If you wish to continue to debate the point of whether dinosaurs lived more recently than 60 mya (without turning into birds) you are free to continue this discussion.
My specific objection to this thread was to the apparent copyright violation.
Placed in context of three threads that I find ludicrous, I will admit to being concerned regarding your actual belief in the topics. You may, of course, simply have a different perspective on the world. In that case, I simply suggest that you not initiate multiple threads on your odd beliefs simultaneously. Wait until one or more of them die out before you submit any more “interesting” questions. If you wish to have serious discussions, you will be taken more seriously if your exuberance does not point to somewaht less serious conclusions.
The Ark of the Covenant would have looked something like this. In Islamic mythology (not the Quran but extracanonical) Muhammad’s mount Buraq was was a bit different from other horses .
Pegasus had wings, Icarus and Daedalus fashioned wings, Egyptian had winged gods as well as all other manners of half-human/half-beast deities, there were angels in the OT with seven wings and then the weird creatures from Revelations and Ezekiel, there were creatures in Central American mythology that were like humans but with insect/butterfly wings, etc… Does this mean that ancient people coexisted with winged humanoid beings?
All ancient cultures had ample imagination when it came to their art, religion, fantasy bestiaries, etc… Add to this the already mentioned fact that some of the ancients were aware of dinosaur bones (some were exposed by earthquakes, some were exposed when soil washed away, some by digs of large scale irrigation, etc.)- not surprising at all. Thomas Jefferson kept dinosaur bones at Monticello (he once deployed slaves away from the fields during planting season when other slaves digging a well began finding fossils he liked) and his neighbor James Monroe’s house at Ash Lawn has dinosaur tracks on its back porch (the porch was carved from a dry creek bed and moved to his home because he loved the curiosity factor of it). People have always known the “big lizards” existed.
The stegosaurus from Cambodia is by far the most convincing (to me) of the above illustrations as having been inspired by the bones of a stegosaurus. Most of the others are beasties that could have been envisioned with far less imagination than a Buraq or a Medusa or a tree dwelling serpent with legs who guards and hoards as “my precious” the fruit from the tree the universe was fashioned around. They may have had knowledge of dinosaur fossils but it’s just as likely they made modifications to lizards and serpents that they knew about. Serpents have been revered and reviled since before recorded time so it’s no wonder they’re found incorporated into other animals just as they are into the Gorgons.
PS- Those are interesting pics, btw. Thanks. As for hard evidence of human-dinosaur coexistence I don’t account them as any moreso than von Danichen’s “proof” of ancient astronauts due to helmeted beings or flying craft (humans have always fantasized about flying for a simple “Damn I wish I could do that” reason after seeing birds and helmets are a very practical thing), but they are interesting. Least convincing of all is the 14th century carving- by the 14th century literacy had been around for over 3,000 years and there are texts written in English that can with some skill and struggling still be read by people who’ve never studied Olde English, and yet nobody mentions dinosaurs? You’d think that compared to the velociraptors the Black Death and invading Turks and the rest would have seemed like mosquitoes.
That stegasaurus pic is interesting. Cryptomundo has close ups of it and it looks far less convincing up close. The creature in the carving has a thick head like a rhino or hippo and no real neck. That link also has pictures of the whole pillar (it’s at the Ta Prohm Temple in Cambodia, built in 1186AD) which is covered with fantastic animals and buddhist symbols.
Like Sampiro, I find it impossible to believe that actual stegasauri were roaming around Cambodia and nobody wrote about them.
Seen this argument before somewhere, more or less word for word. In any case, you are completely wrong about this; the scientific view of our planet that you are at pains to oppose is not an assumption; it’s a conclusion.
Actually, some people think the creatures on the ark would look more like a winged bull than a winged person: Like here . This is based on what Biblical cherubim probably looked like . I know if you google for images of the Ark you mostly get the winged people ones, but I’ve seen some depictions of the latter.
1.) Interesting. I’;ve seen several of those before, but the Cambodian Stegosaurus is a new one to me.
2.) Read Willy Ley’s essay “The Sirrush of the Ishtar Gate” sometime if you can find it. Interesting 1940s era speculation on the same thing. It inspired L. Sprague de Camp’s historical novel The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate (which incl;udes no dinosaurs)
3.) An observation – I think current thinking is that sauropods like brontosaurus couldn’t entwine their necks in so supple a manner. Even if those artworkls were inspired by seeing real dinosaurs, they took artistyic liberties.
4.) I’ll second Adrienne Mayor’s book cited above, and raise you her newest, Fossil Legends of the First Americans, which I’m now reading. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691113459/qid=1152705792/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-8720322-9654350?s=books&v=glance&n=283155 I’ve mert and talked with Ms. Mayor at length. he did a great job on the Griffin in her first book (for which I envy her. I wanted to do the griffin) – she makes an excellent case that it was based on fossil Protoceratops and Psittacasaurus and other ceratopsian fossils. One can make a very good case that fossils inspired a lot of early artwork, and might be enough to explain the examples in the OP.
5.) That said, I’m really intrigued by the Cambodian stegosaur. Even finding fossils wouldn’t necessarily tell you what it looked like – there was a major controversy in the early days of palaeontology over whether those plates stood upright or lay flat on the back. Unless the fossil was found with the plates up in situ, it’s impressive that they got what is now considered the correct interpretation. And don’t know of anything else that looks like a stegosaur.
Further, don’t forget that stegosaurs were (outside India) the first major group of dinosaur to go extinct. When tyrannosaur was stalking triceratops, all that was left of stegosaurs was fossils older then than the late-Cretaceous ones are today.
Is there any evidence of post K-T dinosaurs? Yes. But it’s either simply explained or pretty flimsy.
Dinosaur fossils in Paleocene and Eocene strata: In the few cases where they have been found, there was clear evidence of erosion of Mesozoic strata, with fossils reworked into the early-Cenozoic strata from it. In other words, dinosaur fossils are laid down and petrify; the rocks are partially eroded some millions of yesars later; and the remnants, including some fossils, are in soil that is again compacted to rock.
"Dinosaur teeth" in non-reworked Paleocene and Eocene strata: Clear evidence of the serrated teeth of carnosaurs is found in some Southern strata after the K-T impact. Unfortunately, when there are other bones associated with these teeth, they turn out to be the teeth of Sebecosuchia, a group of crocodiles from the early Tertiary that adapted for dry-land predation and competed with flightless birds and early mammals for the carnivore role, largely in Africa and South America.
Myths and sightings: “Dragons” and such (gryphons, wyverns, etc.) are easily understandable as either large serpents or crocodilians, with the story growing in the telling. This is not to say that they could not be founded in relict dinosaur populations, but the existence of large snakes and crocodilians, and human propensity for exaggeration and tall tales, make that the explanation of choice by Occam’s razor.
Somewhat more difficult to explain is the creature called the sirrush in old Mesopotamian art and the mokele-mkembe in one African dialect. This creature, appearing to be a large but fairly lightly-built quadruped with a long neck, a neck frill at back of head, and a single horn, looks for all the world like an imaginative child’s admixture of a sauropod, a ceratopsian, and a frilled lizard – but is passably similar through 3000 years or so between the carvings and the modern reports. As with all cryptozoological allegations, it’s wise to take these accounts with more than a grain of salt. But it would be very interesting to know what underlies this particular myth. (Lest I be mistaken for overcredulity, it seems highly improbable in the extreme that even a relict population of a large animal might survive for 65 million years with absolutely no fossil record or other evidence of their existence.)
Fossils Showing Dinosaur/Man Coexistence: About 10-20% of these are misinterpretations of fossil imprints and the like. The other 80-90% are frauds by Creationists willing to lie and fabricate evidence in order to prove their point. Snopes and others have good background on these.
I’ll point out that Crocs and Birds are both closely related to Dinos, and they survived quite well, thank you. In fact there were giant flightless predatory birds which survived until historical times. If a non-expert had seen one of the gaint Moas, they could be excused by calling it a “dinosaur”.
That said- there is no reason why a few isolated populations of Archeosaurs (includes marine reptiles and flying reptiles, neither one of which are commonly classed as “dinosaurs” as well as “real” dinosaurs) couldn’t have survived into historical times. In fact, the real question is why certain classes/orders survived and why *all * members of others were wiped out. Thus, finding that one species of dino survived would be extremely exciting, but wouldn’t disprove any laws or anything. I have great doubts, sure. But why not some odd croc, giant lizard or giant flightless bird?
There were giant croc who were 40 feet long and weighed 8000kg.
This particular species seems to have gone extinct during the Cretaceous, but since other crocs surivived, there is no reason some giant croc couldn’t have survived until human times.
Aepyornis was around in Africa until about the 16th century.
There was a HUGE fucking cousin of the Komodo Dragon that was extant in Australia around the time humans arrived.
This thing was 20 feet (or more) long, and was still around as recently as 40000 years ago, and quite possibly more recently. If you saw one of *those * buggers, you’d be justified in saying you “saw a dragon”.
You know what would have been really cool if the Hebrews had really wanted to make an impression? Pterodactyl angels.
Jung’s concept of Technological Angels comes to mind. He wrote in some of his discourses how delusions and dreams and fantasies about angels and divine JudeoChristian mythological imagery were once very common, but by the 20th century with the popularity of Jules Verne and Buck Rogers serials and H.G. Wells films and movies the same fantastic images had shifted to space aliens and robots and the like. Perhaps pre-literate and pre-institutionalized religion societies had “prehistoric/lizardine angels” leftover from a time when our ancestors rightfully feared the animals of the jungles and the forests around them and thus exaggerated them and this survived enough that in the early days when huge temples were new they found their way into the motif (rather like the odd imageries that found their way into the Hebrew temple- the conch [sp?] shells and other vaginal imagery, for example]).
Israel is one of the oldest continually inhabited regions on the planet outside of Africa and is also the site of some incredible unearthed fossils. To the best of my knowledge such “dinosauric” images don’t appear very much there in spite of a fantastic bestiary in the OT. Of course they also had one of the only holy books in the middle east that couldn’t care less about the Earth before humans (i.e. no long stories of Gaea and Uranos or Tiamat and her spawn or the like- gets right to the creation of earth and man) which may also explain the lack of enthusiasm for such things.
You mean midle english, right? At least by the 14th century it would have been.
I’d like to revive a statement the OP mentioned a little ways up, about how modern dating techniques are flawed since they assume no enviromental changes in the earth.
Is this true? I don’t see how that could be since we KNOW there have been considerable enviromentla changes through out earth’s history. I can’t believe science would assume otherwise when dating things. Can someone clarify this, I’ve heard this argument from many creationists and I would like to know what to say to them shall it ever come up again.
What young earth creationists claim is that assumptions about the consistency over time of physical, chemical and radiation processes are false. To give an example, carbon-14 dating is based on the assumption that the rate of decay of carbon isotopes has been constant for thousands of years. YEC types claim that this is a baseless assumption, invalidating all carbon-14 dates.
I am curious how ancient peoples would be able to accurately piece together dinosaur bones and come up with anything resembling the original creature.
I suppose if they found an intact skeleton (laid out as the animal existed) that would be a good start but finding a single brontosaurus leg bone doesn’t get you very far in knowing what the whole creature looked like. Even with the intact skeleton why assume a sauropod and not a mastadon (which I think humans did have interaction with)?
Just doesn’t seem like they would have had much in the way of paleontology and biomechanics knowledge in ancient Greece and such but perhaps they were more savvy than I thought in this regard.
