Dino hunting on the north coast
I spent the day on the north coast getting burnt to a crisp with the Blueprint crew. We filmed near Ballygally, squeezing pieces to camera about Ireland's Jurassic period into the gaps between passing cars. , Curator of Palaeontology in the , came with us to guard the fossils that will be making a cameo appearance on the second programme, and to generally keep me right. He interrupted one piece to camera, for example -- in which I was talking about the that sealed the fate of dinosaurs -- to suggest that I say "mass extinction event" instead of my scripted "extinction level event". That's the kind of subtle distinction only a professional paleontologist will appreciate; but "mass extinction event" won the day.
After lunch, while I finished another bit of filming with Carole and Jim, Mike appeared carrying a large rock which contained some excellent ammonites. It wasn't exactly a Eureka moment; just the sort of thing a paleontologist does when at the beach. He packed the stone away with the Scelidosaurus fossil he'd brought for one of my pieces to camera. A Scelidosaurus is sometimes described as the earliest complete dinosaur -- it was an armour-plated vegetarian creature that inhabited the land that's now the north coast of Northern Ireland about 200 million years ago. How do we know that? Partly because of the rare fossil I was holding this afternoon.
If you can't wait to see our computer simulation, here's a of one of Northern Ireland's long-lost dinos.
Comments
careful there Will, you'll annoy the creationists by suggesting that that dinos died out before humans arrived!!!!
Ok,Maybe it's good to preemptively post a url here before the age-of-the-earth and fossils debate starts. For those who hold to an earth of 10000 years or less I recommend a website by a devout christian (old earth) creationist who has taken the time to comprehensively explain how we know that young earth creationism is incorrect. The credentials of the author should be impeccable to creationists. The piece is at
Hi Pete
I know this may have got lost in the heat of previous debates, but I think the old earth creationist viewpoint is plausible.
However, I hope you are not justing using it as a new angle to undermine those poor dogmatic young earth fundies ;-)
PB
Heres one I wrote earlier...
...reading an interesting book by David Pawson, held by some as UK's greatest living bible teacher.
...unlocking the bible omnibus.
In it he says that many Christians are too quick to reject science and that mainstream science maybe much more compatible with creationism that many think.
He also notes that Christ and all eight NT writers treat it as historic fact.
He says some modern geological dating techniques have put the earth between 175,000 to 9000 years old, from memory.
Like me, he is not dogmatic about the age of the earth, and says old-earth creationism may be plausible.
He even shows how the week of creation could be significantly long periods, again without compromising creationist belief or biblical integrity;- based on hebrew word "yom" translated as "day" in Genesis.
His bottom line is that science works on what it can observe and at bottom it is very valuable - but always provisional.
So he says atheistic scientists and biblical creationists should not be dogmatic and watch how both their disciplines develop with integrity as both are in states of flux, ie interpretation of genesis is also developing, he says.
He states that mainstream anthropology now supports the idea that neaderthals etc need not have had any evolutionary relationship at all with homo sapiens but that no man-ape has ever been found.
Among his many reasons for scepticism of evolution are that mutations dont help animals; there are so few transitional fossils and that the fossil record shows all "stages" of evolutionary animals exsiting in the same periods.
PB
Yes pb, I saw that post on the other thread. And along with several others I've had a good laugh at it, see
/blogs/ni/2007/06/belfasts_biblical_flood_1.html