Undermining long-held paradigms

Just for giggles and grins, has anyone brought up the Synapsids on this thread as part of the reply to this false assumption that mammals were not really around during the age of the dinosaurs?

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"Chance favors the prepared mind." L. Pasteur
and my family motto
Transfixus sed non mortis
Taz

I am just really getting into the Permean myself and have to admit to being on the sharp end of the learning curve with respect to the current state of the research.While I normally do not use Wikpedia they do have an outstanding series of linkages for the class Synapsida and the order TherapsidaAn interesting book that I am reading now is When Life Nearly Died by M.J. Benton.All of this going back, obviously, to the fact that none of this data (despite statements to the contrary) does anything to cause problems with the theory of evolution and in fact strengthens the theory as it better defines the origins of MODERN mammals by better defining their ancestors.Edited by Dr_Tazimus_maximus, : Lack of coffee leading to typing mistakes

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"Chance favors the prepared mind." L. Pasteur
and my family motto
Transfixus sed non mortis
Taz

Hi Nemesis,
you said

The general concensus of the K-T event is that a meteor that hit the Mexican peninsula was the factor for such a catastrophic event. Afterall, there has to be some good reason for why these creatures simply disappeared, right. But not everyone is convinced that it was the Chicxulub site that did them in. A few separate teams, including some researchers from NASA, believe that it was another site that caused such a massive extinction.

I am afraid that your facts are wrong. The Chicxulub impact site is for the KT boundry extinction event, the one in Australia is for an earlier, larger event at the end of the Permean almost 200 million years prior to the KT extinction event.Also you have repeated a certian philospophical error seve3ral times on this thread

when theory unduly becomes fact

Theory never becomes fact, it only becomes more or less supported. Facts, laws and observations all all part of a framework that becomes theory.

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"Chance favors the prepared mind." L. Pasteur
and my family motto
Transfixus sed non mortis
Taz

Hi Quetzal,
yeah it's been a while. Several promotions and then moving to a new job kind of stole all my time. I have actually been trying to find time to catch up with my reading as I have to get invloved with the local and county school system as the creationits are trying AGAIN to get their ID pap into the schools. As for time to post we will see, my standard work week now is ~70 hours per week with a 20 hour weekly commute. Kind of cuts time for other things. Thanks for the ref. I will try to give it a read when I get the chance. I recently read a different book more on the ID topic, "Creationisms Trojan Horse", a good read but off topic.The FACT that proto-mammals are present in Perman era strata should be enough to dampen the persistent creationist claim that the rapdidty (rapid, yeah right, >10 million years is SOOOOO fast :rolleyes of mammalian radiation after the KT invalidates evolution but I guess that the data can be ignored when convenient.Funny thing is that prior to Darwins theories most christians considered the order of the strata as currently understood to be correct (just take a look at the numbers of clergy that worked as part-time geologists back in pre-Victorian and Victorian times), guess that the implications once coupled with Natural Selection caused many to change their minds.

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"Chance favors the prepared mind." L. Pasteur
and my family motto
Transfixus sed non mortis
Taz

Re: Paradigms are the Topic
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Good point! The article you referenced, Dinosaur Fossil Found in Mammal's Stomach, was written by Joseph B. Verrengia, an AP science writer. In the article he says:
"It contradicts conventional evolutionary theory that early mammals couldn't possibly attack and eat a dinosaur because they were timid, chipmunk-sized creatures that scurried in the looming shadow of the giant reptiles."

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I guess one way to look at this is to say that Mr. Verrengia has expressed himself clearly in the layman's vernacular, but scientifically this is just plain wrong.

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Percy, this is a lame excuse because just about everyone who uses these websites use them as a basis for evidence. In

Actually NM this is a very sound statement. I have had commentators from the "popular press" in several labs that I have been in over the years and they invariably foul things up in an attempt to make it comprehensible to the layman. The common concept is that mammels barely existed during dinosaur times and this is just plain false, from a scientific point of view.

What??? That's all they do on those Discovery specials. They just guess about things all day long. They make guesses on what a Dinosaur sounded like, they make assertions on what its temperment was like, what color it was, what it ate, what ate it, etc. They even go so far as to present these reconstructions on whether or not an animal rolls in dung to escape from predators.

I agree that many of these assertions by CINAMOTOGRAPHERS are in error, in fact I tell that to my daughter when she watches them (and now she thinks that her father is a stick-in-the-mud). So what. The bulk of data supporting evolution comes from scientists, not film makers. And the ideas of small mammels relative to dinosaurs does have one realistic basis, dino's filled the bulk of the demes.As in your earlier goof with respect to the crater in Australia, you really need a better handle on the facts. I would recommend Science, Nature, and the Journal of Theoretical Biology over the Discovery Channel (althogh I do like them as well), but thats just me.

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"Chance favors the prepared mind." L. Pasteur
and my family motto
Transfixus sed non mortis
Taz

By the wy NM,
How DO you respond to the data on the Synapsids and proto-mammels from the Cambrian? It really is a growing field and directly impacts you assertion that this one event overthrows the established paradigm.

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"Chance favors the prepared mind." L. Pasteur
and my family motto
Transfixus sed non mortis
Taz