Did Dinosaurs live with man?

to be fair, the dinosaur is represented by hundreds of thousands of species. we just don't have any (known) examples of non-avian dinosaurs. but that's a silly paraphyletic grouping anyways.there's some relatively fringe ideas that some species of non-avian dinosaurs made it past the K-T event by several hundred thousand years. they're pretty controversial, and probably bullshit, but i haven't really looked at them very closely.

so, i'm not really sure that you actually understand what a dinosaur is. this is coelophysis (by jeff martz). he's one of the first dinosaurs, in the mid-to-late triassic. he shows all of the hallmarks of the things that differentiate dinosaurs from other sauropsids and even other archosaurs at the time. but more interestingly, he shows a lot of the hallmarks of modern birds. his bipedal posture (the thing that makes dinosaurs fundamentally different than lizards like the tuatara, and even other archosaurs like crocodiles) is one of those thing. he balances his weight over his hips, which are somewhere between those of a crocodile and a bird. he almost certainly had feathers. and he even has hollow bones (his name means "hollow structure") like a bird. this is one of the earliest dinosaurs.here's a nice photo-collage by Alain Beneteau of another non-avian dinosaur: recognize this guy from jurassic park? yeah, i didn't think so. that's velociraptor (late cretaceous, one of the last dinosaurs). science tells us that they had quill barbs on their arms. that means wings. they are skeletally very similar to the another dinosaur you might have heard of: archaeopteryx. in fact, they are so similar that seems that archaeopteryx (the first bird) was a basal (early) dromaeosaur (the family that includes velociraptor). they're sort of like birds' nephews.it's... relatively hard to find an accurate reconstruction of a dinosaur like velociraptor on the internet. the shape seen in the movies has taken over the popular imagination. but if you saw a real one, you'd think it was a strange kind of bird that had teeth instead of a beak. in fact, that description would be closer to being accurate than thinking a tuatara was a dinosaur. small theropods (including velociraptor) would look like fluffy birds. larger theropods would look like ostriches.if there are non-avian dinosaurs still floating around, we've almost certainly mistaken them for birds. it's not going to come down to finding something scaly and lizardlike. it's going to be "i guess this family tree was organized wrong, and this dinosaur we thought was a bird isn't actually a bird."Edited by arachnophilia, : edit: oh, and some of them had beaks

to be fair, it's not the stones that are the hoax, but the inscriptions on them. the rocks themselves are very, very old. the only question is how recently someone scrawled on them. and that sort of thing is a touch harder to date, reliant on much flimsier evidence that can be sometimes faked effectively enough to an untrained eye.dating based on coloration of patina, and apparent weathering isn't so solid.potassium/argon dating, the law of superposition, and the geologic column are.does that make sense? also relevant is the fact that hoaxers are often trying to deceive, and create a false appearance of age. geology is not. in any case, what exactly is your source that "science!" failed to correctly date them? they were never found by archaeologists, only (forged by) a local farmer. so it's not like science could have dated them relative to their geologic strata. and you can't K-Ar date an inscription. i don't see any way that science could have offered a date at all on those grounds.though it could have offered a date based on comparing the inscriptions to depictions of dinosaurs in popular media. and it would have found that there was no way in hell they'd been carved by anyone who had ever seen a living dinosaur. it also would have been relatively easy to compare it to native art styles, from pre-columbian to contemporary, and give them an approximate date based on that. but that's a bit less scientific.

even the wikipedia pictures aren't that great. most depictions just kind of slap a few feathers on, and still have them looking like plucked chickens. they should have a full set of fluffy, downy feathers that hide the contours of their bodies, sort of like modern birds do. we're just so set on seeing that sleek, naked-lizard that even the feathered drawings come across the same way. thinking too literally. or maybe, not literally enough. it's a name from the bible, and it's pronounced "arach".

no, more like this.

out of curiosity, where did you get that impression?when dinosaurs were first discovered, people looked at the bones and imagined giant lizards. the name itself, coined by sir richard owen, means "terrible lizard", and was apparently meant to imply their great size.the oldest depictions of dinosaurs basically treated them like cold-blooded lizards (the earliest drawings showed them with impossibly splayed legs), and it wasn't really until the 1980's that the public saw anything else. science was only a few decades ahead of that. it's actually this disparity between the science and the popular depictions that lets us look at stuff like the ica stones and say "forgery" immediately without even looking very hard. they look like popular depictions from the 40s-80s at worst, and jurassic park at best.but your misconceptions aren't too far away from the way dinosaurs were thought of 100 years ago. and without, you know really studying the subject, one might be inclined to make the same kinds of classification errors...also, fwiw, "reptile" is no longer the favored term because the colloquial definition of "reptile" is paraphyletic: it's the group of sauropsids, excluding avian dinosaurs. and there's some argument, really, about whether we should call dinosaurs "reptiles". whereas we can call them all, including birds, "sauropsids" just fine. nope. but there's little point in mocking someone for something they just haven't learned. i follow paleontology from my armchair (i'm not a scientist) because i find the subject of dinosaur evolution fascinating, and frankly, because i just never grew out of it from when i was a kid. i think it's exciting, and interesting, and i love learning new things so i imagine others probably would too. no no, you're not seeing the forest for the trees. it sounds a bit like the shortened version of my username. that's really about it. no special meaning.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

can we bicker less, and intelligently converse more?

i did perhaps overstate it. but in my opinion, it's controversial for rather unscientific reasons. there was a lot of controversy about depicting dinosaurs with feathers in the late 80's and early 90's, and most of those predictions have been borne out by evidence (like velociraptor above). well, it depends. there's some debate over tianyulong. if its feathers prove homologous to coelurosaurian feathers, it basically pushes the most basic development of feathers back to the common ancestor of saurischia and ornithischia. perhaps to the common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs, which are also fuzzy.i think it's an interesting debate. but it seems like the more we examine, the further back feathers go. it's also important to remember that dinosaurs had feathers suitable for flight by the late jurassic. these didn't just suddenly sprout from archaeopteryx, the precursors would have been further down the family tree. the only question is how far back they go.i haven't seen any good reason why tianyulong's feathers are not homologous to primitive coelurosaur feathers. i'm of the opinion that these structures are a feature that defines dinosaurs, in the way that hair defines mammals. secondary loss is a pretty convincing explanation. larger mammals are similarly not covered with hair. their mass is sufficient to regulate their temperatures.

ditto. the kid's illustrated books in the 1980's were... pretty bad. jurassic park in the early 90's was like a breath of fresh air. even though it still lagged behind the science, and was full of inaccuracies, it at least showed active, warm-blooded dinosaurs. yup, that's marketing for you. even the best dinosaur books included pterosaurs (which aren't dinosaurs), and sometimes aquatic reptiles (not even closely related to dinosaurs). and sometimes even synapsids like dimetrodon, which you probably wouldn't even call a "reptile". they are closely related. as someone above said, they are dinosaurs' closest living relatives that aren't dinosaurs. and there were some early relatives of crocodilians that were much more dinosaur-like, and walked more upright. it really is, yeah. but they're getting better! the ones in the 80's were particularly bad, because the whole "birds are dinosaurs" thing hadn't really hit the popular culture yet. even though jurassic park showed a bunch of plucked and naked dromaeosaurs running around, it was still largely responsible for bring this idea into the public consciousness.Edited by arachnophilia, : typo

here's a diagram i've used before. A: the ornithischian Heterodontosaurus
B: the early theropod Herrerasaurus
C: the neotheropod Coelophysis
D: the tetanuran Allosaurus
E: the coelurosaur Ornitholestes
F: the Jurassic avialae Archaeopteryx
G: the cretaceous enantiornithe Sinornis
H: the wing of an Opisthocomus (hoatzin) hatchling
I: the wing of the adult chicken Gallus
J: a pterosaur (closely related archosaur)the earliest dinosaurs had five digits, but two were reduced fairly early in the theropod line.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

i see the following:

• a ceratopsian skeleton (dinosaur)
• some kind of pterosaur (not a dinosaur)
• several dragonflies (not dinosaurs)
• a turtle (not a dinosaur)

it goes on to list allosaurs and diplodocus, both of which are dinosaurs. i agree the art is confusing. but if you follow through to the faq page, what it states appears to be correct (though we might quibble about the "reptile" part):

quote:

---

A dinosaur can be defined as "The most recent common ancestor of Iguanodon and Megalosaurus, and all of its descendants".

​

A dinosaur can be diagnosed as a reptile with the following suite of characters: Jaw muscles that reach up onto the top of the skull, plus a big ridge on the upper arm bone (humerus), plus bony processes at the hip, knee, and ankle to help them stand with their limbs straight under the body.

​

Most dinosaurs can be identified because they have an erect limb posture, plus the three bones of the pelvis (ilium, ischium, pubis) are joined to form an open hip socket for reception of the thigh bone (femur), plus the longest finger is the second finger. You might find some of these features in other reptiles, but not all together.

---

i believe if you look through the dinosaur type specimens listing, they'll all be dinosaurs. but i haven't checked. yeah, unless you're reading closely, you'll probably never notice that they've thrown in a bunch of not-dinosaurs because they look cool.

well, tyrannosaurus rex was a cretaceous dinosaur. they lived pretty much right before the KT event (the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the cretaceous). and it's unknown whether or not they were feathered. it's known, however, that earlier tyrannosaurs had simple feathers. so if t. rex did not have feathers, they were probably lost secondarily. many large animals don't need extra structures like feather or fur or hair to help keep them warm, depending on their environment. think elephants (africa and india) vs woolly mammoths.

birds are dinosaurs, so, yes they do.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

it's not a nitpick. it's not a technicality. it's a fact. birds are dinosaurs the same way that coyotes are mammals, or people are primates. well, yes, probably. but then again if creationists weren't confused by biology, they wouldn't be creationists. so i see no point in giving out incorrect information just to suit them. nor do i see any point in following their lead, and letting them define the discussion, based on their inaccurate assumptions.rather, it's better to go back and redefine the debate using the correct terms, explaining along the way what dinosaurs actually are. see the above discussion with artemis. the fact that birds are dinosaurs is very strongly established, and the avian family tree is chock full of transitional forms. it's quite an compelling example of evolution in action, as you can trace dinosaurian evolution from basal archosaurs (which were more similar to crocodilians) to modern birds, in a pretty clear and obvious way.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.