The title is pretty well my question - obviously there are a few conspiracy folks or religious zealots that dismiss dinosaurs as an attempt to discredit creationist dogma, but I’m wondering if there are any more ‘respected’ individuals who question the (previous) existence of dinosaurs.
I seem to recall as a child when a paleontology was becoming more well known (to the general pubic) that some scientists questioned if the skeletons found were really ‘dinosaurs’ or if they were really old…whatevers (elephants? bears? moose?).
Do any of those folks still exist or all they all now extinct? (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
Creationism, in general, accepts dinosaurs. They just have them fit within a 6-20k year history, so humans and dinosaurs lived together like in the Flintstones. Here is a photo from the creationist museum:
Im not familiar with dinosaur denial. I doubt any person who believes this is a credible scientist.
No. There are no reputable scientists who question the existence of dinosaurs.
How old are you? ;)There haven’t been significant questions about the nature of dinosaurs as a distinctive group since the early nineteenth century. They were recognized as being related to reptiles rather than mammals by the 1820s. Richard Owen coined the name in 1842.
To my astonishment, just a few years ago I was talking to a young lady and the subject of religion came up. She belonged to some fundamental church that made the Church of God seem liberal. It finally came out that she knew the earth was only 7K years old. When I asked her how it was possible that dinosaur fossil bones were dated so far back. She replied, in the most earnest way, “There were no dinosaurs.” I changed the subject.
No, of course nobody of note, at least of which I know, subscribes to this theory. I put it right up there with the “fake moon landing” theory.
Heh - I’m not THAT old (36) - however, I do recall in the '70s there were people who were getting at least SOME airtime who claimed dinosaurs were fake - like big foot/lochness monster, etc.
I realize renderings of dinosaurs can be made directly from reconstructed skeletons but what attributes are “imagined” or a “best guess” by either scientists or hollywood?
And evidence to suggest a T-Rex roars or a Veloceraptor screeches? How about skin? Was it all reptilian? And evidence of what colors they may have been?
Is it possible the T-Rex was pink and furry just hissed?
There has been serious speculation that some dinosaurs, maybe even T-Rex itself, may have been covered in feathers. I don’t think anyone has ever been able to prove what color a T-Rex was or exactly what it sounded like.
It’s entirely possible that T-Rex was candy-striped… though a tad unlikely.
We have reproduced the sound of a single dinosaur species, but not vocalizations. We don’t even know if they had vocal chords, for that matter; birds have a larynx*, but reptiles don’t.
However, given the size of T-Rex, it probably sounded a lot like modern crocodilians, which basically just expel air through the throat to make a sort of scratchy roaring noise.
*memo to Americans: this word is not pronounced “larrinicks”.
Guesswork: the smaller the more likelihood of feathers because surface area is increasing relative to volume as it gets smaller. Several species had peculiar hollow structures on the head that are thought to have possibly been resonators for want of any other explanation. What has always intrigued me is how many there were. It takes a lot of forest to support a herd of elephants so it’s hard to imagine how the managed not to eat themselves to extinction long before they did.
(Yes, I know that you weren’t presenting this as serious evidence.)
Well, if we find a Fred Flintstone footprint for real, how would we know it was one of his? An eroded look to the heels? (From all that all-natural car braking.)
Now, if we find a pair of Fred’s footprints, and a pair of Dino’s, might that not suggest a form of… play… between them? :eek:
Well, definitely so with Fred’s next to Wilma’s, especially with the latter being more spread apart. Or Barney’s and Betty’s.
Of course you know that the comic panels across the internet typically don’t show Fred with Wilma… Or Barney with Betty. The *mix-and-match *factor seems to be pretty high…
They didn’t eat themselves into extinction, because they couldn’t have evolved large sizes in the first place unless there was enough food to support them. It takes a lot of forest to support a herd of elephants, but there was a lot of forest. Since CO2 levels were higher in the Mesozoic it’s likely that plant productivity was higher. And it wasn’t like in the pictures in dinosaur books, where there are dozens of dinosaurs packed in. Go out into the forest today and you might not see any animals. We don’t have a good idea of the population density of dinosaurs. While many species have been proven to travel in herds, the herds didn’t cover every square inch of space like in the pictures.
And we know for sure that some theropod dinosaurs had feathers, including Velociraptor. It’s entirely possible that Tyrannosaurs were covered in soft yellow fuzz, like a baby duck. We have scaly skin impressions for other species such as hadrosaurs, so at least some dinosaurs had scales over some of their bodies. Of course, colors and patterns of markings are completely speculative. Different species might have had markings similar to any extant reptile or bird, or perhaps something way out in left field unlike any creature living today. While some reptiles are the dull grayish-brownish-green that dinosaurs are typically painted with, other reptiles and birds have brilliant colors, markings, and displays. The baroque horns, crests, frills and spikes that are preserved in the skeletons of many species have were probably sexual displays, and these displays were likely to be more brightly colored. And of course some species probably had soft-tissue displays that haven’t been preserved. Feathers are an especially likely possibility, although as far as I know feathers have not been found on any dinosaurs except theropods.
Its likely they had local camouflage as being bright pink in the middle of the wetlands or in the forest would be a pretty huge disadvantage. We’ll never truly know their colors and other attributes but we can make some pretty informed assumptions. It also turns out that melanin survives somewhat in fossils so we may eventually know the color of feathers.
And as for feathers in tyrannosaurs, there’s this. Note, however, that we also have skin impressions of adult tyrannosaurs, showing a more typically-reptilian scale pattern. Thus, it’s still up in the air, so to speak, as to whether Tyrannosaurus itself had feathers at all, or if they were only present in juveniles.
Further nitpick: They do. Birds have both a larynx, at the top of the trachea, and a syrinx, at the bottom. However, unlike in other tetrapods, sound is produced by the syrinx rather than the larynx. (Reptiles and amphibians, like mammals, also have a larynx.)
