Sean Murtha
Scientists have discovered a fossil in New Mexico that looks like a sixfoot-long, two-legged dinosaur, but is
actually an ancient relative of alligators and crocodiles.
Posted on 01/26/2006 3:31:41 AM PST by Pharmboy
Sean Murtha
Scientists have discovered a fossil in New Mexico that looks like a sixfoot-long, two-legged dinosaur, but is
actually an ancient relative of alligators and crocodiles.
Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History have discovered a fossil in New Mexico that looks like a six-foot-long, two-legged dinosaur along the lines of a tyrannosaur or a velociraptor. But it is actually an ancient relative of today's alligators and crocodiles.
The discovery is a striking example of how different animals can evolve the same kind of body over and over again.
For almost 60 years, the 210-million-year-old fossil has been hiding in plain sight. It was lodged in a slab of rock dug up in 1947 in New Mexico by a team led by Edward Colbert, a paleontologist at the museum.
The site, called Ghost Ranch Quarry, is famous for hundreds of fossils of a very early dinosaur, Coelophysis. Coelophysis kept Dr. Colbert busy for decades, and he left several slabs unopened at the museum.
"We always collect more than we can study," said Mark Norell, the chairman of paleontology.
In 2005 one of Dr. Norell's graduate students, Sterling Nesbitt, began to open the slabs. One rock contained a pelvis and an ankle. The bones clearly did not belong to a dinosaur. They showed distinctive features found only in living crocodiles and alligators, as well as their extinct relatives. That alone made the discovery exciting, because it represented one of the oldest crocodilelike fossils.
Mr. Nesbitt paged through Colbert's notebooks to figure out which slabs had been next to the one with the pelvis and ankle. When he opened them, he found almost all the remaining bones in the skeleton.
It quickly became clear that the fossil was unlike any crocodilelike species ever found.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Looks like a dino to me, but got to believe those pelvic bones...
Never smile at a crocodile
"The discovery is a striking example of how different animals can evolve the same kind of body over and over again."
What????
Thanks, but I can't deploy the list for this. It's "just another fossil."
Don't worry, it's been catalogued and will appear in the next digest.
I think it's got a way cooler body-style than a crocodile. It should have stuck around.
Bet it tasted just like chicken.
Is anybody missing a bureaucrat?
The age of the creature, all the fleshy parts that long ago dissolved, where it came from, what it became, all of that conjecture being passed off as facts, as if these people were there to photograph the creature.
Amazing.
It must take a great imagination to be a "paleontologist".
Don't get excited... It was just my ex-mother-in-law.
She was just taking a nap at the site and they made a minor mistake in their analysis.
No prollem...I ping, you decide.
Evolutionists are due for big surprises.
Yeah, I was thinking Teddy looks a lot like Jabba the Hutt.
What????
The beauty of having something written down is that if you don't catch it the first time, you can go back and read it again.
If you need it explained further, the idea is that external conditions will shape the evolution of a body type - for example, a two-legged velociraptor-type creature - because it is the best type suited for those conditions. After all the other variants have gone by the wayside, the one best suited for a particular set of conditions remains.
See, now who says Hillary only had one child!
I agree...although a Darwinist, I always cringed a bit when paleoanthroplogists built a complete hominid from one fossil tooth.
You want a ping to these?
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