On another idiot site known as Creation Moments, Creationist, Ian Taylor, having no absolute knowledge about dinosaurs made up this article that contains the usual tripe that has been refuted one too many times before. Here he gives out his kindergarten views about dinosaurs in Everything You Want to Know About Dinosaurs, where he answers the questions that are laid on at the top of each section of the article stupidly.
Here's the first question: What did dinosaurs look like? A jackpot question. In it, he explains about the relationships between extinct and living animals that are highly similar to each other and how extinct animals can be reconstructed based on similar animals alive today that are related to them. He states that scientists are reconstructing dinosaurs the exact same way, while ignoring the fact that there are no animals living today compares to dinosaurs and their lifestyles. Still, scientists were able to piece together a more accurate image of the dinosaurs and their lifestyles based on fossil clues they left behind in the fossil record. In some ways, their lifestyles are quite similar to that of birds and crocodiles, which are the only 2 animals that are related to them. In other ways, they are not. Taylor tells about how scientists, who use this method, are carefully reconstructing the skeletons of dinosaurs in a most accurate way based on other dinosaurs related to them, even though they make mistakes sometimes. Taylor tells about the mistake involving the Brontosaurus skeleton having the wrong head on its body that is now corrected and renamed Apatosaurus due to the fact that the name Apatosaurus was given first before the name Brontosaurus were used for the exact same creature. Unlike creationists who purposely hide their own mistakes from the public, once the mistake is known, scientists quickly corrects them, taking great care to never repeat the same mistakes again.
He then asserts that the fossil eggs being found over the years since 1869 being of the same size at both ends as reptile eggs. That's bull. The eggs actually came in many different shapes and sizes. Some oval-like while others are as round as a basketball. Some are as small as a tennis ball while others are big 18 inches long whoppers shaped like giant footballs. Taylor also mentions about the skin impressions of dinosaurs being that of reptilian, while ignoring the dinosaur fossils with feather imprints being found China in recently.
Taylor asserts, in the conclusion of the segment, that all these evidence leads to the conclusion that dinosaurs were all coldblooded creatures just like the reptiles of today, which is a blatant lie and an unreliable conclusion. For so many decades, scientists hugely debated over whether dinosaurs were either warm-blooded or cold-blooded even though some scientists believe that dinosaurs were both warm and cold-blooded and that there is strong evidence that points to the concept of dinosaurs being warm-blooded creatures like birds and mammals today, such as having more haversian canals found inside their bones than in reptiles, feathers all over their bodies, and the fact that dinosaurs walk, run, and stand in a fully erect posture unlike reptiles that creep and crawl on their bellies like in snakes and on sprawling legs like in other reptiles.
The next segment asks, How big were the dinosaurs? Answer: dinosaurs came in all shapes and sizes. In this segment, Taylor displays his idiocy and claims that the world 'dinosaur' was never mentioned in the Bible because that name was invented in the 1800s' long after the Bible was written centuries earlier. One of the usual creationist idiotic answers said over and over again to imply that before the 1800s', dinosaurs were once called 'dragons' that eventually became extinct by the time the 1700s' roll around. Thus, the claim implies that dinosaurs and dragons are one and the same. They are not and the creationists knows it! This claim is entirely all made up out of ignorance of the total lack of human and dinosaur fossils buried together in the fossil record as well as the total lack of human and dinosaur bones in grave sites and in the records dating to the time of the Roman Empire, The Spanish Inquisition, The War of the Roses, and the Bubonic Plague. They're ignorant of the fact that the word "dragon" is not a King James Bible invention.
Creationists firmly believes that dragons are dinosaurs that people once saw, battled, and killed in many multiple accounts of dragon legends that spread throughout the world. And yet there is no evidence of this. What creationists endorse is all fabrications. Creationists deliberately fabricated the dragon stories to make it as if the heroes of the stories were fighting dinosaurs instead of what the stories actually depict. The dragons in the stories all resembled snakes and lizards with some possessing feline-type bodies. They are fire breathers that also breathe out ice, poisonous gas, spit venom, have impenetrable armor, forked tongue, woman's genitals, bat-wings or bird-wings, multiple heads, and the ability to create storms. Dinosaurs are none of these things despite the creationist's efforts to make them be so.
Taylor stupidly thinks the first dinosaur discovered was what he calls a Mosasaur, unearthed in 1770, not knowing that Mosasaur or Mosasaurus was not a dinosaur, but a marine reptile that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous Period, 70 million years ago. The actual dinosaur fossil was first discovered in 1676 where Robert Plot, a Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University in England, a year later, describes a piece of a Megalosaurus thigh bone, which he thought to have come from a giant human being that have perished in the Flood as described in the Bible.
Taylor erroneously claimed that Sir Richard Owen invented the name dinosaur in 1840, while the name Dinosauria (meaning fearfully great lizards) was in fact invented by Owen in 1842, about 2 years off of what Taylor wrongfully asserts. Taylor claims that after Darwin published the Origins of Species book, dinosaur fossil collecting began to increase because the giant size dinosaurs were more attractive than the small ones (never mind the likes of Compsognathus, Troodon, Deinonychus, and Velociraptor) and museums pay big money to have explorers even bring back fossils in hopes that transitional species will be found to confirm Darwin's expectations. They already have. And the young earth extremists are too blind to notice. What the young earthers want is a smooth transitional record to convince them that there are such things as an animal or a plant transitioning from one species to another. They're not going to get it. Still, there are many instances of transitional forms being found that met up with Darwin's expectations, such as Suchomimus, a dinosaur that's transitioning from Baryonyx to Spinosaurus for instance.
Now Taylor claims stupidly,
There are two basic types of dinosaur: Those who walked on four legs generally called crocodilian, although there is debate about whether individual species did, in fact, waddle like a crocodile, and those who walked on two large back legs and are called bird-hipped.
Such stupidity! Made up out of ignorance of the dinosaurs being divided up into 2 major hip groups, The Ornithschian (bird-like hips) and the Saurischian (lizard-like hips). None of them ever waddled along like a crocodile.
Next, Taylor asserts that dinosaurs must have grown larger like reptiles and live for hundreds of years. But that doesn't explain how come some dinosaurs maintain their smallness while others grew to be various sizes up to as large as a 5 story building. No one knows for sure how long did dinosaurs lived concerning their life-spans. Although some did grew to live to be about 100 or 200 years old (if they're lucky.), others lived much shorter lives like Tyrannosaurus Rex for example, whose life span, according to recent studies, is about 30 years on average.
The next question in the segment is Were the dinosaurs ferocious carnivores? Answer: Yes! Some of them were. However, knowing their narrow-mindedness, it is best not to ask that question or else they will give you some hilarity that involves a T.rex being a herbivore before Adam ate the apple in the Garden of Eden. Taylor tries to prove his point of T.rex being just a scavenger by wrongly stating that the teeth of T.rex was shallow rooted in its jaws. A blatant stupid lie. The jaws of T.rex are actually deep-rooted or else the mighty King of the Dinosaurs would have never have crush bone if its teeth were shallow-rooted. Taylor then makes a useless comparison with the teeth of T.rex (round, thick, and conical) and the teeth of a fruit bat (thin, smooth, and blunt) while neglecting to mentioned the bat having chewing molars on the sides of the jaws unlike T.rex who has none. So, comparing the teeth of T.rex with the teeth of a bat is highly useless.
The next segment asks, Where there marine dinosaurs? Answer: Unless we find an actual fossil of a dinosaur that's highly adaptive to the oceans and seas of the world, no. Taylor, like many people, often mistaken Plesiosaurs, Mosasaurs, and Ichthyosaurs as dinosaurs, while none of them has characteristics of dinosaurs when it comes to their anatomy and skeletal structure. Like before Taylor, like all YEEs, denies the existence of transitional forms. They claim to not exist, saying that every dinosaur found is fully developed, showing no signs of any intermediate at all.
Just because an animal is fully formed doesn't necessary mean they can't change. Even the most developed of all animals are subject to change in order to survive the ever changing environment surrounding them.
Taylor tries to show an example of this by comparing Monoclonius with Triceratops, claiming that there's no intermediate found that tells us that Monoclonius have evolved into Triceratops since Monoclonius had only one horn on its nose and Triceratops had only 3 horns on its face. Never mind the fact that Monoclonius has 2 small incipient horns above its eyes that eventually became prominent horns of Triceratops through evolution. Taylor also claims Brachiosaurus, for example, had nostrils on top of its head but no transitional creature has ever been found showing the migration of the nostril from the front to the top, while deliberately ignoring another dinosaur, Atlasaurus, a basal Brachiosaurid of the Middle Jurassic Age that may be part of the lineage that gave rise to Brachiosaurus, a giraffe-like dinosaur that actually had fleshy nostrils located right in the middle of its face instead on the top of their crests (Witmer, 2001).
The phrase, "great creatures of the sea" doesn't necessary refer to the Mesozoic marine reptiles despite what Taylor says about the phrase in Genesis 1:21 which it says that God created "great whales" and other forms of sea life. Taylor, one of the few strict YECs who still embrace this, gives out this 1977 claim, which is nowadays abandoned by most YECs after vainly defending this falsehood for over 20 years, that tells of a Japanese Fisherman's boat that claims to have pulled up a decaying body of a Plesiosaur, which turns out to be more than a basking shark.
Taylor also believes the Loch Ness Monster to be a Plesiosaur as well often seen coming up towards the surface to breathe air. Like yeah right! Never mind the lake being much too cold for marine reptiles like the Plesiosaur to swim in and there are no Plesiosaur fossils found in that area. Not too long ago, There is an explanation behind the sightings of the Loch Ness Monster made especially during the 1930's that says, the alleged Loch Ness Monster sightings were all the work of sideshow circus elephants swimming in the lake with their heads, back, and trunks exposed at the surface. A picture of a swimming elephant in comparison with an alleged Loch Ness Monster photo and you'll find that it make much more sense than a cardboard cut-out of a sauropod dinosaur. Still, that doesn't stop people from believing in the creature, making alleged claims to have seen the monster, and do whatever it takes to keep that legend alive by unearthing fossil remains of a plesiosaur from one site and transfer them to the Loch Ness Lake and left it there for others to discover it.
And finally, Taylor concludes the segment by asserting that there are sauropod-like creature roaming the swamps of Africa, while there is not a single trace of fully intact dinosaur bodies nor post-Mesozoic dinosaur fossils to be found anywhere on earth. He says that many expeditions have been made to find the creature, but even if they did find it, it would be extremely difficult to prove. It'll be impossible to bring back a living or dead specimen since it is easy for people today to fake photographs and sightings for publicity gain. Especially when the creature only exists in African folklore.
The next segment asks, Did man and dinosaur live at the same time? Answer: Only in science fiction and nowhere else. Taylor, like all YEEs asserts stupidly that dinosaurs and mankind live at the same time while blatantly ignoring the fossil record completely void of human and dinosaur fossils buried together.
Taylor gives out a cesspool load of false evidences for this tripe and outright stupidities such as the made-up notion of dinosaurs being created a few hours before Adam according to the young earthers' distortion of Genesis 1:24-27, Behemoth of Job 40 being a sauropod (false), Leviathan of Job 41 being a [sic] fire breathing Hadrosaur dinosaur (also false) which Taylor stupidly claims to have no teeth in its jaws while ignoring the fact that there are lots of teeth found on the sides of the jaws that's perfectly made for munching on plants, accounts of Chinese people keeping fire breathing dragons for ceremonies (false, too), and Beowulf killing a T.rex monster (definitely false). All claims are false and entirely made up to deceivingly deter people away from the fact that there are no traces of dinosaur fossils found along side of man in both the fossil and historical records.
Next, we see the question, Did birds evolved from dinosaurs? The answer is a definitive YES! In this section, we find Taylor being clueless to the subject of birds and dinosaurs and how they are related based on fossil evidence. He gets stupid and asserts that a French Naturalist, Etienne St. Hilaire (1772-1844) was the first to proposed that birds evolved from bird hipped dinosaurs based on the bone structure similarities of dinosaurs and birds. What a stupid lie. No scientist believes that birds evolved from bird-hipped (Ornithschia) dinosaurs, not even Hilaire. Hilaire died in 1844 long before Paleontologist, Harry Seeley (1839-1909) first divided the dinosaurs up into 2 major groups in 1887. So, Hilaire never heard of those things we know of today.
Next, Taylor wrongfully claims that Daspletosaurus and Dromiceiomimus were the first 2 candidates for the ancestral bird, while being engrossed in ignorance of the fact that these 2 dinosaurs are of the Saurischia (lizard-hipped dinosaurs) and that Daspletosaurus was first discovered in 1970 and Dromiceiomimus was first discovered in 1972. He also claims that Compsognathus, found later on, seemed to be the most likely candidate for the ancestral lineage (Actually, Compsognathus, is closely related to Archaeopteryx.). Close Taylor, but no cigar.
You just had to think, "Such stupidity!" when you see and hear such claims like the claims made up by the likes of Taylor. You're not the only one who thinks like that when one sees and hears someone makes stupid claims like that out of ignorance of how dinosaurs really evolved into birds based on fossil evidence. Then Taylor lies about Charles Darwin, claiming that in his Origins of Species book, Darwin laments the absence of transitional fossils that would prove his theory valid. Never mind the quote being taken out of context from The Origins of Species book. Then, he tells of the discovery of Archaeopteryx made in 1877 in the most distorted way, claiming that even though the famous fossil specimen does has wings and a furcula, a wishbone (a primitive one), 4 other specimens turned up that contained no feathers and wishbone on it, which is a blatant lie. He's referring to the 4 Archaeopteryx specimens that were mistakenly identified as Compsognathus. Then, Taylor claims that only the London specimen has the furcula. Both Huxley and Darwin were suspicious of this and would not accept this specimen as a genuine transition. That was before they closely compare it with Compsognathus and find them to be strikingly similar to each other to the point where they now identified the feathered dinosaur as a transitioned fossil from dinosaur to bird. Then Taylor brings up the infamous false accusation made by Sir Fred Hoyle, who was an astronaut, who, in 1986, falsely claimed that Archaeopteryx was a fake. This page clearly debunks such a false claim.
Next Taylor gives out more idiocy, stating that birds could not be descendants of dinosaurs because dinosaurs are cold-blooded unlike birds that are warm-blooded and that the public should not be deceived by the so-called new tactic of regarding dinosaurs as active warm-blooded to get around the "old (yet, outdated by decades) problem", but rather be just as ignorant and absent-minded like him. Sorry, Taylor. That's no good reason, let alone no excuse, to reject such a notion. Dinosaurs are far from being the cold blooded reptiles people used to think of them as decades ago.
Taylor claims that classifying dinosaurs as warm-blooded creatures poses real problems for the ones that are of giant size. Oh sure. Never mind the large animals having the ability to lose much less body heat than smaller animals. He purposes that warm-blooded animals are limited to about the size of an elephant (never mind the blue whale) he says digestion of food generates heat and the elephant loses heat just by waving their big ears back and forth to dispose of excess heat from its body. Then turns around and idiotically claims that there's no evidence of dinosaurs having big floppy ears. No sure. Never mind the plates of Stegosaurus and the sail-backs of Spinosaurus and Ouranosaurus being heat exchangers as well as displays to attract mates.
Honestly, one has to wonder where did he get all these idiocies from other than his head? He deliberately ignores the fact that giant size warm-blooded animals lose heat much more slowly than smaller warm-blooded animals. It would be a waste of time for a giant size warm-blooded animal to bask itself in the sun all day long just to raise their body temperature, only to loose it at once when the weather gets cold and day turns into night. Smaller warm-blooded animals loose more heat faster than the warm-blooded giants. So, they have to have some sort of covering to help maintain their body temperature and to keep warm during cold days and nights.
There is tons of evidence pointing to dinosaurs being warm-blooded. Other than feathers, dinosaurs, like mammals, have more haversian canals in their bones than in cold-blooded reptiles, allowing them to grow much faster than reptiles. Reptiles took decades to grow up to large adult sizes unlike mammals, birds, and dinosaurs that took much less than 20 years for them to grow up into adulthood. Another evidence of dinosaurs being warm-blooded is the fact that dinosaur fossils in some cases have been found right near the poles, indicating that the dinosaurs must have lived in places where it was cold and wintry most of the year.
And finally Taylor claims that dinosaurs cannot descend into birds because their lungs are so different than that of birds, which is another blatant lie clearly debunked in this article.
The final segment of the article asks, Did dinosaurs go on the ark? Answer: Except birds, no. Taylor asserts that Noah took up into the ark only young, healthy specimens to repopulate the earth, while Noah was suppose to take in only animals that are sexually mature, including birds, not inexperience babies who can't survive without their parents around to show them how to survive. Some animals do look after themselves after they've been born (i.e. Spiders, lizards, and snakes.) but that doesn't mean all baby animals can. Taylor concluded this falsehood by giving out the usual idiocy involving dinosaurs outside of the ark drowned in the Flood except those in the ark that will eventually die off due to post flood extremes, including men killing them off except those in the remote areas of the world to simply exterminate them because they were multiplying and dispersed throughout several continents to the point where they grew large and more numerous and became both a menace and a nuisance to the people. And yet all this doesn't explain how come we are not finding any traces of human and dinosaur fossils in and around each other in the fossil record as well as dinosaur skin and bones made into jewelry, tools, and clothing in ancient human dwellings if what Taylor claims is true. As mentioned before, if God wanted the animals saved to repopulate the Earth only to die off afterwards, then what's the point of rescuing them from the Flood?
This article proves beyond doubt that Taylor's knowledge about dinosaurs stunk royally! He has no knowledge at all about dinosaurs and is completely clueless about them. Later he wrote another article which discusses alleged living fossils being discovered in various places all over the world. These so-called "Living fossils" are what creationists use as evidence of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals living alongside of man all the way up to modern times in sharp contrast to the image of them being extinct long before man came along. Apparently the extremists are very clueless themselves to what a living fossil really is and what they promote is nothing more than either animals of different species, elaborate hoaxes, or misidentification of animals carcasses that in some cases were consumed by other animals or floating in the water.
Many of the examples Taylor gives in the article are just that. The first example is the discovery of the okapi (Okapia johnstoni), an elusive relative of the giraffe found in the Congo basin. Creationists claim that this creature is supposedly extinct for 25 million years, but the discovery of the okapi in 1901, thus disproving evolution and the old earth, while being ignorant of the fact that there is no decree, biological or otherwise, that demands modern okapis be different from fossil okapis. The same thing is said of the coelacanth, the prehistoric fish YEEs also try to use to disprove evolution by claiming that the finding of coelacanth disproves evolution and old earth because it contradicts the notion of the fish being extinct 70 million years ago, while being ignorant of the living coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae is a total different species than the extinct Coelacanthus species. It's obvious creationists don't have a clue when it comes to finding animals they think it's exactly the same as the extinct animal only to find that the supposed "living fossil" is nothing but a animals of a much different species than the extinct types.
Taylor even tried to use the African cichlid, Haplochromis desfontainesii to disprove the notion of the Sahara Desert, the world's largest desert, being tens of thousands of years old as some people would have believed according to the YEEs. For once, the YEEs got it exactly right on the age of this desert. However, the Sahara is actually much older than 6,000 years. The desert is between 7,000 to 8,000 years old, about 2000 years older than the alleged age of the Earth according to the extremists.
Before it became a desert, the Sahara was once a land covered with grasslands and forests well watered by monsoon rains that filled rivers and lakes that once covered many parts of the region. Many people and their livestock settled there and many wild animals roamed about in the region. This was before the whole land was transformed into the desert we know of today after what's left of the ice sheets that existed during the Ice Age melt away. Still, this has nothing to do with the age of the earth.
Then Taylor gives out the old plesiosaur fallacy involving the 1977 discovery of a basking shark mistakenly identified as a plesiosaur which most creationists now abandoned after vainly defending it for over 20 years.
Next, he gets to another fallacy about alleged discoveries of a modern plesiosaur involving a discovery of a pseudo-plesiosaur found inside of a stomach of a sperm whale made in 1937. In order to gain publicity, someone claimed to have caught a sperm whale somewhere in the Pacific. When he dissected the whale, he became awe struck when he discovered what Ed Bousfield, retired Research Associate at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto and the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, and Paul LeBlond, professor at the Department of Oceanography at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver), the authors behind Cadborosaurus: Survivor of the Deep, speculates to be a dead body of a "plesiosaur" nicknamed "Cadborosaurus" after Cadboro Bay located in Victoria, British Columbia. The creature is described as a serpentine like creature with only a camel-like head with two small bumps, two flippers, fish-like tail, serrated ridges, serpentine body, and brownish hair. To make the story more attractive. The man behind this sighting claims there are about 200 sightings or more made of the creature (All probably made up as a result of misidentifying along with fabricating many sightings of seals and sea lions, branding them as the alleged sea monster.) and says that what he found was a young, baby version of the creature.
This is among the crypto-stories YECs exploit and tout around to convinced the gullible of their fabled young earth views. The alleged monster is wrongly speculated to be a "swimming dinosaur" or a plesiosaur, the last of its kind - or so the YEEs constantly asserts while ignoring the fact that the alleged carcass of the "Cadborosaurus" not having a broad turtle-shaped body with 4 flippers, a short tail, a long neck held horizontally, and a small, flat arrow-head like real plesiosaurs. Caddy only has hair, ridges, camel-like head with two small bumps, fish-like fin, and a snaky body. Real plesiosaurs don't. The "hair like a seal" part should have been a dead giveaway along with only 2 flippers, fish-like tail, and horse-like head, for this is exactly what any warm-blooded seal, sea lion, and walrus has while true plesiosaurs in fact don't.
Next Taylor fabricates the alleged sightings of an extremely rare hairy beast which he brands as a giant ground sloth reminiscent of Mylodon, the giant ground sloth that became extinct 10,000 years ago. Known as Mapinguari, which means "defender of the forest" in the Brazilian language, this South American version of Big Foot or the Yeti is said to have been sighted in the Brazilian jungles of South America, where it roams around at night feeding on leaves it tears down with its backward clawed forearms. The creature is also said to be carnivorous, though not necessary a man eater, gives out a foul order, has an extra mouth in the stomach, have a loud screaming cry, hates water, is covered with red hair and caiman skin according to some accounts, and is highly bullet and spear proof due to the thickness of the fur coat. Many people dismissed the creature as a myth, but one ornithologist named David Oren believes the creature to be real and set out many expeditions to look for the creature, only to find a set of footprints, a piece of skin, and some smelly dung which turns out to be nothing more than agouti fur, anteater feces, and casts of tracks that were inconclusive. But that doesn't stop him from believing the creature to be real, yet very elusive.
Then, Taylor gives out several accounts of recent sightings of mammoths made over the years that are in some cases frozen in ice, but what does that have to do with living fossils? The answer: Zilch!
And finally, Taylor concluded his article by giving out the infamous soft-parts-of-T.rex-fossil = young-earth fallacy, claiming that the soft tissues of a T.rex recently found in the 1990s' by Mary Schweitzer disproves the old earth concept and confirms the notion of the 6000 year old earth to be true while in fact it doesn't. Just as mentioned before, it is apparent that Taylor is clueless about what he's talking about concerning the concept of living fossils let alone dinosaurs.
