Dinos and Humans hand in hand

seriously. i don't mean to facetious: that's like every old depiction of brontosaurus, ever. if it's supposed to be a sauropod, whomever drew it certainly never saw one. we have a long history of bad paleontology, and the notion that dinosaus dragged their tails like cold-blooded lizards is an old and disproven one. we know now that sauropods work kind of like suspension bridges, anchored over their hips. their tails extended backwards, cantilevered out to provide counter balance for their necks. an apatosaurus would have looked more like this in real life: so basically, we have two options:1. it's a forgery done in the last 150 years or so by someone looking at bad information or ray harryhausen or gertie or a color book or the blanket i slept under as a child; or:2. it's something else.[edit]also, as a photomajor, i should point out how far a little dodging and burning can go, even avoiding full-blown photoshop trickery.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 10-18-2005 11:04 PM

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please note, that's not what i'm doing. i made a fairly coherent argument that shows that whomever drew that particular picture never saw a sauropod dinosaur alive.i am absolutely fascinated at the possibility of a dinosaur alive today. i just don't think this even hints at any such thing. i'm still holding out on mkele mbembe, personally

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some sauropods have incredibly long tails, even longer than the tail of apatosaurus pictured above. part of the key here is that they're shaped differently. so it's definitally stylized at the very least.frankly, it looks like a cartoon. i'm sorry. it's got and eye and a smiley face. but if it's REAL, i suggest that it might be a case of mistaken identity. look at the bible.ca picture. notice the most prominent part is the series of right angles that would NOT be found in a live sauropod. now look at this: a little bit of discoloration in the wrong place gives it legs. notice in the bible.ca one it doesn't have hind legs. apologetic press actually draws a line there where there isn't one on the rock. there's a dark splotch that continues up the tail where the "body" is, and the "rear legs" are cut off at a weird angle(i see a lot of subtlety when i look, part of my drawing background...) well, if it's meant to be a sauropod, the person who drew it never saw one alive. that's all i'm saying. so? well, if people hunted it, someone saw it alive. but if the artist saw it DEAD, he would have seen it like this:it's called "rigor mortis." the tendons and muscles tend to seize up in such a way that in dinosaurs makes the head and tail arch upwards -- not in that right angle patter on the rock.coincidentally, that's labelled "apatosaurus" as well, but it doesn't look like one to me. if it is, it's still got the "brontosaurus" skull on it. but the rest of it looks like a camarasaurus too, so i think the website just got their labels mixed up. i just chose it because it demonstrates rigor mortis in sauropods really, really well. who says dinosaurs were discovered in modern times? the earliest, i think, was in the 1700's, and the earliest significant find the 1800's -- but the chinese have probably been digging them up for a few thousand years.there's a popular theory that dragon legends and so forth are based on the fossilized skeleton of dinosaurs. if you ever seen some thecodonts (dinosaur ancestors) some look very close to chinese dragons...but anyways. it might be someone's take on a fossil find. which would also be consistent with the idea that, if it's a sauropod, the artists never saw one alive.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 10-19-2005 01:36 AM

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i was actually kind of comparing the anasazi drawing to the ica stones -- they contain the same kind of dinosaur depiction very standard up until the modern revolution of paleontological thought.in fact, one of them looks exactly like the blanket i slept under for my entire childhood.

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i'm sorry. well documented and supported scientific theory, analyzed and contributed to by millions of scientists... vs. a bunch of forgeries, pseudoscience, and people who can't even read the bible right.people DO look at the ToE skeptically -- and it's held up. perhaps you should take that attitude with creationism. you've been corrected on haeckel a number of times. but i'll use my sauropod example from earlier in the thread.do you know how hard it was for me to find a picture of anatomically correct apatosaurus for that first post? you wouldn't believe me if i told you that post, with the three pictures, took on the order of 3 hours to write, mostly looking through jut plain awful pictures. heck, the bad ones were pretty hard to find too.most pictures look kinda like this: it's not quite wrong, but it's not right, either. it's somewhere between dragging its tail, and using it as a balance. its back still curves in the same way, which is wrong.now, the new school of the warm-blooded dinosaur has been around a while. the way we look at dinosaurs is fundamentally different now than it was when this particular stereotype was drawn up. some of the new depictions are absolutely stunning.look at the date. 1997. it shouldn't be wrong, that's pretty recent. it's even after they figured out that brontosaurus had the wrong head, and didn't really exist, in the 70's. yet i'm sure you've heard the name of the non-exist dino, "brontosaurus" haven't you?paleontology had a lot of mixups and misidentifications in its early days. it's taken us a while to sort some of them out. and traditions hold fast -- everybody loved their brontosaurus toys as a child. what the heck kind of name is apatosaurus ajax anyways? it looks like a diplodocus now, and that's boring.these errors are repeated for the same reason you're repeating errors, and people report errors about the bible. people just don't know any better. (also, i haven't seen any ape-like (or dark skinned) neanderthals or human embryos with gills for years. but i HAVE seen some brontosaurs.) it's selling you on the idea that collection of hoodwinks and forgers and ignorant can challenge a standing and well supported scientific theory on the basis of a few painted rocks of questionable authenticity. mm hmm. go look up that book i mentioned in the other thread, or one from the same section of the library. look over the REAL data for a while.do fakes and deceptions happen there too? yes, they do. allow me to tell you an anecdote. there was this guy i used to be friends a few years back, paleo nut. he might as well have been pro. guy had a hadrosaur leg in his living room, and a significant percentage of the world's dinosaur embryos in his garage (6 tarbosaur eggs, all with babies).he showed his protoceratops once. i said it looked like a nice fossil. he agreed, and then pointed out exactly how it knew it was a fake. "look," he said, "the metacarpals are out of proportion, and made of the wrong mineral. that's half the selling point -- and they're from a different specimen. look at the marks here and here and here. this whole leg's not even fossilized bone. i tell you, that's the last time i buy anything from the chinese, this is the third forgery they've sold me." or something to that extent.i've been looking at dinosaurs and dinosaur skeletons idly for a long time. and i'm an artist used to looking at detail. i might have figured it out in a while, but i certainly didn't notice from a cursory glance. apparently, there is a large black market for fossils in china, and people "alter" them to increase their value.and to the trained eye they are easy to pick out. the trained eye spots the difference between actual fossil and reconstruction in an instant. the people who ACTUALLY know what they're looking for view most everything as total skeptics, and when something shows all the signs of being bogus, it probably is.but you, the random and anonymous creatonist pundit on the web, are not familiar with all of the intricacies of actual paleontology. you're not even familiar with the pictures in books. you can sit there and feel all safe in your ignorance of the area. yeah, you don't find evolution in the fossil record to be credible....but what the hell do you know?

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is that i can do this too.the fact of the matter is that most artists are not biologists. and creatures that few people have seen do not get reproduced faithfully. so we should expect to see some downrigh funny things. i mean, what the heck is this? i'll ive you a hint: it's a totally known creature, alive today.

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nope. let randman guess.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 10-20-2005 09:52 PM

alright, randman neglected to answer, which means he probably knows what it is. BOTH artistic images are depictions of the biblical story of jonah, and the whale that swallowed him.(technically it's a "great fish" but these depictions are based of the christian traditions of the whale.)jonah's whale is depicted in just about every way you could possibly think. some look like tradition sea serpents. some look like wild boars with wings and no hind legs. some look remarkably like a kronosaur (the bones pictured).the problem with art is that it's NOT photographic. even photographs can lie -- but the people who drew and scultpted and painted jonah's whale had probably never seen one even once. whales lived out in the ocean, a mysterious and seldom seen beast.and so when people wanted to draw one -- well, they made stuff up. and by chance, some of these made up creatures look like some stuff that really did exist -- but some like that second whale do not. i hold out hope for mokele mbembe. personally, i want to run a different experiment on the natives. we know from paleontology how a sauropod stood, and walked, and held its head and tail. i want to show them the two pictures -- the old classic brontosaur dragging its tail and living in water, and the newer more accurate plain-based sauropod with it's tail in the air.if they choose the outdated one, it's probable that they're just making it up. which would be a shame really, but it would make a lot more sense -- the jungle is no place for a sauropod.

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yeah, that's not too bad, actually. it looks like a rhino.

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what did you think it was, out of curiousity?

i guess that's just as good as any, really. lol.

that would be interesting, since "transitional" whales like basilosaurus lived long before man. i was half tempted to use a picture that actually looked exactly like basilosaurus, but i figured someone would argue just this point.mostly, i was just trying to demonstrate that artistic depictions of fantastical creatures, even the ones that do exist contemporary to the artist, are not always the most accurate things in the world. sometimes, people just make stuff up.and you're bound to get some coincidences with reality. personally, i think the first pic looks a lot like a kronosaur.

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really? that's disappointing.