Careful, Speaker, the mods don’t want any board wars.
It’s not really the case that “there never was such a thing”; the name Brontosaurus as a taxnomic entity was relegated to a “junior subjective synonym” of Apatosaurus, but as the terms imply, such a designation is subjective on the part of those doing the classifying. There was a lot of pressure during the so-called Bone Wars between Cope and Marsh to not just find more dinosaurs, but to find (and name) more new dinosaurs. Thus, they had the tendency to name just about everything they found as a new species. Only well after the fact did people start to sort through the mess and found a lot of duplication. Brontosaurus was the same critter as Apatosaurus (except for the skull, which was tacked on more as an afterthought), but Apatosaurus was named first, so it got priority. The animal existed, but it’s just due to the vagueries of taxonomic priority rules that it’s called Apatosaurus and not Brontosaurus.
Having said that, “brontosaur” works fine as a common name for sauropods (much as we now have to deal with ‘raptors’ as the common name for dromaeosaurs, or “T-Rex” instead of T. rex).
I do not have a catalogue of such groups. It is simply something I have encountered from time to time:
From the CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS & RESEARCH MINISTRY at www.carm.org:
However, a bit more theologically, there is something else to consider. Genesis 1:30 seems to indicate there was no meat-eating among land animals before the Flood, only after.
From Dr. Bruce Foster:
If you will look at Genesis 1:30 very carefully, you will notice that God originally created all the animals as vegetarians. The animals probally did not become carnivirous until sometime after the flood, as the earth replenished itself with abundant plant and animal life.
I have no idea how widespread this belief may be, (I certainly do not share it), but it is (as I initially posted) present in some groups).
C’est vrai. Ignore me!
I thought he was talking about Dino from The Flintstones. I thought maybe when Dino got all excited about something and made that “Mee! Mee! Mee!” sound, he was talking in tongues.
tom~, I would ask how exactly an animal would magically go, after a flood, to being carnivorous from being herbivorous, but my guess is the answers are something like this from those who believe it:
- God did it that way.
- What, doesn’t your precious evolutionism explain that?
- It’s not like it’d be that hard, they’d just eat different stuff.
- Well, The Flood made all the vegetation salty, so the animals had to eat other stuff.
One wonders how Dr. Foster explains plants such as the Venus Flytrap, which eat animals (mostly small bugs, I believe), and what he might think of vultures due to the fact that they eat only what meat is already dead.
I wasn’t aware of THAT! Goodness wonder what T-rex used those 12 inch steak knife teeth for then?
Yes, I know Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus are the same critter. I was trying not to be TOO pedantic. Or look like I was being overly bitchy to iampunha Also what **Darwin’s Finch ** said: they are synonyms.
[What with all the posts about The Great Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus Naming Controversy, I thought I’d slip in a link to Cecil’s excellent Classic article on the subject. It doesn’t contradict anything previously posted in this thread; it’s just a fun read.
Although I wish the linked article had included Slug’s drawing.](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_011.html)
I am more interested in the rationale for why supposedly-former herbivorous animals would suddenly be made carnivorous as a result of either the Fall or the Flood (the “how” would undoubtedly be “God did it”). Did God decide that the world needed a bit more suffering, to go along with what Man caused? Was He not happy with how things turned out during the Creation (which was, so far as I am aware, supposed to be a one-shot deal), and have a “do over”?
Unless they were made that way from the beginning, such a position - that herbivores became carnivores as a consequence of one of those events - argues only for a spiteful God (“I’ll punish Man and everything else for what Man has done!”), as far as I can tell.
In the “after the Fall” view, man introduced sin, which introduced all pain, suffering, and death. Prior to the Fall, all animals were herbivores. Subsequent to the Fall, some because carnivores, inflicting pain and death on others. (This is why Messianic prophecies speak of the lion lying down with the kid, etc. When the Messiah comes, he will restore the Earth to the state of Paradise (or one much like it).)
I am not sure as to the rationale behind the “after the Flood” scenario of carnivores arising from the herbivore population. I suspect that it comes from Gennesis 9:
Since God only authorizes humanity to eat flesh after the Flood, I would guess that God only allows animals to eat flesh after the Flood. Other translations make verse 3 slightly more explicit in indicating that this may be the first permission God has granted for humans to eat flesh. The NIV says:
some because carnivores ==> s/b some became carnivores
“When the moon hits your eye” is more of a Velikovsky thing.
Did God change their teeth and digestive tracts then?
Man was originally made omnivorous, right?
I read somewhere that dinosaurs exsisted long before man, then after some big earth disaster, God renewed it and THEN made the sky, lights, etc.
Vanilla, the Re-Creation or Gap theory- that a previous Creation, including dinos & perhaps even humanlike beings, was destroyed in the Lucifer Rebellion, and that God reshaped it in six days or stages was introduced in the mid-1800s & popularized by dispensationalist preachers, including the Scofield Bible. It assumes that Gen 1:2 should be translated “the earth became without form and void”. I believed it for a while as a slightly more realistic alternative to literal Young-Earth Creationism. I now hold to Old-Earth (Day-Age) Creationism with some dalliance with Theistic Evolution.
I’m pretty sure G-d was just getting ready to have that whale swallow Jonah and those bears eat the children who taunted Elijah about his hair. I could be wrong though.
- Satan made them eat each other.
Well, duh! Satan told the VFTs “Hey, the animals eat plants. Why can’t it be the other way around? Don’t you want to be better than animals?” and thus the VFTs are corrupted. Satan then moved on to Jupiter Pitcher Plants. Then after he was through with them, satan got the vultures interested in carrion. We obviously need to extend our ministry towards saving the flytraps, pitcher plants, and vultures!
The general lesson to be learned here is that no matter how irrational something is, you can always gather together a group of likeminded people who think it is obviously true and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.
This is sometimes relevant to people on boards such as this one, who are of course much smarter than the guys on the board you refer to - or those on any other board, for that matter - but who nonetheless sometimes fall into the error of relying of the general consensus of opinion on this board to collectively scoff away dissenting opinions. Doesn’t count here, any more than it does elsewhere.
I agree. There’s a lot of people who IMHO need to be history. But is it happening? Not a chance, unfortunately.