Agassiz vs Gray

Louis Agassiz was a zoologist. Asa Gray was a botanist. They were Harvard professors in Darwin's day.

As I have already noted speciation by polyploidy is no problem for plants. Even in animals, variation within chromosomes keeping their number is no problem, but mammalian as well as plant species have differring chromosome numbers. And though slightly decreasing ones might just be feasible, increasing ones is a major problem if not an outright impossibility. I do not reckon there is a real feasible possibility for it. This message as well as this one deal with it.

You have guessed it, Louis Agassiz being a zoologist was anti-Darwin, his arguments are reused by Creationists to this day. Asa Gray, being a botanist was pro-Darwin.

Subsequent major Darwinists in the following decades were more Lamarckist than purely Darwinist not to mention Darwinist Mendelian. They did not come up as much with good explanations, as with mere discoveries -- I think the Dinosaurs were dealt with back then. Though their discoveries bolstered an impression of "once the fauna was different, so probably fauna, including its details the species has evolved", in explanatory and theoretical terms, they did not dare be fully Darwinist. Leaning too much on environment natural selection and adaption edge of the pair natural selection vs variation as they did is in reality saying, as Lamarck did, that adaptions made with a goal during an animals lifetime can be genetically transmitted. Which is an explanation that heredity has blown to pieces.

HGL

What about Dinosaurs?

My main theory about Tyrannosaurs Rex is that it was a mutation or genetical engineering product with far greater size than the ordinary samples of that species. A bit like this:

Papa Smurf tries to create a new fertilizer, but it transforms an ordinary flower into a smurfivore plant. After destroying the plant, two smurfs try to get rid of the fertilizer throwing it in a lonely place. However, a bird swallows it and becomes a huge, destructive monster named the "Howlibird". The Howlibird destroys the smurf village and the smurfs escape to an old tower.

quoted from wiki article

A few weeks or months ago, China had found fossiles of a species like T Rex, but one hundred times smaller. Here. What if T Rex is to this as the Howlibird? I mean, "More than 30 specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex have been identified, some of which are nearly complete skeletons." "More than 30"="less than 40" in language, though that is not quite so in Mathematics. "All three of these latter specimens are smaller than the first.". Nanotyrannus are by some counted as juvenile exemplars (two of them, first only one skull) of T Rex. What if they are right about species being same, but wrong about which is both normal and adult? Teratophoneus ... is known from an incomplete skull and postcranial skeleton recovered from the Kaiparowits Formation. "Alioramus is known from the holotypes of A. remotus and A. altai." A fuller quote from Daspletosaurus is in order:

The type specimen of Daspletosaurus torosus (CMN 8506) is a partial skeleton including the skull, the shoulder, a forelimb, the pelvis, a femur and all of the vertebrae from the neck, torso and hip, as well as the first eleven tail vertebrae. ... Aside from the type, there is only one other well-known specimen, a complete skeleton discovered in 2001. ... The Oldman Formation was deposited during the middle Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous, from about 77 to 76 Ma (million years ago).

I quote the last bit, because I think it worth while to note that, as any other young earth creationist would say, I believe there is this Oldman Formation, I am more than doutful about "Campanian stage of Late Cretaceous", and in the 77 to 76 million years ago, I have no faith at all. The no longer living animal itself, of course, is dated from the rock it is found in and thus from this estimate about 77 to 76 million years ago.

Another problem: Spinosaurus:

On the basis of a photograph of the lower jaw and a photograph of the entire specimen as mounted, Smith concluded that Stromer's original 1915 drawings were slightly inaccurate. In 2003, Oliver Rauhut suggested that Stromer's Spinosaurus holotype was a chimera, composed of vertebrae and neural spines from a carcharodontosaurid similar to Acrocanthosaurus and a dentary from Baryonyx or Suchomimus.:35−36 This analysis was rejected in at least one subsequent paper.

All other specimens are partial only. One from leg, some from snout or teeth. I suspect that the rejection of the chimera theory in that subsequent paper was necessary to keep up Paleontology as an Academic and supposedly scientific theory.

I have already touched upon this problem earlier on.

As for this:
link, not image upload - am not into the share alike since my conditions are here - by Franko Fonseca, it seems the teeth are teeth, but I am not as sure the bone is bone.

You see, there are fossils and fossils. Petrified skeletons are one type. Oops. Petrification is not the only kind of fossilisation. There is also Permineralisation:

Permineralized fossils preserve original cell structure, which can help scientists study an organism at the cellular level. These are three-dimensional fossils, which create permanent molds of internal structures. The mineralization process itself helps prevent tissue compaction, which distorts the actual size of organs. A permineralized fossil will also reveal much about the environment an organism lived in and the substances found in it since it preserves soft body parts. This helps researchers investigate the plants, animals, and microbes of different time periods. Examples of permineralization (:) Most dinosaur bones are permineralized. (...)

OK. Seems it might not be an artefact after all then. At least not a human one. Which of course is no guarantee the beast itself was wholly natural in origin.

If modern day weapon developers are going to try to take a cue from what might be the work of pre-flood genetical scientists, let us study the art of dragon-killing, in such literature as we have, it might turn out useful.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Paris V, Buffon
(appropriately enough!)
22-II-2011