Not So Extinct Dinosaurs

I return today to the subject of the class of reptiles properly described as dawn age reptiles. My researches have stumbled into more telling reports and the phenomenon is sorting itself out. We can begin to characterize the phenomena a lot better.

Modern sightings exist for creatures that are apparently Theropods, Sauropods, Apatosaurus, Plesiosaurs, Stegosaurs and possibly Pterosaurs. I suspect that we haven’t missed a species at this rate. These are all creatures that are large specialized reptiles, yet on the same class as the turtle and the crocodile. They are not warm blooded.

What that means is that they are all aquatic and generally unable to operate too far from a body of water. Yet this alone gives them a huge range. The plesiosaur is able to operate through out the ocean and we can assume into the Arctic. It merely needs to increase the antifreeze capability of its blood system to do this as is done by most northern fish. The remainder needs to operate on land or most properly within large deltaic swamps. Again, up to 13,000 years ago, we had flat lying continental shelf that most certainly was primarily swamp land not unlike the Gulf coast. Today we have the tropical swamps of the Congo and the Amazon and many smaller locales.

Again these swamps maintain a steady ambient temperature necessary for these creature’s survival and success. Thus the only places to look for dawn age reptiles are were other dawn age reptiles survive. On land it is specifically crocodile swamps throughout the tropics. At sea, it is the whole ocean and from the available observations inland lakes also as breeding locales. This makes good sense since an egg clutch does not do well at sea.

These reptiles exhibit two other important characteristics that have hidden them from us. The easy one is that they are generally nocturnal. They simply risk getting too hot if they start charging around in the midday sun. Thus after any exposure they head for deep water and reserve activity for the night and predawn hours. They have been observed quietly sunbathing but this is not a source of energy. Recall that sunbathing crocodiles on been disturbed go straight to water.

The second is that like fish, they are able to get enough oxygen in water to operate comfortably. It appears that the mechanism is a form of fleshy comb, not unlike a rooster’s comb. Their lungs are used for exertion but on sliding to the bottom of a pool, they simply go doggo and absorb oxygen from the water itself with their external gill like surfaces.

Both the Stegosaur and the Theropod have been depicted with fleshy combs and the Sauropod observed in Africa was also sporting a form of fleshy comb. Ongoing sightings of Plesiosaur like creatures in over thirty lakes in the Pacific Northwest have also depicted a comb around it head.

None of this would have easily survived the fossil record but it is been consistently reported in the many scattered sightings.

As I have posted earlier, these animals all live where man decidedly does not live. You do not set up housekeeping in a crocodile infested swamp. Yet we have a group of reptiles feeding on the soft swamp plant life and each other. As I posted earlier, T-Rex is perfectly engineered to kill and eat a crocodile.

The challenge for the future is to capture some of these animals.

Reporting

Up to about fifteen years ago, all sightings ended up, at best in the hands of a newspaper reporter, and I must say that many did their very best in dealing first with the informant and then in getting the story straight. If it went any further it went into the hands of a professor somewhere who had few credentials to handle the observations and simply died there. In fact the average newspaper man might only see one story in his lifetime. An exception to this was John Green who assembled a book on Sasquatch reports because he actually got enough in to inspire the effort in the first place. This did not happen so easily with giant reptiles.

This has now changed. Reports are been posted on the Internet and we are slowly getting critical mass that any competent researcher can access. This is accelerating the effort to locate and discover specimens. For all of them you need to pack a harpoon gun, so it will be a while yet and the pictures will remain fuzzy and shaky as the photographer discovers adrenalin.

Fundamentalists

One annoying aspect of the presently available material is that the anti evolution crowd has jumped onto the subject as if it might prove their case, an argument which escapes me entirely, but then their arguments usually do. That the early products of evolution remain with us is a pleasant surprise and is solely the result of the conservation of their ecological niche.

At least I am reassured that if we preserve our own niche that mankind has a long future lasting millions of years on Earth and possibly as many on Venus once we get around to setting the place up properly.


This item is confirmation of sightings across the strait from Northern Australia that was strongly inferred by the Burrunjor we posted on earlier.

First published:

Creation ex nihilo 23(1):56

December 2000

A dinosaur actually living in the world today? According to a report in Papua New Guinea's The Independent newspaper,1 a 'dinosaur-like reptile' was seen on two occasions in the Lake Murray area, in Western Province.

On December 11, 1999, villagers travelling in a canoe reported seeing the creature wading in shallow water near Boboa.

The following day, a Seventh Day Adventist pastor and a church elder say they saw the animal not far from the first sighting.

The creature was described as having a body 'as long as a dump truck' and nearly two metres wide, with a long neck and a long slender tail. It was walking on two hind legs 'as thick as coconut palm tree trunks', and had two smaller forelegs. The head was similar in shape to a cow's head, with large eyes and 'sharp teeth as long as fingers.' The skin was likened to that of a crocodile, and the creature had 'largish triangular scoops on the back.'

So what did these eyewitnesses really see? The description does not seem to fit any species known to live on the earth today. However, its large size and crocodile-like skin certainly bring images of dinosaurs powerfully to mind.

The circumstances in which it was encountered are strikingly reminiscent of the river-dwelling sauropod-like animal known as mokele-mbembe, whose sightings in the vast, remote swamps of Africa's Congo region have led even some evolutionist scientists to speculate that dinosaurs may still be living in the world today.2

For believers in the prevailing evolutionary view that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, the idea that they might be alive today is hard to accept. This is despite the recent discovery of the living Wollemi pine tree,3 also believed, from fossils, to have been extinct since the 'dinosaur age'.

Christians, however, should not be surprised, as the Bible teaches that God created the dinosaurs only thousands of years ago.

So why have dinosaurs (apparently) disappeared? Probably for the very same reasons that wildlife protection agencies give when expressing concern over current extinction rates of animals and plants,4 primarily the effect of man (e.g. through hunting and land clearing).

After the Flood, many of the dinosaurs and other animals are likely to have multiplied across the earth (

Genesis 8:17) more quickly than Noah's descendants (e.g. a rabbit's pregnancy lasts 31 days; the offspring mature in ten weeks). N.B. also that the people disobediently stayed around Babel, before God judged them.

As human settlement expanded, populations of many animal species would have declined due to over-exploitation (for meat, skins, etc.), habitat loss, or deliberate extermination to reduce the threat of attack. Tales of dragon-slaying heroes like St George may suggest man's part in the dinosaurs' demise.

Despite the popular view that such factors have the most impact on amphibians (e.g. frogs), many scientists now recognise that reptiles are in even greater danger of extinction.5 This may help to explain why the celebrated dinosaurs have apparently died out before many of our so-called 'modern' species.

So if any dinosaur species are still living, the most likely places to find them would be in biologically rich areas with limited or no human settlement, such as the Congo and Lake Murray regions, as these reports suggest.

Dawn Age Reptiles

I keep coming across more and more evidence of the actual presence of dawn age reptiles on Earth. It is sufficient to spark a reappraisal of our thinking on the matter. I come to the idea as dismissive as any researcher. Like how could these animals avoid detection on an ongoing basis?

The one element of commonality is that these are reptiles whose ecological niche is the same as shared by crocodiles. They are swamp dwellers who can and will spend most of their time in water and emerge possibly only to lay eggs. Like crocs and turtles, they will quickly go into water on birth. It is reasonable that all the dawn age reptiles shared this behavior.

It is not unreasonable that theropods, stegosaurs and apatosaurus could be still extant if their cousins sharing the same ecology are also extant. The swamps certainly solve the food supply issue for the vegetarians who typically become huge. The theropods also do well hunting an ample supply of crocodiles.

The key observation here is that the instant we understand it is all about swamps, the question changes to asking why they are not there if the crocs are. In other words they had a survivable niche that allowed such survival.

I will add that this ends another issue. These animals are all primarily aquatic first and at best come out to catch a bit of sun. Been aquatic, they maintain stable body temperature equivalent to ambient in water. This also suggests that their demand for oxygen is surprisingly low and may be supported by the additional expedient of ingesting water. Persistent reports of extant Plesiosaurs continue to crop up and they clearly do not need to breech in order to supply oxygen. Such animals would also migrate back to ancestral swamps in order to produce a clutch.

Of course, we have had a long string of eyewitness reports successfully recognizing these animals. Some of them are simply excellent and carry the ring of truth. They have been easily named and in addition, a millennia old collection of pottery from Mexico established characteristics latter confirmed by archeological discovery. Also we have a carved stegosaurus in a Cambodian temple that is indisputable.

The fact remains that the whole works can reside comfortably in large swamps, spending all their time in the water and perhaps been active mostly at night. They rely on aquatic plants for sustenance mostly and this also provides excellent cover even in the daytime. Besides, how could you differentiate the head of a reptile from another reptile if that is all that you got to see?

On top of that human witnesses are rarer than the reptiles are likely to be. Human penetration has always been daunting simply because of the heavy insect problem and the restriction to daytime travel. These animals look just as much at home at night as during the day. The only one I wonder about is the stegosaurus.

Therefore, we can make a hesitant conjecture. These critters may still be extant and functioning in the major global swamps. Locating them will also be a daunting challenge and will take a major effort. Occasional eyewitness reports have been futile to date since these animal are simply too large for capture or even killing when encountered. We are simply never heavily enough armed in the first place and having handling equipment to hand is also unlikely. So far, almost no one has been prepared to believe these reports.

That ultimately suggests that if we hope to ever capture the plant eaters we need great luck or we need to locate their nesting spots deep in the swamps.

There are already enough individual eye witness reports to support some form of effort.

It is also noteworthy that the pottery models show a sauropod maintaining an arced back in order to walk. It looks very much like a traditional image of a dragon and displays a ridge of tooth like fins on the back. Both features fit an aquatic model were flexibility in the back is normal and spikes on the back would discourage attention from crocodiles.

I still want to say that this cannot be true, but I am also sure that our access to this particular niche has been spotty at best. A detailed search with plenty of remote cameras for both night and day is surely called for.

Two Impossible Phenomena

This month, I have been confronted with two impossible phenomena. The first impossible phenomenon was a theropod living in a swamp in Northern Australia with an existence probability greater than zero. It is a smaller version of tyrannosaurus rex but that possibly reflects only the fact that we are seeing juveniles and that given the chance and the years, a bigger version becomes possible because it likely keeps growing if the habitat allows it. Recall that its contemporaries do not obviously age out the way we do.

The second impossible phenomenon was that a skilled entomologist had picked up on the fact that biology is sensitive to gravity and biota can sense and manipulate material structures to beneficiate the effect. This led him to a real device that also manipulated gravity.

This last is rather good news. If it is possible to sense gravity, it is possible to manipulate gravity. There may be many years between the two events, as was very true for electricity whose discovery exited Benjamin Franklin and whose exploitation excited Tesla and Edison one century later. Today we think we understand it.

These impossibilities are straight out of bad science fiction, yet they must be considered. When you invoke biology, I am always receptive. The reason is that biology has discovered and exploited every law of nature and any we do not understand.

In fact, if a new phenomenon is ever presented, I want to see it show up biologically before I support it.

Both these phenomena will shake science up. And science is very much due for a firm kick in the pants. It has become far too easy to hide behind your specialty and maintain the pretense of having an important opinion on anything outside that specialty without bothering to do any of the basic homework.

I admit that it took my establishing a proper protocol and language for handling phenomena properly to loosen my own blinders. That makes it easy for me to perceive when researchers are out of line. That methodology is central to my book Paradigms shift which I will make available in eBook format shortly now that an effective system is up and running.

Niche of the Burrunjor

The possible presence of a living theropod in the tropics of Northern Australia was a bit of a shock and I have since had time to reflect and some interesting inferences suggest themselves.

The continent of Australia included Papua – New Guinea until about twelve thousand years ago. This block was and is cut off by deep waters from the remainder of the globe and has been since the age of the dinosaurs. That means that the only place on Earth that had any chance of retaining a markedly different suite of plants and animals was this region. Every where else was eventually over run by the Eurasian biome.

There were four separate tropical zones suitable for the survival of theropods. Obviously Africa and South America and then we have the island arc and continent of Indonesia and Australia, neatly cut into two separate zones. Even more important, Yucatan which was the site of the asteroid impact that ended the age of dinosaurs was on the opposite side of the globe from the jungles of northern Australia. That was simply the best place to survive the initial shock and as it turned out the place where a more restrained evolutionary development took place.

The evidence so far is also very instructive. The animal is non migratory and generally slow moving compared to its obvious upland competitors. It did not run down game, but certainly was able to take out a cow and carry it off. That is no big trick. So could you. It probably runs as fast as we do.

That means that it operates inside a hunting range and this is supported by the pattern of losses and the behavior of dogs who immediately recognized the range of a superior predator. The terrain descriptions so far are of tropical woodlands with a low canopy and dense ground cover. This is difficult to travel through and see anything.

That leaves only the important question that should have been understood a century ago. What does it eat? It cannot run down herds of Kangaroos, nor can it prey on large herds of grazing dinosaurs that these hard cases likely hunted to extinction in their refuge a few million years ago. However, it is the perfect hunting machine for eating crocodiles and alligators. With its huge legs and weight, it can leap onto the back of such a reptile and use its jaws to crush the prey to death.

The rivers are full of such game and the hunting area can be small. You can also be sure that nosy little primates will stay far away. Thus we have almost unlimited food and secure hunting areas along rivers. No wonder they are still with us. That begs the question of survival in the Congo and the Amazon. They could have and we certainly were avoiding them anyway.

Now we understand their biological niche, it should be possible to stake out districts and to run one down. Carefully of course, as no human in their right mind will go personally into such an area on foot.