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New Type of Dinosaur Unearthed
MileHighScience writes to mention that a new type of sauropod has been discovered by scientists from Utah's Brigham Young University. Dubbed Abydosaurus mcintoshi, the new addition to the long necked dinosaur family was discovered at Dinosaur National Monument. "The circumstances of its discovery were both unusual and dramatic. The researchers stumbled on four skulls in a quarry at the preserve. Two were still intact. Sauropod skulls are rarely found in the fossil record because the soft tissue from which they are constructed is unlikely to be preserved after death. 'Their heads are built lighter than mammal skulls because they sit way out at the end of very long necks,' Brooks Britt, a BYU paleontologist said in a news release. 'Instead of thick bones fused together, sauropod skulls are made of thin bones bound together by soft tissue.' Of more than 120 known species of sauropods, there have been only eight instances in which scientists have been able to recover intact skulls."
Let's not forget the threat from the pengui sapiens of the pokealotatwat tribe.
Mormons aren't creationists in the usual sense of the word.
Headline: Blanket assumption based more on stereotype than actual familiarity turns out to be untrue. Film at 11.
A lot of people seem to think that theology/cosmology is inherently constraining when it comes to serious scientific work, and I suppose the output those like the Intelligent Design crowd does a lot to reinforce that, but my experience suggests that there's no shortage of religious people who excel in scientific and technical fields, who accept the standards of those fields whether or not they seem to conflict with religious beliefs on some point, and do solid work -- even groundbreaking work.
Some of that experience is directly with BYU, where I've found that most of the science faculty is inline with broader scientific views... for example, by and large they conclude that evolution is the best framework for studying biology and believe that's how most of life on earth came to be in its given state. And that even if you like to think of yourself as a smart person and come complete with various metrics outside of two standard deviations to prove it, there are probably Mormons who are in fact as smart or smarter than you by those metrics. It's certainly true for me. And they take the idea of scholarship and professionalism pretty seriously.
There are certainly counterexamples; I've met people with a certain kind of view-rigidity characterized by a general literalism and intolerance for ambiguity who I believe are blinded by their cosmology/theology. But then again, my observation is that this isn't a problem limited to the religious or religion, and based on the shallowly dismissive attitude in the parent poster's post, it seems likely he's amongst the afflicted.
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