I was under the impression that some ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups don’t believe in dinosaurs. Some half-assed googling reveals a protest of a company in Israel for using dinosaurs in their advertising. I’m guessing it’s not very mainstream, though. I’d be interested in knowing the position of Lubavitcher and Hasidic Jews.
Although the Mormon church doesn’t take a position on it (most Mormons believe in dinosaurs), I’ve heard numerous older Mormons assert that fossils older than 6,000 years are remnants of older worlds which were used to construct this one. Again, not a mainstream view, but it’s out there.
Not a “credible scientist” by any stretch of the imagination but in the early 1980s my girlfriend at the time gave me a cassette tape by some preacher named “Joel” who argued something to the effect that not only is there backwards masking in rock music, but that The Devil planted dinosaur bones across the Earth to deceive Man into thinking Creationism was a lie.
To which I argued, in between spreading disease, wars and poverty, Satan actually has the free time to go around the Earth and bury dinosaur bones? And where did he get them? Does he have a factory, several miles below the Earth’s crust, with a worker army of a hundred midget Demons running around building them? And where did they get the raw materials to make these bones, and the molds, and where did Lucifer get the investment money to keep this operation running . . . . . .
Needless to say, that relationship did not last.
To the 21st century, my wife swears up and down a few years ago she read on Yahoo! Science somewhere that some researcher speculates that there are unexplored regions of the Amazon that may be habitats for species of “VERY LARGE” undiscovered reptiles, but fuck me if I can find that article anywhere, and neither can she.
I’m in my mid-sixties and I don’t recall a complete denial by any Christian group about dinosaurs actually existing. Some fundamentalists speculate that God is testing our faith with information that makes dinosaurs look older than 6,000 years. She is such a clown!
I think if you parse your own sentence closely, you will see the problem with it in many ways. I have heard the same thing about African jungles though.
Um, no, that’s not inconsistent. The quote says the first discovery of remains in North America came after the first European discoveries and their taxonomic classification. Isn’t that what happened?
That is what happened. Of course, what Mr. Wozney seems to have missed is the “clearer” in the UCMP quote. Dinosauria as a taxon was initially erected to contain the three then-known species. After further discoveries, scientists began to get a clearer picture of the diversity of that taxon. Today, there are over 800 valid genera belonging to Dinosauria. So, yeah…we have an even clearer picture now than they did after the first North American fossils began turning up.
Owen was able to come up with the name dinosauria because he’d already seen Gideon Mantell’s Iguanadon fossils, among others (Southwest England is literally brimming with fossils in places) and various dinosaur and non-dinosaur fossils collected in South America by Darwin and others.
The jackass who I quoted is saying, “dinosaurs couldn’t have been described in 1842 because nobody had ever found a dinosaur in North America.”
On a related note, I’m sure I grew up with the belief the fossil record relating to dinosaurs developed very quickly and dramatically because of the invention and implementation of steam railways - the hewing through rock in England and then elsewhere revealed huge quantities of dinosaur material in very short time.
Is that how it happened in the early 19th century?
Can’t say for sure about the goings-on in England, but at least some of the material excavated during the "U.S.'s “Bone Wars” was a product of the Transcontinental Railroad’s construction. A good many finds were, and still are, accidental discoveries from various rock quarries around the world (with one of the current “hotbeds” being China’s Liaoning quarry, and the famous Archaeopteryx fossils coming from Germany’s Solnhofen quarry). Though, once it is found that a particular quarry (or other rock formation exposed for other reasons)) houses excellent fossil specimens, the findings become less accidental and more deliberately sought after.
You can tear into me as a person if you want but it was a legitimate criticism intellectually.
“To the 21st century, my wife swears up and down a few years ago she read on Yahoo! Science somewhere that some researcher speculates that there are unexplored regions of the Amazon that may be habitats for species of “VERY LARGE” undiscovered reptiles, but fuck me if I can find that article anywhere, and neither can she.”
There are too many points of conjecture in that comment to count. You can’t really have legitimate articles about undiscovered reptiles in unexplored places.