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Dinosaur Evolution Comes Into Focus
nickynicky9doors writes: "National Geographic has an article celebrating the work of dinosaur hunter Paul Sereno and his colleagues. New Thinking On Dino Evolution provides an overview of the recent discoveries and the conclusions and questions that follow the discoveries. One of the lines of inquiry asks how the breakup of the SuperContenient Pangaea impacted the evolution of the dinosaurs."
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I think I'll respond by recounting a conversation I had with a Sunday School teacher back when I was a kid. Paraphrased, as sadly I had not the foresight to record it:
.....God works in mysterious ways.
Teacher: The Earth was created in 6 days, 6000 years ago. There were no such things as dinosaurs.
Me: Then where do all these bones come from?
Teacher: God put them there.
Me: Why? To tempt people into not believing in the bible? Isn't that Satan's job?
Teacher: Ummm....
Me: Cause if God is all loving, and wants us all in heaven, why would he tempt people into not believing in his word? And if he's all knowing, doesn't he already know who would believe in dinosaurs and who wouldn't?
Teacher:
Some Other Kid: Maybe the 6 days are really like 6 billion years, and all the dinosaurs and stuff happened during like the 3rd and 4th day, which was really billions of years?
Teacher: No, that's not how it is at all. Let's move onto something else...
(Still waiting for Jerry Fallwell or Pat Robertson to blame dinosaurs on gays and minorities...)
It hurts when I pee.
OK, so "many things" on Earth appear to be very old, but the Earth itself is only 6000 years old? Dinosaur bones from space? Someone added a few too many zero's to estimated ages of deep ice core samples from the Arctic? Carbon dating a liberal myth? Help me out here.
It hurts when I pee.
Keep in mind that, if you buy into evolution, in theory very small changes could have very drastic effects down the road.
This is all completely hypothetical, but let's say you have Pangea, starting to break apart. At this time they have pretty much the same animals wandering around. Now, when they finally do become seperated and start drifting apart, one of the new continents begins to see average temperatures a few degrees lower than on the others. These few degrees perhaps has a negative effect on the incubation periods of several key predators eggs, resulting in a mini-mass extinction of certain predators on the "colder" new land mass.
With a bunch of predators gone, there is suddenly a gap, which predators who were previously lower on the food chain can exploit. Or perhaps prey start dominating the landscape for a while, growing tremendously in size. The process just continues to domino effect from there on.
The point being that there are so many factors that could send evolution branching in so many different ways, it's very unlikely that dinosaurs would have continued to evolve in much the same way on seperated landmasses. Hence the idea that the breakup took a very long time, and the possibilities of "land bridges".
It hurts when I pee.