Monday 31 January 2005

Tastes Like Chicken

From the New Scientist :
When the dinosaurs ruled the world, the mammals hid in the shadows, daring to grow no bigger than shrew-like insectivores that hunted at night. Or so we thought.

Repenomamus giganticusTwo stunning new fossils from China have overturned this preconception. Not only did large mammals live alongside their giant reptilian cousins, but some were big and bold enough to go dinosaur hunting.

Named Repenomamus giganticus and Repenomamus robustus, the sturdily built mammals lived in China about 130 million years ago, around 65 million years before we thought their kind inherited the Earth. At 1 metre long, R. giganticus was big enough to hunt small dinosaurs, and a newly discovered fossil of its smaller cousin, R. robustus, died with its belly full of young dinosaur.
Pictures of the fossils can be found at Pharyngula.
I’m also sure that the scientifically-literate readers of the Panda’s Thumb and Pharyngula won’t be terribly surprised by this—the mammal-like reptiles are older than the dinosaurs, and mammals were contemporaries of the dinosaurs. The surprise is that what was discovered was a bandy-legged brute that was relatively large (about the size of your average dog) and was so danged uppity that it had been eating dinosaurs. That’s a bit more temerity than had been expected from our long-lost relatives.
Of course some have a, er, different interpretation of the find.
While the discovery is a particular shock (from an evolutionary standpoint) because one part of the evolution model may need to be drastically changed, it isn't shocking for creationists. Creationists believe that man, mammals and dinosaurs originally lived at the same time.
[...]
While it is encouraging to hear evolutionists admit discoveries like this which challenge their way of thinking, the photos of the fossils and the description given in articles raise a caution flag. The dinosaur bones may only appear to be in the stomach of the dog-like creature when they really may just illustrate how the Flood waters would have buried one on top of the other.
[...]
Such a find in the fossil record, regardless of the cautionary flag raised with this discovery, still provides an excellent confirmation of the biblical model of a global catastrophe, which left billions of fossils in the rock layers all over the world.
Which is flat, right? I guess there's quite a few dinosaurs still left, after all.


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