Re: [asa] How paleontology works

--- Jack Haas <haas.john@comcast.net> wrote:

> As a follow-up to Iain's comments on Mary Schweitzer's research read the
> interesting account of her research in the article:
> "Dinosaur Shocker" By Helen Fields in
> <http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2006/may/dinosaur.php>
> Jack Haas
>
The article mentions Jack Horner, who gave a very interesting talk during
January Series at Calvin a number of years ago. He was talking about his
efforts to understand the T. Rex: where it fit into the ecology, what its
capabilities were, etc. I had long since abandoned my creationism, but I
wondered how Jack could learn so much from fossils. He convinced me that one
can learn quite a bit from fossils. By taking a CAT scan of the animal's skull
he could identify the size allocated to the various brain lobes andd found that
the olfactory lobe was very large -- characteristic of a scavenger. The ratio
of the length of the upper leg bone to the lower was approximately 1:1 -- not
optimal for running fast. By identifying the place on the front legs where the
muscles attached he did some simple calculations aandd found the T. Rex could
not generate more than ~300 lbf with its front legs -- not really enough to be
able to tear apart another dinosaur. From these investigations he concluded
that T. Rex was a scavenger, not a predator. These findings may be overturned
-- perhaps have. Still, it points out that a paleontologist can do a
significant amount of science.

Siumilarly, in the case of stellar evolution, as Howard Van Till points out in
his book, "The Fourth Day...", observations of stars in various stages of their
development can be correlated with the theory of nuclear fusion to develop a
pretty good picture of the evolution of stars. Again, observations ombined with theory.

Bill Hamilton
William E. Hamilton, Jr., Ph.D.
248.652.4148 (home) 248.821.8156 (mobile)
"...If God is for us, who is against us?" Rom 8:31

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Tue Sep 12 08:58:42 2006