Tyrannosaurus rex

It's easy to see why creationists think it was an herbivore.

Means nothing.

It's just another kind of lizard.

The gigantic, predatory, dead for 300 million years and put in the earth by Satan to deceive us kind.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Is the asymmetry in the nostril area an artifact of fossilization or was it like that in life?

The gigantic, predatory, dead for 300 million years and put in the earth by Satan to deceive us kind.

Dean Wentworth said: Is the asymmetry in the nostril area an artifact of fossilization or was it like that in life?

Mike said: Maybe that's where Bambam Rebel hit him with his club.

and the feathers are exactly where?

Mike said:

Dean Wentworth said: Is the asymmetry in the nostril area an artifact of fossilization or was it like that in life?

Maybe that's where Bambam [Rubble] hit him with his club.

'Tis a cool photo, Timothy. I'm usually walking past that skeleton at least once a month, and haven't really thought of looking at it from that perspective. When was it taken?

I’m usually walking past that skeleton at least once a month, and haven’t really thought of looking at it from that perspective.

Looking at this gives me a whole new respect for the prehistoric--excuse me, Adamic--coconut. Clearly, they were terrifying.

sharky said: Clearly, they were terrifying.

When did creationists suggest that T-rex was a vegetarian? That's pretty a kooky idea.
I thought my colleague at work who is attempting to train his cats and dog to adjust to a vegan diet was odd, but then again, I live in California.

When did creationists suggest that T-rex was a vegetarian?

They only ate fruit that had fallen to the ground.
Pity about the deviated septum.

The most frightening sight a coconut ever sees.

George-o said: When did creationists suggest that T-rex was a vegetarian? That's pretty a kooky idea. I thought my colleague at work who is attempting to train his cats and dog to adjust to a vegan diet was odd, but then again, I live in California.

Richard Simons said: It's widely reported that visitors to Ken Ham's Creation Museum in Kentucky are told that T. rex had large teeth so it could eat coconuts (before the Fall, as I'm sure you know, there was no death and therefore all animals were vegetarian).

George-O said... I thought my colleague at work who is attempting to train his cats and dog to adjust to a vegan diet was odd

Wait,...I don't see the saddle. Where's the saddle?

I wonder how Rexy got up after taking a nap?

Glorious! First time on site and laughed for minutes! You guys are priceless. (Naturalist who needed that.) Thank you all.

Couldn't Adam and Eve and the T. rexes they rode around on have eaten fruit (avoiding the seeds, of course) from plants that don't need to die to produce food? That would let the plants in on the whole "no death before the fall" deal. Since coconuts are as alive as a human zygote, if not more so, I don't think the T. rex would have eaten coconuts. You can eat, say, apples, without killing the tree or murdering precious seeds, so there's no death involved. Maybe the T. rex ate seedless watermelons, which God surely made around the same time as his perfectly designed bananas?

Oh wait, bananas die after producing fruit, and now my head hurts!

Alex said: Wait,...I don't see the saddle. Where's the saddle?

ooh! I've got pictures of "Sue" from when my S.O. and I were at the Natural History Museum in Auckland last month.

I'll post them up later for comparison, see if there are noticeable differences between that specimen and this one.

It was a LOT darker there than where Tim shot this, so there is likely to be some graininess to the photos.

Crushing coconuts with those teeth? I think not. How would a coconut stay in place as the animal bit down? An intelligent agency would surely see that large, flat teeth would be far superior for this task.

Gary said: Couldn't Adam and Eve and the T. rexes they rode around on have eaten fruit (avoiding the seeds, of course) from plants that don't need to die to produce food? That would let the plants in on the whole "no death before the fall" deal. Since coconuts are as alive as a human zygote, if not more so, I don't think the T. rex would have eaten coconuts. You can eat, say, apples, without killing the tree or murdering precious seeds, so there's no death involved. Maybe the T. rex ate seedless watermelons, which God surely made around the same time as his perfectly designed bananas? Oh wait, bananas die after producing fruit, and now my head hurts!

and the feathers are exactly where?

Awesome!

Henry J said:

and the feathers are exactly where?

Would T-Rex's of a feather flock together?

Isn't D.C. great?

When my well-meaning friend fed his cat with vegan "cat food", it took the mighty Buster (as lazy and fastidious a cat as you ever met) exactly a day and a half before he presented my friend with a half rat, as a hint about what Proper Food looked like.

Great photo; you can almost smell the halitosis....

Pics of Sue from the Auckland War Memorial Museum a friend took last month while we were visiting.

They keep it rather dark, and lit with purple and red lights.

I did my best to adjust, but you might notice some noise and reddish tint.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ichthyic/sets/72157615748503541/

"Is the asymmetry in the nostril area an artifact of fossilization or was it like that in life?"

Who nose?

Joe Felsenstein said:

. before the Fall, as I'm sure you know, there was no death and therefore all animals were vegetarian.

For that matter, if there was no death, why did T. rex have to eat anything at all? It couldn't starve.

As far as the schmoo thing is concerned appearancewise the closest dinosaur equivalent would be a therizinosaur (except for the claw thing).

I took this picture about three weeks ago on a visit to New York. One of the special things about tuis skeleton is that it is the actual thing, not a cast. There are very few Tyrannosaurus skeletons in existence, so most museums have high quality replicas. I believe the asymmetry is a result of the fossilization.

Timothy Sandefur said: I took this picture about three weeks ago on a visit to New York. One of the special things about tuis skeleton is that it is the actual thing, not a cast. There are very few Tyrannosaurus skeletons in existence, so most museums have high quality replicas. I believe the asymmetry is a result of the fossilization.

Gimme a Break! I could build something like this in my garage with hammer & chisel. Stuff like this is found at flea markets and craft fairs all over the world. In China where I now live the locals sell "fossils" to gullible western tourists for enough cash to eat for a year.

Try Again.

A while ago, I found myself in Chicago with a day to kill, so I went to check out the Field Museum.

It was a weekday, and I pretty much had the place to myself.

They have a big T-rex skeleton in their lobby (don't know if it's a cast), and I found myself really examining it.

When you stop and look closely, you can see what tough lives these creatures lived. I spotted broken bones that had healed and some kind of ulcerous growth on the spine.

A bored docent wandered over, and I related my observations. She was thrilled to have someone who was interested in "her" dinosaur and proceeded to walk me around pointing out all the chipped teeth and busted ribs.

She was also able to show me that the growth on the spine was most likely an infected abscess, possibly from a fight wound, as there was an item lodged inside that looked very like a piece of a tooth from another T-rex.

Maybe they were fighting over the last coconut.

There is a very nice replica of the Field Museum's T. rex, "Sue", at Disney Animal Kingdom. It seems the fossil was found in South Dakota in 1990 and was an astounding 90% complete. U of Chicago got the fossil on auction at Sotheby's for a cool $8.36 million USD, with Disney and McD's helping to foot the bill.

Pictures of the Sue replica, third row down on the page:

http://www.vectorsite.net/gfxpxr_06.html

The T.Rex from WWCC in the same row is smaller, but it sure seems to be an attention-grabbing item for a community college cafeteria.

Also note the nice replicas Disney had, bottom row, four images on the left.

Timothy Sandefur said: I took this picture about three weeks ago on a visit to New York. One of the special things about tuis skeleton is that it is the actual thing, not a cast. There are very few Tyrannosaurus skeletons in existence, so most museums have high quality replicas. I believe the asymmetry is a result of the fossilization.

Matt G said: Crushing coconuts with those teeth? I think not. How would a coconut stay in place as the animal bit down? An intelligent agency would surely see that large, flat teeth would be far superior for this task.

Randy said: Prehaps a swallow held it by the husk so the T-Rex could get at it.

Eh? what? I don't know! AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH

Richard Simmons said: It's widely reported that visitors to Ken Ham's Creation Museum in Kentucky are told that T. rex had large teeth so it could eat coconuts (before the Fall, as I'm sure you know, there was no death and therefore all animals were vegetarian).

This summer I visited the temple of our clan deep in South India in the delta of the river Cauvery. (The reigning deity, btw, is on a salt free diet and all the food cooked by the temple is salt free). I watched and video taped the temple elephant (female, named Booma, about 10 years old), eating a coconut. She was offered a dehusked coconut, which she crushed underfoot. Then she deftly picked up the broken pieces one by one with her trunk and wedged it between her lips and the small tusk protruding barely past her lips. (The tusk would have been too large for males). It was wedged in such a way the tip of the tusk was at the junction of the hard shell and softer pulp. She pushed the piece inwards using the upper back trunk and the pulp got separated from the shell and she swallowed the white pulp and discarded the shell. Then another devotee came by with a huge bunch of bananas. He offered the bananas one by one and she swallowed them whole in a rapidly. Finally the Booma put her trunk on the head of the devotee to bless him.

That T-Rex must have had a large trunk that failed to fossilize to help wedge the coconut just right. But who would have de-husked the coconut. It must have been Adam!

I mean, one does destroy the palm offspring if one eats a coconut. Or do creationists not believe that plants are alive?

uh, MrG?

if u gander at the link I provided above, you will see pics of the actual skeleton of "Sue", not the replica.

I have plenty more angles if someone wanted a specific one.

so after they ate the two unicorns they starved to death.

stevaroni said: Besides, it's a well known fact that not all coconuts will successfully sprout into trees. Most of them are destined to perish before taking root. God, being omniscient, could have identified the doomed coconuts and marked them for consumption.

Ichthyic said: uh, MrG? if u gander at the link I provided above, you will see pics of the actual skeleton of "Sue", not the replica. I have plenty more angles if someone wanted a specific one.

Henry J said:

and the feathers are exactly where?

Would T-Rex's of a feather flock together?

I think this vegetatian t-rex (and I'm assuming vegan raptors, pleisiosaurs, ithyosaurs etc)
thing is just a put on, a prank, right? I mean creationists don't actually believe that they ate plants do they? Can someone post a source? No one can be that dumb.

One more thing: just to tick off my vegan colleague at work, I bought an order of yellowtail sushi and gave it to a stray cat in our parking lot at work. The cat went bananas(coconuts?) over the sushi and is now my new best friend.

The Sanity Inspector said: And what else did it have in common with birds? Could it have been trained to speak, like a parrot? Imagine the T-Rex chasing the jeep down the path in Jurassic Park, while squawking "I'm a pretty boy!"

I mean creationists don’t actually believe that they ate plants do they? Can someone post a source? No one can be that dumb.

Ichthyic said: uh, MrG? if u gander at the link I provided above, you will see pics of the actual skeleton of "Sue", not the replica.

the pro from dover said: and the feathers are exactly where?

The big question is whether Tianyulong's filaments were actually related to the proto-feathers of the theropods. Zheng can't be sure based on a single specimen, but he notes that there are definitely similarities. Among the theropods, the proto-feathers of Sinosauropteryx were most similar to those of Tianyulong - they were shorter and more slender, but they also didn't branch. They also have similarities to the feathers recently found on Beipaiosaurus, which were hailed as the simplest yet discovered. It's possible that Tianyulong's filaments evolved independently from those of theropods. Indeed, no one has found evidence of proto-feathers in the earliest species of theropods, which suggests that the last common ancestor of this group didn't have them. The more intriguing idea is that Tianyulong's filaments were a direct part of the evolutionary lineage that led to true feathers, which would mean that the common ancestor of saurisichians and ornithischians was fuzzy. It could have had simple filaments that were retained by Tianyulong, developed into true feathers by the theropods, and lost in many other lineages. Zheng thinks that the similarities between Tianyulong's filaments and those of Beipaiosaurus supports this idea. Only one other ornithischian, an early horned dinosaur called Psittacosaurus, had similar structures but its filaments were sparser, more rigid and only found on its tail. Perhaps these too were elaborate versions of some ancestral filament, borne by the earliest dinosaurs some 230 million years ago.

In a related editorial, Lawrence Witmer says:

"Perhaps the only clear conclusion that can be drawn... is that little Tianyulong has made an already confusing picture of feather origins even fuzzier. Such an outcome is common in palaeontology. But the prospects of new fossils, new molecular and imaging techniques, and even new ideas, offer the hope of bringing the evolutionary picture into sharper focus -- and that picture may well end up being of fuzzy dinosaurs."

Reference: Zheng, X., You, H., Xu, X., & Dong, Z. (2009). An Early Cretaceous heterodontosaurid dinosaur with filamentous integumentary structures Nature, 458 (7236), 333-336 DOI: 10.1038/nature07856 Image: Reconstruction by Li-Da Xing [Source: "Not Exactly Rocket Science". Links removed. Seems the images didn't make it either.]

Imagine the T-Rex chasing the jeep down the path in Jurassic Park, while squawking “I’m a pretty boy!”

I think this vegetatian t-rex (and I’m assuming vegan raptors, pleisiosaurs, ithyosaurs etc) thing is just a put on, a prank, right?

"Our aim is to design new proteins from principles we discover studying natural proteins," explains co-author Christopher C. Moser, PhD, Associate Director of the Johnson Foundation at Penn. "For example, we found that natural proteins are complex and fragile and when we make new proteins we want them to be simple and robust. That's why we're not re-engineering a natural protein, but making one from scratch." Currently, protein engineers take an existing biochemical scaffold from nature and tweak it a bit structurally to make it do something else. "This research demonstrates how we used a set of simple design principles, which challenge the kind of approaches that have been used to date in reproducing natural protein functions," says Dutton. [Bold added.]

To build their protein, the Penn team started with just three amino acids, which code for a helix-shaped column. From this, they assembled a four-column bundle with loops that resembles a simple candelabra. They added a heme, a chemical group that contains an iron atom, to bind oxygen molecules. They also added another amino acid called glutamate to add strain to the candelabra to help the columns open up to capture the oxygen. Since heme and oxygen degrade in water, the researchers also designed the exteriors of the columns to repel water to protect the oxygen payload inside.

"This exercise is like making a bus," says Dutton. "First you need an engine and we've produced an engine. Now we can add other things on to it. Using the bound oxygen to do chemistry will be like adding the wheels. Our approach to building a simple protein from scratch allows us to add on, without getting more and more complicated." [Bold added.]

Interesting article, TL, thanks.

Interesting article, TL, thanks.

stevaroni said: after going to AIG and reading enough of their "explanations" to find you a link, I'm going to have to go rinse out my brain with a log of alcohol

mrg said: Interesting article, TL, thanks.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM said: PS. I've now read some comments of yours on Girl Genius Agatha (tho' not gotten around answering them) - thanks profusely - and yes, she kicks ass, plus I happen to like long hair in a girl. She also kicks ass, literally, and who can resist that?

I was impressed by the adjustable eyes on stalks.

stevaroni said:

I mean, one does destroy the palm offspring if one eats a coconut. Or do creationists not believe that plants are alive?

Well, they were in The Garden. The palm trees there were probably more than happy to produce sterile coconuts for them, much like today's factory chickens are more than happy to produce sterile eggs for McDonalds. Besides, it's a well known fact that not all coconuts will successfully sprout into trees. Most of them are destined to perish before taking root. God, being omniscient, could have identified the doomed coconuts and marked them for consumption. In fact, maybe that's what happened to the T-rexes. The T-rex version of Eve ate a forbidden coconut and was banished from the garden, and there were no coconuts outside the garden, so after they ate the two unicorns they starved to death. The rest is history.

Hi all,

As for "Sue" currently on display at Chicago's Field Museum, some of you may not know that McDonald's - which had paid the winning bid on behalf of the Field Museum - agreed to make casts, so that the skeleton would be exhibited too elsewhere around the globe. One of the places it hasn't appeared yet - and I think its appearance is long overdue - is at the Black Hills Institute for Geological Research in Hill City, SD. It was Pete Larson, his brother Neal, and their colleagues at Black Hills which unearthed the skeleton (Sue Hendrickson - for whom "Sue" was named for by Pete - was Pete's girlfriend at the time, and assisting Black Hills.). Without hashing out the whole sordid affair here, I think Pete was convicted wrongly by the Federal government and is someone who should receive a pardon some day.