The best dinosaur fossils that include the entire skeleton of the dinosaur, though rare, have one very strange thing in common. They all have a weird "death pose" where the tail and neck arch very awkwardly back and up as if the dinosaur were doing a contortionist impersonation when it died. A new study by scientists has figured out what the likely cause of this strange pose is. Surprise surprise! It's WATER!
Scientists recently tried a number of methods to get dead birds to take this shape upon death (placing them in warm sand, etc.) but the only method that created the same "death pose" as found in dinosaur fossils was dunking the dead birds in water. By doing this, the backs and necks of the birds instantly arched exactly like the poses fully intact dinosaur fossils have.
Wikipedia: Dinosaur Death Pose
Alicia Cutler and colleagues from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, think it all comes down to a dip in the wet stuff. Cutler placed plucked chickens – both fresh and frozen – on a bed of sand for three months to see if desiccation would lead to muscle contractions that pulled the neck upwards – a previously suggested explanation for the death pose. The chickens decayed without contorting. When seven other chickens were placed into cool, fresh water, however, their necks arched and their heads were thrown back within seconds. Sustained immersion of the birds for up to a month slightly increased the severity of the pose, but the major movement of the head occurred almost immediately.Add another point to the global Genesis flood being the cause of such dinosaur fossils.
NewScientist: Water Is the Secret of The Dinosaur Death Pose (Requires subscription to see more than first couple paragraphs.)
Answers In Genesis: Dunking dead chickens delivers dinosaur death secret.
So the thought is that dinosaurs didn't make it on the ark? How come?? Did Noah 'forget' to take them or what?
ReplyDeleteHehe. Good question. The answer is actually pretty simple though and you'll probably smack yourself in the forehead for not thinking it already. Noah took 2 of every animal kind, one male and one female. All other animals that didn't make it on the ark died in the flood. They were drowned and buried in soft sediment during the flood, resulting in the tons of fossils that we find today. Creationists believe that the vast majority of fossils are creatures that died in the flood, or in smaller events (landslides, local floods, etc.) since then. The fact that dunking dead featherless birds in water produces the exact same body contortions as we find in dinosaur fossils is another clue that they died by drowning and being immediately buried in sediment, which preserved them to this day.
ReplyDeleteDid any dinosaurs survive the flood? Yup! Noah took a male and female of every kind of living creature, so he definitely took dinosaurs too. Creationists believe that the world's climate was quite a bit different before the cataclysmic flood, much warmer everywhere (one sign of this is palm tree fossils in places like Nova Scotia Canada). After the flood, however, the climate changed dramatically all over the planet. Hello ice age (the one and only)! Because the climate and environment changed so much and continued to change a lot over the next 1000 to 2000 years, dinosaurs (like many other creatures) couldn't cope and went extinct (like the wooly mammoth). Dinosaurs, after all, for the most part, were giant cold blooded lizards that only survive well in very warm and consistent climates.
Also, while evolutionists like to believe that dinosaurs evolved into flying birds, Creationists have a much more rational explanation. Some dinosaurs didn't actually go extinct and can be found on earth today! It is believed that many of the dinosaurs were actually giant-sized lizards just like the far smaller versions of lizards we have today. There are many giant versions of different types of creatures that we have fossils for (there are a number of dragon fly fossils that are bigger than cars!!!). So the idea is that before the flood, because of the conditions on earth, a lot of things grew huge compared to the size they grow today. In that case, dinosaurs were probably really big lizards that lived for many years and just kept growing until they died.
Ahhhhh... Makes sense.
ReplyDeleteSome Creationists also believe that the idea of dragons are based around dinosaurs that lived after the flood but, like many other creatures in nature, have since gone extinct. Most cultures in the world have legends and myths about dragons, which are usually giant lizard-like creatures (sometimes flying, sometimes not). Those stories and ideas had to have come from somewhere, just like the huge number of global flood legends and myths probably came from the actual Genesis flood event.
ReplyDelete