Please Help Me Disprove This (Re: Modern dinosaurs)

I've never taken a formal course in biology, so I usually refer to people who have when creationists try to argue with me. Please help me disprove this article:
http://www.livingdinos.com/dinosaur.htmlEdited by Adminnemooseus, : Added the "(Re: Modern dinosaurs)" part to the topic title.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

No argument against evolutionary theory is presented in this article. It does not falsify the theory of evolution if an ancient creature turns out to have modern descendants. That possibility kind of goes with the theory, actually.The exciting question is how much or how little change we find found in those descendants. There is always change. Modern coelocanths, for example, have evolved. They are not the same lobe-finned creatures we see in the fossil record. But they are similar enough to their ancestors that it's a buzz to find them.As it happens, we already know the dinosaurs did not all go extinct. Today their descendants survive and thrive all around us--as birds.Welcome to EvC. You wouldn't happen to be the author of this material, would you? Spamming us again for hits?_______Edited by Archer Opterix, : added URL.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

The whole thing is arguing against a strawman version of evolution.Simply put, even if tomorrow every species of dinosaur that we know of suddenly jumped out of the bushes and exclaim "HERE WE ARE, WE'VE BEEN HIDING BEHIND THE BUSHES ALL THIS TIME!" it would not disprove the theory of evolution. In other words, the theory of evolution does not require the dinosaurs to be extinct. Instead, the evidence that we have acquired so far all point to a mass extinction 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs.If we do find living dinosaurs we don't already know of (crocs don't count ) we would have to reconsider all the evidence we've collected over the years. Nothing to do with evolution.

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From the article:

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As the mud dried and turned into stone, the creatures were fossilized and others were turned into coal in just a short number of years, not millions of years.

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If this were the case, then we should expect to see regeneration of fossil fuels that are currently running low. As far as we can tell, our supply has not been getting renewed in any substantial way since we rst started mass-draining it ~200 ya. It's pretty clear that such things take longer than a "short number of years" to form.Regarding that sh... let me make an analogy that you can use.Let's say we were cousins, you and I. Now, we thought that grandpa Bill was the only child of our great grandparents. However, we nd some birth records that show grandpa Bill had a sister! Would that suddenly mean that our grandfather did not exist and that we are not both descended from him? Of course not!Finding a line of descent that we previously didn't know about has the same non-effect on evolution. It has no bearing on the fact that we are descended from a single common ancestor.Anyway... can't read the rest, as it looks mostly like nonsense. I'd just set your silly metre on it and have your creationist debate buddies watch as the needle breaks Jon

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In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist... might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. - Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _En el mundo hay multitud de idiomas, y cada uno tiene su propio significado. - I Corintios 14:10
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _A devout people with its back to the wall can be pushed deeper and deeper into hardening religious nativism, in the end even preferring national suicide to religious compromise. - Colin Wells Sailing from Byzantium

Living Dinosaurs.I think the main point has already been made. The question of whether there are still dinosaurs roaming the earth has damn-all to do with the theory of evolution, and everything to do with the question of whether there are, in fact, dinosaurs roaming the earth.Alas, unless you're a pedantic cladist and include birds among dinosaurs, there aren't.

this site resurfaces here every so often. the obvious problems will get dragged up here again and again -- the person making the claim has to provide better proof than this sort of nonsense, it doesn't say much about evolution, etc etc.the real problem, and what really bugs me about the whole "what if dinosaurs were still alive today?!?" argument is that dinosaurs are still alive today. a whole class of animals alive today actually fall under the classification dinosauria, and their presence is so banal and commonplace that i don't see what the fuss could possibly be over.birds are dinosaurs.

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Also:If we found a T-rex living off in a cave”*cough* Tomb Raider”, it would in no way falsify the theory of evolution.

What exactly do you want disproven? Do "living dinosaurs" exist today? Doubtful, but possible. We already know they did exist, so a remnant living in places devoid of humans is conceivable, but not likely.By the 1940's, various scientists agreed that they would not find any other quadrapeds anywhere in the world. Yet, in the early 1990's, an extremely rare quadraped, looking something like a small deer, and said to be a relative of the bovine family, was discovered in Vietnam. Known as a Sao La by the Vietnamese, ts scientific name is rendered Pseudoryx nghetinhensis. If you don't remember, a big giant war was fought there. And there were a few undocumented sightings during those years, but no one took it seriously.Obviously, that isn't a dinosaur, but it does illustrate that organisms live underneath our noses. There still remains the possibility that in some vast expanse somewhere, there lives creatures not seen by humans.You also then have to consider how many sightings, that parallel one another by different peoples in different parts of the world there are.We all laughed and mocked the Chupacabra, but some people really did see something. Sure, fanciful stories grew around it, but its like I've said before, folklore often doesn't come from absolute nothingness. Something actual almost always triggers the fanciful event. In the case of the Chupacabra, it just so happens to be a breed of Coyote with a strangely tinged coat.As for things like dragons, you'd really have to be dismissing a lot when considering the fact that parts of the world, where people had no outside interaction, all have the similar of very similar stories. You then also have to wonder why and how the body types of these "mythical" creatures just so happen to look an awful lot like dinosaurs. Know what I mean?Edited by Nemesis Juggernaut, : edit to add photoEdited by Nemesis Juggernaut, : Edit to add classification name

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

I'm not sure what makes you think there was no interaction. Like, what time period are you talking about? Alexander the Great had conquered everything between Macedon and Punjab, almost the entire world as known to the Greeks at the time, by 323 BC.Not just him personally, of course, but his armies, consisting of persons from every race and nationality across his empire. With that massive army came contact between those peoples, sharing of stories and technologies, blending of races, etc.I'm just saying - for as much contact between cultures as there has been throughout human history, it's the easiest thing in the world for an image like the "dragon" to get around from place to place. And it might very well have come from ancient culture's exposure to dinosaur fossils, we know that many cultures were finding the bones of those creatures long before we knew what they were really from.

Incans and Chinese at the height of their civilization. I'm pretty sure they didn't have any interaction with one another, yet, they both tell of dragons. Artifacts and petroglyphs also corroborate that terrible lizards were a part of the consciousness of many ancient civilizations. That's interesting that you say that, because purportedly, Alexander is alleged to have seen dragons (dinosaurs) living in the caves of India. Supposing what you are saying is true, how would you reasonably explain that dragons and dinosaurs share a very similar structure? Did ancient people inherently invent mythological creatures that just so happened to resemble what we know today to be dinosaurs?

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

I don't know what Incan dragons look like, unless you're talking about Quetzalcoatls, which aren't dragons at all but feathered serpents. Do they? Before the actual discovery of dinosaurs, dragons were either depicted as multi-legged serpents:or as low lizards, similar to komodos:neither of which look particularly dinosaurian to me, except insofar as they look reptilians (though dinosaurs are not reptiles, as is commonly misunderstood.) I'm saying that what's weird is that, until the discovery of dinosaurs, the dragons of old didn't look anything like what we think of as dragons now:Or what I think of, anyway. They looked like the living reptiles known to those cultures at the time, snakes and lizards.Of course, it's hard to study the history of an image, and harder still to know why one person or another would have drawn a dragon as they did. But there's about a hundred more likely explanations than the survival of dinosaurs into contemporary times.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Come on, get serious.Look up the bestiary for dragon like critters and you will find that they vary all over the place, from worms to lizard to lion to bull to horse.What is a dinosaur? How come they actually varied from tiny little things to large critters?How come the imaginary dragons just happen to be what someone might imagine based on a few fossil bones of the real ones?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

yes!the debate seems incredibly silly to anyone who actually studies dinosaurs at all -- dinosaurs are still very much alive. people enjoy watching them, feeding them, owning them as pets. they are one of the most popular food sources in the world: there's a good probability that you ate one today.they just don't look like lizards. but then again, they didn't look like lizards 65 million years ago, either. "dinosauria" encompases a group we know as "birds." birds are dinosaurs -- birds are still alive. so dinosaurs are still alive.and very little time, geologically speaking, has passed since the "age of dinosaurs." the total length of time that dinosaurs dominated the planet as the major lifeform was much, much longer than the time that has passed since that age. there were many plants and animals that lived alongside t. rex that we would recognize today.that we might still find some of these prehistoric things still alive when we thought they were extinct is occasionally surprising (like the coelocanth), but no more fantastic than the existence of the shark, or nautilus, or cockroach, or any other rather commonplace animal that's just as old as or older than the dinosaurs.

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to be fair, the oldest (read: least scientifically knowledgeable) depictions of dinosaurs after they were discovered all look like giant, terrible lizards. and, uh, whales got the same treatment for several hundred years. doesn't really say a whole lot.it's those feathered serpents that make me curious.also, two of your images are bandwidth-theft-disabled.Edited by arachnophilia, : typo

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