Saturday, February 16, 2008

Noah had to use duct tape to get this one on the ark

I suppose this one ate coconuts as well?

Photobucket
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Fossils from two newly discovered meat-eating dinosaurs that lived in the Sahara Desert 110 million years ago paint a fearsome picture of life in Africa's Cretaceous period, which appears to have been teeming with unusual carnivores.

University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno unearthed Kryptops palaios, a short-snouted, hyena-like beast, and Eocarcharia dinops, a shark-toothed, bony-browed killer in a 2000 expedition.

Both were about 25 feet in length -- and on the prowl for meat.

"These are two of three that we dug up. To have three large predators in this area is really extraordinary," said Sereno, who describes the dinosaurs in the scientific journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

[snip]

Sereno said the animals lived in the southern landmass that was known as Gondwana, where distinctive meat-eaters arose, many of which bear no likeness to the better-known North American predator of the time, Tyrannosaurus rex.

[snip]

Kryptops was a scavenger and had a uniform series of relatively pointy teeth and a short snout. "The idea was that the animal was sticking its head into carcasses," he said.

Eocarcharia, or "dawn shark," is known for its blade shaped teeth and bony brow.

"The teeth are very narrow side-to-side. They are blade-shaped for cutting. This animal specialized in capturing live prey and severing limbs. It was definitely a sabotage attacker, waiting for an opportunity to jump at something," Sereno said.

Eocarcharia and members of the group carcharodontosaurids gave rise to the biggest predators on southern continents, matching or exceeding Tyrannosaurus in size.

Sereno said the fossils epitomize the split world of dinosaurs during the Cretaceous period, which occurred because the continents began to drift apart.

"There is nothing quite like it in North America Cretaceous because after a few fits and starts, the tyrannosaur came into being and they are often alone as the large predatory dinosaur."
I am very grateful to be living in the Holocene Epoch, thank you very much.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

No dinosaurs on the ark, sorry, too big to fit. They all drowned, I guess.

ellroon said...

Maybe Noah made a raft for incorrigible animals...

Anonymous said...

It must have sunk, because have you seen any dinosaurs lately?

ellroon said...

um... /looks around ...

no ....

/has brilliant idea

THAT'S why the dinosaurs are found in the layers of soil! Their raft sank!

(Tell me again why Noah had to have dinosaurs on the Ark? I'm running out of explanations...)

Anonymous said...

Yeah, that's what Noah must have thought, how am I supposed to fit those things? And he had only a specified number of square cubits to work with, you know.

ellroon said...

Why weren't the dinosaurs running about in the Bible? They'd be kind of obvious.

Anonymous said...

Well, one of their descendents was the dove, which was a pretty big player in the whole Noah story.

ellroon said...

Nonsense. All animals that have been on earth have been unchanged since the Garden of Eden. Ignore all evidence otherwise! Don't look! Stop that! Fossils are just a temptation for you to believe in science which obviously is Satanic except for medicine which helps and maybe technology which we use and a little bit of math but everything else challenges the Holy Word and should be totally not trusted because scientists are sneaky and talk about evolution which can't happen if the world is only 6000 years old.....

Let me untangle my limbs here and locate my head...

Anonymous said...

Look, Noah came around a few years later than that, when there was a flood and stuff. Some things died in the flood.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, that failed to be funny. I'm running out of steam on this one.

ellroon said...

Lol... I agree. The hilarity is seeing the people actually struggle to fit the square peg into the round hole... making the damned facts fit the theory if it kills them.

Bumpersticker I have driven behind: The Good Books Says So, I Believe It, and That's That.

Must be odd to live in such a monochromatic world....

Anonymous said...

There are fundamentalists of every stripe, including adherents of scientific theories. Science is a method, not an end result.

ellroon said...

Exactly. I am mocking the desire for the inflexible truth in the face of an variable world, which I recognize even in myself.

Rigidity is dangerous and should be resisted ... rigidly.

Anonymous said...

Better to bend like a reed, or even better, perhaps, be like water. Water wears away everything else, in time.

Speaking of which, I have a red sea to part soon... HDNW12C. That will not make sense to you now.

ellroon said...

Uh oh.../runs over to Cannablog to see..