Thought that last dinosaur was BIG? This one's bloody ENORMOUS Paleontologists at Ohio Uni have unearthed the partial skeleton of an entirely new species of titanosaur – the massive herbivores that were the largest animals ever to walk on the planet which is nowadays ours. Rukwatitan bisepultus "Looks like Derek ate a bad shrub. You OK, mate?" The new specimen, Rukwatitan bisepultus, …
is a speculative art rather than a science. There's far too much assumtption and fanciful thinking to call this a real science.
From one tiny tooth fragment they'll claim a new dino species and make preposterous claims as to its size. Sure, some bones etc scale well, but some do not.
Imagine if you took girraffe bones and assumed the animal was more or less deer shaped. You'd end up with completely the wrong idea.
If you have any paleontological background, please do let us know.
> From one tiny tooth fragment they'll claim a new dino species
I'm no expert but I understand teeth are distinctive and conserve their shape very strongly within species, so a radically different tooth would suggest a new species.
> and make preposterous claims as to its size
Can you give me an example of them doing that? Please? You'll notice from the nice diagram that they actually found a lot more than one tooth BTW.
> Imagine if you took girraffe bones and assumed the animal was more or less deer shaped. You'd end up with completely the wrong idea.
Indeed you would, and even more so if they assumed the animal was more or less mouse-shaped - they'd look right prats! So perhaps they're not that fucking stupid. You, on the other hand...
Fact is you both are correct.
He is right that way too much imagination is today called science. Just look at what so called documentaries of "prehistoric" humans. The look's the skills are portrayed as how we want to think they were, with 3d animations. There is nothing scientific in that. It's actually closer to a religious belief on how things must have been.
The evidence is not readily available to be observed by anyone. It's just piltdown man all over again, just that the forgery is the mental picture that some "scientist" have.
Still finding a tooth can very well suggest a new species, but it does not have to, it can be small mutation within a group of species or complex. Just as a black, white, red or yellow people are considered to be one species. Yet we have some distinctive differences.
The fact that the British Museum of Natural History exhibited a dinosaur with a "guessed head", as no head was found with it....... and even after the same species real head was found (and really nothing like the "expert of the day " guessed head) , because "he was a prominent contributor, don't upset him by proving him wrong"
puts my trust in "experts in the field" at a bit of a low, and I'd rather read theories and summise myself thanks
This was Othniel Charles Marsh, who in the 19th century was in a vitriolic competition with Cope known as the "Bone Wars". He found a fairly complete specimen of an adult Apatosaurus having previously found a juvenile. Wanting to increase his new species count and thinking the rlarger adult was a different species he called it Brontosaurus. He wanted to display the assembled skeleton at Yale, but it was lacking some bits, notably a head, feet and tail. Since he thought it was a new species, so he didn't have the spare parts, he used bits of other Sauropds to fill the gaps.
Fairly well covered in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatosaurus
Ah, very intersting however a) AC claimed it was the british natural history museum whereas it seems it was an american museum (the peabody natural history museum?), b) this was *well* over a century ago, not that long after the term 'scientist' itself was coined c) in absolutely no modern sense did they act like scientists.
Upvoted, however, as your point and rev were valid, unlike pillock AC's post.
In this case of course they have quite a lot. And i think they've done well to avoid the "ours is bigger than yours" claim.
I'm not sure your argument holds up though. If, say, a fossil tooth of a radically different form and size was discovered but no other bones - say a 5 foot long canine - what would you have the paleontologist do? Ignore it?
The scientific approach would be to form a hypothesis of what sort of animal the tooth would come from, which might be by analogy to better known animals. But if you've only got a tooth the scope for error is large and future discoveries will often leave you red-faced.
But I don't see how you can say this is not a real science. That process is very similar to what happens in physics, astronomy etc. You have limited data - apples fall off trees - form a theory - Newtonian gravity and it eventually gets replaced by something better.
You can see this with paleontology. I recently read Conan Doyle's 1912 book "The Lost World". It protrays most of the land dinosaurs as either blundering mindless beasts or things (perhaps the Tyrannosaur) that hopped like enormous frogs. Sounds daft today but it was the working hypothesis at that time.
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This post has been deleted by its author
no, gravity isn't caused by the rotation of the Earth.
I know of someone who insists we're kept from floating away into space by the air pressing down on us. How the air stays put he's utterly unable to explain, but that's the beauty of being totally uncontaminated by logic thought, you can dismiss gravity as "it's just a theory" and handwave away any inconsistencies and open ends in your own "explanation".
Gravitational pull is a function of the mass of the attracting body (see also the articles on Rosetta versus 67P/Chruyumov-Gerasimenko) and the distance from it, so unless the Earth was substantially lighter back then, or the whateversaurs were floating around in space then no, they would have gravity pull on them about as hard as it is pulling on us. The bit of mass that was added right at the end of their existence may have been large, but it was still inconsequential with regard to gravity.
Even if the Earth was smaller back then (how? did heavy elements break down into lighter, more voluminous elements) its mass would still have been roughly what it is now (modulo some influx of space debris), and, if anything, the whateversaurs would be closer to the centre of the Earth, and gravitational pull on them would be larger.
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