Mummified hadrosaur evidence of recent global flood

just an important clarification. they're calling it a "mummy" but the term has the wrong connotation. as you write, it is a fossil, and no soft tissue has been found -- just fossils: rocks and minerals in the shape of the hadrosaur. hovind is actually right in this part of the claim. it WAS buried very rapidly in flash flood conditions. however, the jump to "NOAH!" is completely disengenuous for any number of reasons.

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well, yes. that's what i mean -- my original statement is, to the best of my knowledge, correct. "so soft tissue has been found." there is always the chance, since fossilization is a somewhat slow process and doesn't happen all once. i think, however, the best we can hope for would be something like the t-rex DNA extracted from a fossil (femur?). this is roughly the same time period, and there was a lot more to fossilize, so you never know. i think it would be the coolest thing ever to extract some hadrosaur DNA, even if it'll cause many more arguments with creationists about how old the earth is. actual tissue would be amazing, but let's not count our chickens. or distant chicken relatives. oh, well, i could be mistaken. i caught a program on the national geographic channel about it, and they suggested that the mineral the "mummy" is composed of was likely produced by bacteria that live in oxygen-starved environments, ie: underwater. but they could be wrong, of course. on their night of dinosaurs programming, i spent the two hours prior to it screaming at the television regarding how idiotic they were. fair enough.Edited by arachnophilia, : typo

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i wasn't sure, so i tried not to make a bold statement. i'm aware they're both late cretaceous dinosaurs, and both lived in the hell creek area, but i forgot offhand which particular specimen the DNA came from. and so i didn't want to make a claim that regarding the specifics. but hey, if they came from exactly the same exact time and place, that's great. edge of my seat. it looked like poop. literally. i'm always sort of amused by how the scientists know what they're talking about in the interviews, but the narrators always always always screw stuff up. it's like the couldn't have run the final cut by one of those scientists whos work they're presenting.ah well, at least they generally get it better than the newspapers.i was sort of puzzled about how someone said that the hadrosaur's tail was far fatter than people had ever thought (yet i'm positive i've seen many depictions that weren't nearly as gaunt as their skinny version), and how they were surprised at the spacing of the vertebrae, as if dinosaurs didn't have cartilage.

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oh, yeah, that was the confusion i was trying to avoid. i'm sure. i really wish people who are scientists themselves would report this stuff. well, there's been a bit of a fad recently of depicting dinosaurs as pretty skinny animals. but if you think about, they all more or less have to balance over their hips. at least the bipedal ones. so the mass of the tail has to be roughly equal to the mass of the torso, head, and forearms. right? excessively skinny tails wouldn't work as a counter-balance. agreed, and it is very very cool to have the specifics. but (probably because of editting) their reasonable amazement at the coolness of seeing everything in place came across as complete ignorance of basic biology.

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yeah, and well enough to know it's just a trend. i think it started with dinosaurs like velociraptor, as part of their general public image overhaul to make them appear more bird-like, active, and warm-blood. and they just kind of over-compensated a bit. small, bipedal dinosaurs like that may well have been skinny (especially those with pneumatized bones, less weight on one end = less weight on the other) but the larger herbivores, i would imagine, were probably not.hadrosaurs, in my mind, are a little bit like cows. grazing herd animals -- so we should expect them to be built a bit like grazing herd animals. you could probably make a pretty damned good steak from one. and i expect tyrannosaurs thought the same thing.

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that's a possibility. the drawings i've seen over the years have gotten more and more anatomically correct as well, and the "anorexia" does kind of demonstrate bone structure, and to some degree musculature. though i'm not totally sure that musculature can be entirely accurate anyways. it always seems like they're missing some thigh muscles to me.the most preposterously skinny dinosaur depictions i've seen are generally t. rexes. some with ridiculously fragile-looking heads.

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the problem i see is that the flesh and everything seems to occupy the same volume it would have in life, unlike the earlier hadrosaur mummy. which probably means that the flesh was NOT dried out before fossilization began. at least in the section they've analyzed."mummy" is just the term they use for dinosaurs fossilized with skin intact. this one, to my knowledge, does not seem to have been actually mummified. at least as i understand the process of mummification. well, the relative completion indicates a fast burial. had it sat around exposed for a long time, things like t. rex would have wandered into a free meal. it also indicates very little chance to decompose. once buried, the fossilization can take as long as it needs to. frankly, i'm rooting for slow fossilization -- that they'll find some actual tissue.normally, we just get bones and desicated mummies. this thing seems to be a full-on cast of the entire dinosaur. and if they can pull DNA out of t. rex femur bones, what might be contained in the middle of this? it's very unlikely, but it would be pretty damned cool to pull out actual tissue.

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the coastal plains around the hell creek formation were actually pretty wet. as JB had indicated above, there were lots of rapidly changing rivers, and there is a crocidile buried along with it. it's likely it was buried by water -- which would be the opposite of dessication. JB would probably be able to provide more info. i don't exactly know enough about this. just an arm-chair paleo-hobbyist.

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