be factual.

Then they dig for fossils and make assumptions that confirm the theory of the "mass extinction event". All evidence collected and analyzed goes to confirm:

a) that the dinosaurs were killed off by a mass extinction event.
b) that we now have more details about what this mass extinction event looked like.
c) any other new theories that we can come up with to support a and b.

Of course this is all a standard design of the science in the first place, IMHO. Each assumption lies on the back of the previous assumption and they move forward and make more assumptions based on flawed fundamentals. So what we should really be asking are the following questions:

a) What evidence do we have that there really was a mass extinction event (asteroid, comet, etc) ??
b) What evidence do we have that these fossilized bones belong to a species that you have deemed "dinosaur" (versus any other animal) ?
c) Where is the real, empirical evidence that supports your theory that these fossilized structures are "dinosaur dung" or dung in general (other than the earthworm experiment) ?

“It’s a very nice story—everything seems to agree,” says David Fastovsky, a paleontologist at the University of Rhode Island who has worked with Sheehan on studies of the extinction event survivors.

Very nice story, indeed.

[lux]

Dinosaur poo indeed!

[lux]

Yet another Godzilla movie ...


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIu85WQTPRc

...is added to the long, long list.

Also part of the nuke hoax.