Sure.
But still, some talk about a “snake like neck” coming out of the water.
Maybe we need to look at our definition of just what is called a “dinosaur”. Their are “lizards” that can run around on their hind feet. As there were dinosaurs who went around on all fours.
I bring up Komodo dragons just as an example of how there are some very large lizards out there and who knows, maybe in the past there were others?
Can we go off everything purely based on fossils?
Non-avian dinos are a distinct branch of the reptile class*. Lizards (monitor or otherwise) are not on that branch. All non-avian dinos are reptiles, but not all reptiles are dinos. Jayjay is using the scientific definition. Which definition are you using?
*Kingdom, phylum, class…
As I’ve already noted, no dinosaur had a sprawling gait, not even the obligate quadropeds. Their pevic bone literally prevented this.
What I’m saying is, lets just suppose, that some soldiers, back in say Roman days, or even a medieval knight, did go out and kill a large reptilian creature.
What did he kill?
A crocodile? A monitor lizard? Maybe some lizard species thats extinct now? We laypeople call it a “dinosaur” just because, and lacking any fossil or skeletal remains, thats what it appears as?
For mammals, yes. It can work in the opposite direction for reptiles. I don’t understand the mechanism, but I suspect it’s related to being an endotherm vs an ectotherm.
I can find nothing in post #17 that rules out the possibility of a small, neat-extinct population of Aquilops in the Brazilian rainforest. Can you please identify the precise lines in post 17 you believe address the Aquilops?
I’d like a cite for the proposition that Aquilops could not survive in today’s atmosphere, please.
I agree. I was responding to the claim that surviving dinosaurs were impossible, made later in the thread. No one would be likely to mistake an Aquilops for a dragon.
They were called steganosaurus.
If that isn’t clear enough for you, then you seem to be a lost cause for even the most basic level of scientific understanding.
No, science actually doesn’t work like that. Scientist say: There is no evidence that any non-avian dinosaurs survived until modern times. They don’t say: It’s literally impossible that any non-avian dinosaurs survived until modern times.
But they can say that it is so asymptoticly close to impossible as to be indistinguishable from it. The likelyhoood of surviving dinosaurs is so absolutely insanely astronomically remote that it makes the existence of bigfoot look like an utter certainty in comparison.
And, BTW, absence of evidence *is *evidence of absence when that evidence should be apparent.
I’ve known a lot of scientist (and have even been one, myself, back in the day), but I’ve never known one that says things like that.
Thefirst hit says the higher oxygen content was wrong.
St. George might. What else would he believe it to be?
Look, there’s not much of a bright line between Birds and some “dinosaurs” (Birds are a type of dino, after all). There is no reason at all some small dino could not have survived.
Not a huge sauropod, sure. But one of the small feathered warmblooded ones? Why not?
Would small, feathered, warm-blooded ones have perpetuated the myth of dragons and sea-monsters during the Dark Ages?
Maybe for a very small, tiny person.
No. But we have strayed from the Op, as you know. I was responding to *“The likelyhoood of surviving dinosaurs is so absolutely insanely astronomically remote that it makes the existence of bigfoot look like an utter certainty in comparison.”
*
Now if he had said “Large sauropod dinos” or Tyrannosaurs or stuff bigger than a hippo- sure.
But Birds *are *dinos. And they survived. Now of course, I am sure Darren Garrison meant “non Avian dinosaurs”. But still, a small, feathered, warm-blooded dino is not unthinkable.