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Posted on 08/13/2003 9:02:05 PM PDT by nwrep
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By RAMOLA TALWAR BADAM, Associated Press Writer
BOMBAY, India - U.S. and Indian scientists said Wednesday they have discovered a new carnivorous dinosaur species in India after finding bones in the western part of the country.
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The new dinosaur species was named Rajasaurus narmadensis, or "Regal reptile from the Narmada," after the Narmada River region where the bones were found.
The dinosaurs were between 25-30 feet long, had a horn above their skulls, were relatively heavy and walked on two legs, scientists said. They preyed on long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs on the Indian subcontinent during the Cretaceous Period at the end of the dinosaur age, 65 million years ago.
"It's fabulous to be able to see this dinosaur which lived as the age of dinosaurs came to a close," said Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. "It was a significant predator that was related to species on continental Africa, Madagascar and South America."
Working with Indian scientists, Sereno and paleontologist Jeff Wilson of the University of Michigan reconstructed the dinosaur skull in a project funded partly by the National Geographic (news - web sites) Society.
A model of the assembled skull was presented Wednesday by the American scientists to their counterparts from Punjab University in northern India and the Geological Survey of India during a Bombay news conference.
Scientists said they hope the discovery will help explain the extinction of the dinosaurs and the shifting of the continents — how India separated from Africa, Madagascar, Australia and Antarctica and collided with Asia.
The dinosaur bones were discovered during the past 18 years by Indian scientists Suresh Srivastava of the Geological Survey of India and Ashok Sahni, a paleontologist at Punjab University.
When the bones were examined, "we realized we had a partial skeleton of an undiscovered species," Sereno said.
The scientists said they believe the Rajasaurus roamed the Southern Hemisphere land masses of present-day Madagascar, Africa and South America.
"People don't realize dinosaurs are the only large-bodied animal that lived, evolved and died at a time when all continents were united," Sereno said.
The cause of the dinosaurs' extinction is still debated by scientists. The Rajasaurus discovery may provide crucial clues, Sereno said.
India has seen quite a few paleontological discoveries recently.
In 1997, villagers discovered about 300 fossilized dinosaur eggs in Pisdura, 440 miles northeast of Bombay, that Indian scientists said were laid by four-legged, long-necked vegetarian creatures.
Indian scientists said the dinosaur embryos in the eggs may have suffocated during volcanic eruptions.
Evolutionists? I thought they preceded Darwin
This is false. The relative ordering is determined by the fossils. The absolute dates depend on other observations
To learn as much as I can from these people.
Me too!
Pardon me, may I interject?
You can "wish", till the cows come home, for your garage to miraculously become more organized. You will be waiting 30 billion years and then realize the obvious, this world is suffering from degeneration.
Bo knows degeneration!
Oh yeah, I forgot, life is an exception. Maybe Bo don't know.
That's pretty much par for the course for most the evos around here. And this USMMA fella - someone who I have never seen on these threads, but yet has the cajones to come in here and ridicule someone who has put a lot of thought and work into their posts. Typical of most the evos in here, and their fan club. Question the 'establishment' and get hammered on. Then once you defend yourself...BAM....banned. It's becomming pretty predicatable.
I commend you for sticking to your guns.
FRegards, MM
I see: So any theory about who invented baseball must also explain how the universe got started!The point is, you keep bringing up arguments against the Big Bang as if they were arguments against biological evolution. Evolution got started when the first replicating self-contained biochemical set ("protocell" or whatever) first split in two. That was something like 10 billion years after the universe came into existence.I don't follow what you are saying here.
Evolution has nothing to do with the origin of the universe! If the universe came about because of a Big Bang, then evolution would still be the best scientific explanation available, given the clear evidence before our eyes. If the universe always existed (the steady state theory), evolution would still be the best scientific explanation available, given the clear evidence before our eyes. If the Big Bang came about as a result of a prior Big Crunch, in an infinite progression of Big Bangs/Big Crunches, then evolution would still be the best scientific explanation available, given the clear evidence before our eyes.
So why do you insist on arguing against biological evolution in an area in which it says nothing? It's like thinking you can discredit some mainstream theory of the origin of baseball by discrediting the Big Bang. (Was baseball invented by Abner Doubleday? No, because the Big Bang never happened, so there!)
If I may expand a bit, as I recall, the physicists scoffed for what they thought were good reasons. Namely, Lord Kelvin had rather carefully calculated that the sun could be no older than 30 million years, based on the assumption that what powered the sun was the gravitational energy of the matter that had fallen together to form it in the first place - you add up how much gravitational energy a mass the size of the sun would have, and divide by the rate at which the sun is radiating away energy. Simple, no? Aided, no doubt, by the fact that Lord Kelvin was one of the pre-eminent physicists of the day, even Darwin conceded that this was a huge flaw in his theory, since he estimated that at least ten times that many years would have been necessary for certain geological features to have formed.
Alas, Lord Kelvin will have to be remembered as the discoverer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics - which is also popular in these parts - and not as the man who drove a stake through the heart of Darwinian evolution. Although his calculations were undoubtedly correct, his assumption about what powered the sun was completely wrong. Lord Kelvin simply had no idea about the process of nuclear fusion, being sixty years too early for Eddington, and eighty years too early for Bethe ;)
And yet...here you are. Strange...
In the linked article, the authors immediately proceed down the compactification path though I do not believe this is necessary and I really hadn’t considered how you would approach the eigen decomposition for 5D with 2 time dimensions or how you would figure a Minkowski metric with an extra dimension.
Strangely, everytime I get into researching brane theory I keep coming back to the University of Pennsylvania ala Physicist, Tegmark, Ovrut and now Tianjun Li on a Time-Like Extra Dimension and Cosmological Constant in Brane Models
I haven’t completely waded through that article yet, but so far it sounds like it is heading in the direction I was pondering concerning dark energy. Hmmmm….
USMMA_83, we're all trying to suppress the flames on these threads, and trying not to make our arguments personal. You should check out the following & hopefully sign on:
For your information: many of the regulars on the science threads here on Free Republic have joined in the AGREEMENT OF THE WILLING to promote civil discourse and to avoid flame wars which lead to excessive use of the abuse button, transfer to the Smokey Backroom, and ultimately ... thread deletion. I respectfully ask that you read the linked agreement so that you will know what the willing parties expect of one another and their dealings with others.
Which ones?
Here, and pointing your way while uttering "you're number one."
I'll leave you with this:
Good night. ~MM
Huh? Big bang is a cosmological theory. What does it have to do with anything else? Doesn't it stand or fall on its own merits, just like any other theory?
As Jennyp pointed out, Darwin certainly never heard of such a thing as big bang theory. He just studied life as it is.
No it's not! The only thing the Theory of Evolution "needs" from cosmology (for the ToE to not be falsified) is for the Earth to be at least 4 billion years old, and that only because the oldest fossils look like they're over 3 billion years old.
I can come up with a dozen hypotheses about how the universe came to be that would be compatible with the earth being 4 billion years old - including "God spoke the primordial universe into existence 13.7 billion years ago, then sat back & watched with excitement as His grand physics experiment played out". See? It's irrelevant to the theory of biological evolution.
Do you carefully follow the evidence, or do you blindly accept the prevailing folklore? Are you a victim of the myths and legends of our time, or do you think critically for yourself?
Our entire culture - our science, our social structure, and our educational system - is based on the specious premise of biogenesis: that
matter + energy g new life (at least on rare occasions)
Let's conduct an experiment. Take a new (unopened) jar of jam, jelly, or even peanut butter - direct from the supermarket shelf - and examine it carefully.
Notice that it is an "open" thermodynamic system: energy can enter and leave the container as it is exposed to different temperatures. (In fact, the container is probably also optically transparent, but that is incidental to our purposes here.)
According to the dogmas of the current high priests of biology (and other venerated elders of our society), occasionally, if you combine matter and energy, it is possible to yield new life forms. The accepted theory is that even inorganic matter, subjected to totally random processes, originally combined itself into an initial life form, from which all subsequent life evolved.
Let's now open the sealed jar and carefully examine the contents inside. Did you find any "new life"?
Of course not! (And aren't you glad!) Our example even contains organic material, which contributes an unfavorable bias to our null hypothesis (a handicap, as it were), but even that, too, helps establish our basic point. To attempt to use inorganic materials in such a container further clinches our conclusion: did we really evolve from a rock and some water?
The equation implied by our current priesthoods of science is erroneous: the underlying equation is incomplete.
matter + energy -is not equal to- new life
matter + energy + information g new life
Unless there is introduced information, from an external source - a spore, or some other essential contaminant - no "new life" will ever be found. Ever.
Every day, for over a hundred years, we have continually conducted billions of experiments analogous to the one above and we never find any "new" life forms. Our entire food industry depends upon the fact that, unless an impurity is introduced, no "new life" is ever found. The Darwinists cannot explain the origin of life because they cannot explain the origin of the information necessary!
If you would like an overview to the subject of brane theory, Brane New World is a good one!
OK, let's conduct another experiment. Go out into the country and measure the height of the surrounding hills.Let's conduct an experiment. Take a new (unopened) jar of jam, jelly, or even peanut butter - direct from the supermarket shelf - and examine it carefully.
Notice that it is an "open" thermodynamic system: energy can enter and leave the container as it is exposed to different temperatures. (In fact, the container is probably also optically transparent, but that is incidental to our purposes here.)
According to the dogmas of the current high priests of biology (and other venerated elders of our society), occasionally, if you combine matter and energy, it is possible to yield new life forms. The accepted theory is that even inorganic matter, subjected to totally random processes, originally combined itself into an initial life form, from which all subsequent life evolved.
Let's now open the sealed jar and carefully examine the contents inside. Did you find any "new life"?
Of course not!
According to the dogmas of the current high priests of geology (and other venerated elders of our society), mountains were formed over millions of years as tectonic plates pushed together, forcing massive amounts of rock upwards, in some cases almost 30,000 feet high.
Let's wait a week. Now go out again. Have any of the hills you measured a week ago turned into mountains yet?
Of course not! Nobody's ever seen a hill turn into a mountain. (Well, almost nobody.) Ergo, the prevailing folklore is incorrect. QED.
| Jurassic Park, right here in Gujarat! RAJA BOSE  TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2003 01:12:39 AM ] |
AHMEDABAD: What was life like in Rahioli, 60 km from here, 67 million years ago, when a 30-ft-long dinosaur ruled the Narmada basin? Get set to find out in Kheda district's Balasinore. Only, the beast stages a return as a robot and in an artificial setting. With paleontologists revealing the existence of Rajasaurus Narmadensis in the Cretaceous period by assembling a dinosaur skull from fossilised pieces found preserved in volcanic rocks in Rahioli village near Balasinore, the state is looking at the find as a gigantic opportunity to package as an international theme park and attract foreign tourists. While an interpretation centre and other basic tourist amenities will be ready by the time Navratri celebrations begin on September 25, major plans are afoot for a theme park that will recreate the period, complete with an automated dinosaur that will move, roar and hunt amidst a prehistoric setting. Balasinore was also one of the tourism hotspots the state government had projected to industrialists during a recent meet to hardsell investment destinations in Gujarat. “Work on the initial tourist facilities will begin in a week’s time and will include setting up an interpretation centre that will present features like evolution of the dinosaur. The route leading to Rahioli will be widened and a cafeteria will be set up for tourists coming in during Navratri,” said Tourism Corporation of Gujarat Limited managing director DK Rao. The “discovery” has already fuelled aspirations in the region, with people looking to the prehistoric predator to help usher in tourists and prosperity. “Gujarat is fortunate to have a site like this. There is a need to build on this finding to turn the area into a major tourism destination. But, a lot of infrastructure needs to be developed. We do not even have signages leading up to the site right now,” says erstwhile Nawab of Balasinore Salabat Khan Babi, who has worked for over a decade to create awareness about the need to protect the site. The theme park, to be built on a 50-60-acre plot, will not only “relive” the period, but also have an enclosure for wild animals like lions and leopards. Visitors will have the opportunity to pose with fossilised dinosaur eggs and bones for photographs. Log huts will be put up for those seeking a first-hand experience of a pre-historic night under the shadow of the dinosaur. “The theme park needs to be marketed now. Though no budget has been drawn up yet, we are looking at private participation and have also written to international agencies and universities. While the Ahmedabad-Vadodara Expressway will provide road connectivity, we have requested the Western Railway to run a weekend train to the closest station to the site,” adds Rao. |
Jesus addressed this very issue when He said,
"Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven..." (Luke 6:37)
How can you, a mere human, sit in judgement of what is in another's heart...much less what has transpired between a devout person and God? Even I, an "Evo-atheist", refuse to judge, mock or disbelieve a person who claims to be Born-Again. And if such a person also happens to believe that evolution was God's plan and choice, who are you to dishonor their faith or beliefs? I suggest you rethink your position, for you are not God and were not there at the inception of the Universe.
You'd better be good, else I will unleash one of my unholy minions on you...the Lab Ferret From Hell! ;^)
Not if you only have to do it once.
First, let me say that I'm sorry AndrewC has chosen to involve the moderators and Alamo-Girl by pinging them in his posts #991 and #487. You folks have better things to do than be called by him to fight his feuds for him. I hoped it would blow over after his first ping, but when he repeated it I realized that he's not going to stop. So please bear with me while I describe the full nature of the disagreement, since he has given you his version twice now, and most likely will again -- and it's not the whole story.
Second, I apologize to the participants of this thread, who have had to witness this food fight. Not that there aren't several others going on at the same time, but still...
I'm even sorrier that AndrewC did not accept my offer for us to let bygones be bygones and start fresh:
[My post #482:] "But I'll make you a deal -- unless I've used any other words you'd like to claim I don't understand, let's both sleep on it tonight and then start with a clean slate tomorrow."Unfortunately, his response was to describe my suggestion of reconciliation as "intolerable", repeat his demand that I "not address him", and ping the moderators.
Incredibly, even though AndrewC had demanded that I "leave him out of my discussions" and obviously expected me to obey (both then and now), did he leave me out of his own discussions? No, he did not. Even while I was gone most of the next day and was not posting, he continued to include me in *his* discussions:
[AndrewC wrote in his post #506:] I'm not stooping to anything. I'm trying to get him to leave me out of his abusive discussions.And:
[AndrewC wrote in his post #507:] Outmaneuvered me where? He began the same tack he did on the cubic circuit thread. As you can see he again became abusive.Note that not only was he continuing to make accusations against me (while demanding that I in no way respond) he even continued to carry on the conversation I had been having with him, by responding to a point I had made to him earlier in post #468 -- but only after he had tried to shut down my ability to respond to it. When he had the original opportunity to provide a substantive response, he instead chose to ignore the point and simply made an empty inflammatory insult. More on that below.The reason the discussion went down that road, was due to his gratuitous statement --->"If you're going to make an analogy, make sure it's a valid comparison."
That was unnecessary. Left out, the answer would have been---> Of course the erosion process has those three things. The wind never is constant in speed, direction, or the material it contains. The sandstone varies in hardness, composition and age. Selection is done by the cohesiveness of the sandstone when compared to the force of the wind. And there are many, many places that have various configurations of sandstone that are eventually exposed to the wind. Even now some are being built.
Here's the third instance of him continuing to "include me in his discussion" after he had demanded that I not include him in mine:
[AndrewC wrote in his post #514:] I said the original line was gratuitous. I find that post 474 was abusive. The fact that you do not understand that 474 is abusive reflects on you, not me. The original gratuitous line "If you're going to make an analogy, make sure it's a valid comparison.", had his word in it, not mine. He chose the word "comparison" and not "inference". He chose the words in post 474, after I wrote "your turn".Horrors, I wrote "comparison" where AndrewC thought I should have written "inference". Well string me up, boys. Actually, when I wrote "comparison", I very well meant "comparison" and not "inference", but rebutting AndrewC's compulsion to quibble about words is a very minor issue at this point -- albeit a strangely large issue to him, apparently.
Getting back to the main issue, I find it astounding that he could think that it's proper to demand silence from me about him, and then continue to discuss me on the thread himself. The term "double standard" seems wildly inadequate for that sort of mindset.
Even so, I did not rise to the bait -- and there's a strong possibility it *was* bait, placed in order to try to get me to respond so he could ping the moderators (again) over my "noncompliance" with his "request" that I shut up while he continued to post and to denigrate me. I did not respond to those posts.
So what set him off? Heck if I know, but according to AndrewC himself it was this post #468 of mine (quoted in its entirety):
Wind and a little time turns sandstone into arches that resemble flying buttresses. It does not follow, to many people, that more time using the same process will result in the formation of Notre Dame Cathedral.AndrewC has since complained (multiple times) that this was "gratuitous", apparently some sort of grave transgression in his mind, since he makes a major issue of it here, and about two other posts on this thread alone (not mine) in: #93 and #96. But I don't see how it's gratuitous to point out that conclusions based on analogies are only valid if the things being compared are appropriately similar. Poor analogies lead to erroneous conclusions.That's because "many people" fail to take into account why a process which includes variation, reproduction, and selection is very different from erosion, and is capable of much more.
If you're going to make an analogy, make sure it's a valid comparison.
Nonetheless, this apparently infuriated him, because instead of responding to the actual point, or defending his example, he decided to make a juvenile sniping attack in his post #469:
If you're going to make an analogy, make sure it's a valid comparison.As childish and insulting as this was (since I had used the word quite appropriately, and I certainly "understand the English language", *and* AndrewC had *left off* the definition entry which best matched the manner in which I was using the word), I nonetheless thought it only right to give AndrewC an opportunity to rethink the direction he had gone and try again. My post #470:If you're going to make a comment, make sure you understand the English language.
a·nal·o·gy
( P ) Pronunciation Key (
-n
l
)
n. pl. a·nal·o·gies
- Similarity in some respects between things that are otherwise dissimilar.
- A comparison based on such similarity. See Synonyms at likeness.
If you're going to make a comment, make sure you understand the English language.(Earlier in the thread AndrewC had stated, concerning an agreement among Freepers: "I think that the agreement is insane and appears to have been fashioned by drunks", and asked another poster, "That is allowed here, or do you wish to silence others?" He later retracted both.)You've retracted two of your hasty smartass remarks in this thread already, would you like to make it three?
Or shall I demonstrate that you have dishonestly left off the dictionary definition which encompasses the word as I was using it, and that I have hardly failed to understand the English language?
Your move.
Rather than take advantage of the invitation to retract his childish and abusively false claim that I did not "understand the English language", AndrewC decided that he'd rather have something to fight about and issued his post #472:
You've retracted two of your hasty smartass remarks in this thread already, would you like to make it three?Sigh.No, your move.
At that point I wrote my lengthy post #474, which explained in detail why AndrewC's snipe was baseless, juvenile, and dishonest. It concluded with:
So rather than deal with the substance of my post, you chose to go off on a classicly childish and completely unfounded "dictionary flame" (2), one of the lowest forms of cheap shots.This is the post which AndrewC piously declares to be my sin of being "abusive". But note a) who threw the first flame, b) I believe I made a pretty good case in that post that he was, indeed, acting like an ass by doing a "dictionary flame" in a dishonest manner.I even gave you an opportunity to reconsider and retract it, and you refused. This is, I must say, typical of you.
Now -- would you care to retract your trollish implication that *I'm* the one who needs to "make sure [they] understand the English language"? Or are you going to continue to act like an ass?
Now personally I think the foregoing is pretty small potatoes on the Abuse-O-Meter (on both sides). I think AndrewC is being foolish for trying to escalate it to something so heinous that I Must Be Silenced Forevermore or turn it into a Let's Have The Moderators Decide This.
But he has chosen to, and thus here we are.
So what to do? One option, of course, would be for me to just obey his commands and never again post anything about anything he writes. But I don't see that as a workable option. Over the past few months, we have debated a number of topics on opposing sides, and this latest seems primarily a ploy to try to silence me from continuing to point out when he is in error, being inconsistent, employing a double-standard, making unfair accusations, or behaving badly.
That is further supported by the post he actually replied to in order to first declare that I must never speak to him again. It was *not* the "are you going to stop behaving like an ass" post. No, to that one he merely replied "Your abusive language has been noted" (without, unfortunately, addressing the point I was making about how he should stop flaming).
What's quite illuminating is that he finally declared that I should never speak to him again in response to a *later* post of mine, #478. This one was too long to include here, but it was on another topic entirely -- it asked him several pointed questions about why he spent many, many posts accusing certain posters in the thread (his philosophical opponents) of "abuse" over mild perceived transgressions, and had appointed himself "behavior monitor" of the thread (most of AndrewC's posts on the thread dealt with accusations of alleged "uncivil" behavior), and yet had failed to utter a single disapproving word about truly abusive posts from his philosophical friends, such as calling people on the thread, "fanatics", "raving lunatics", "the retarded - infantile", "crippled minds", and telling a Freeper, "He was doing the devil's work so that is why you approve of his actions", etc.
Rather than answer questions about the blatant inconsistency of his targets, *that* is when AndrewC suddenly decided it was time to tell me to shut up and stop talking to him. Interesting, is it not?
The final irony/hypocrisy is that earlier, discussing something else with another person, AndrewC had declared that everyone has a right to speak here:
[AndrewC wrote in his #287:] And my pointing that out to others does not require me to be anything but a member of this forum. You do not own this place nor do your words in anyway possess the imagined force you seem to think are behind them. You are the hypocrite.Also:
[AndrewC wrote in his #785:] I'm not enforcing anything. I'm using my God-given right to express myself.And most ironically:
[AndrewC wrote in his #156:] I suggest you go elsewhere than a conservative site to discuss something non-conservative when you desire to squelch input from others.Now he seeks to squelch input from me. Should he go elsewhere, by his own advice?
Furthermore, it is simply intolerable for one Freeper to be able to declare that another "must not" speak to him or address his posts. The public forums are just that -- public. Anyone member can comment, and any other member can remark upon those comments if he wishes. To allow AndrewC's "hands off me" policy just because he declares it and threatens to invoke the moderators to enforce it would have a hugely chaotic effect on this forum. How many people would begin to invoke it in order to silence their critics or those with opposing views or simply those they don't like? It's a weapon, it's a cheap trick, it's censorship -- it's not a reasonable request.
If I'm ever truly abusive, anyone -- including AndrewC -- can press the Abuse button on the offending post. He doesn't have to read my posts and he doesn't have to respond to them. But it's an attempt to stifle Freedom of Speech for him to try to bar me from ever commenting on his posts, and to try to get the moderators to enforce his protective shell for him.
That's my view, anyway. If I'm wrong, let me know or suspend me or whatever, because otherwise I'm not going to stop commenting on AndrewC's posts if I see something I'd like to reply to. But if I'm right, could the moderators please ask him to knock it off and stop bothering them (and complaining on the thread) every time his sensibilities are offended by a reminder that I still exist and often don't agree with him?
Thank you.
Well in a sense *all* birds are dinosaurs, just highly modified ones...
But no, the dodo wasn't more closely related to dinosaurs than any other bird, and it *was* a bird.
It went extinct in the mid 1600's, but that's still very modern times compared to the age of the dinosaurs.
The question, of course, is how do we know it was a true bird? The answer is pretty interesting.
You'd think that we'd have all sorts of dodo artifacts gathering dust in museums around the world, but in fact is that since the dodo went extinct so long ago, we actually have very few remains of it left. In all the world, that we know of, there exists just one preserved dodo head, one preserved foot, one complete skeleton, and a hundred or so miscellaneous bones in various condition.
Note that that's a classic "bird" breastbone on that skeleton, it's not dinosaurian. And so on.
However, using bits from these items, researchers (Dr Alan Cooper and Dr Beth Shapiro from Oxford's Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre, Dr Dean Sibthorpe, Andrew Rambaut, Dr Graham Wragg, Dr Olaf Bininda-Emonds and Dr Patricia Lee from the Department of Zoology, and Dr Jeremy Austin from the Natural History Museum, London) extracted and amplified dodo DNA, and compared it with the DNA from the Rodrigues Island Solitaire, a nearby (also extinct) dodo-like bird, as well as 35 species of pigeons, doves, and other bird species. Why pigeons? Because earlier analysis of the dodo skeleton showed that it was most similar to that of the pigeon family. This isn't as odd as it might sound if you're only familiar with small American pigeons...
The DNA analysis showed that as expected, the dodo was most closely related to the Solitaire, but beyond that its nearest relative was the Nicobar pigeon from southeast Asia:
Next nearest was the crowned pigeon of New Guinea:
And the tooth-billed pigeon of Samoa:
The similarity to the dodo's beak should be obvious.
Interestingly, all three birds are ground-feeders, with strong hooked bills for cracking hard nuts. The dodo's extreme bill was used for feeding on the nuts of the Calvaria tree, which were very hard.
The researchers wrote:
'The genetic differences suggest that the ancestor of the Dodo and Solitaire separated from the Southeast Asian relatives around 40 million years ago, and sometime after this point flew across the Indian Ocean to the Mascarene Islands. The data suggest that the Dodo and Solitaire speciated from each other around 26 million years ago, about the same time that geologists think the first (now submerged) Mascarene Islands emerged. However, Mauritius and Rodrigues islands are much younger (8 and 1.5 million years respectively), implying that the Dodo and Solitaire used the now sunken island chain as stepping-stones. Furthermore, the isolation of Rodrigues Island suggests that the Solitaire, at least, may have still been able to fly as recently as 1.5 million years ago.'
There is actually a project underway to try to "bring back" the dodo in a manner very similar to "Jurassic Park", by extracting as much DNA as possible from remaining dodo parts and then merging them with pigeon DNA to fill the gaps and then cloning. It's a longshot, of course, but it's an interesting attempt, and it's got a better chance than bringing back dinosaurs, since 1600's DNA is a lot "fresher" than 65+ million-year-old dinosaur DNA.
Another interesting fact about the dodo is that although most people think of them as very fat, they may have been much slimmer in the wild. They were large birds, about the size of a large tom turkey, but the "fat" drawings of them were all from specimens brought to Europe, while drawings of dodos in their native Mauritius were much slimmer. The thought is that the captive dodos had been overfed during their captivity, leading to the "fat look" in many drawings:
(Having gone extinct in the 1600's, of course, there are no photographs of living dodos.)
But bone structure calculations, reconstructions from skeletons, and sketches from indigenous dodos has led to a slimmer view of the dodo:
They still might have gotten plumper at certain times of the year, though. Sketches from different seasons seem to show the dodo at different weights, and it has been hypothesized that since the dodo's nut foods were seasonal, they may have packed on weight in times of plenty to get them through the scarcer months of the year. This may also explain why they fattened up so easily when overfed in captivity.
It further might explain why they lost the power of flight. Given a) their island had no natural predators, b) the plumper, heavier birds may have survived the winter better, and c) a bigger bird has a bigger stronger beak for cracking hard nuts, it may well be that the dodos had more evolutionary incentive to get large and therefor flightless than they did to retain the not-so-useful-to-them ability to fly.
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