Have you ever heard of the cassowary? It is an enormous bird that lives in New Guinea. It is a remarkable bird with a feathery coat, scaley legs, and a blue head with a thick bill-like crest on top. The cassowary can run up to 30 miles an hour and is only smaller than the ostrich in the bird kingdom. Some would say that looking at this bird is like getting a glimpse of its ancient ancestors, the dinosaurs.
One educational video I watched about this bird portrayed a man visiting one of these birds in an up close encounter. It was a supervised visit, because these birds can be hostile towards people and could deliver a deadly blow with one of its powerful legs. The crest upon its head is reminiscent of some dinosaur species. As the host of this program described, it bobs its head up and down like the velociraptors from Jurassic Park. Think about that statement for a moment. Does a cassowary move like the velociraptors from Juraasic Park or did the velicraptors from this movie move like a cassowary?
Clearly, the veliciraptors, from the movie, moved like a cassowary. The creators of Jurassic Park, in trying to figure out how a velociraptor moves, took the assumption that dinosaurs evolved into birds and observed birds to figure out how some of the dinosaurs may have moved. Unfortunately, this is where we have arrived with paleontology. We assume that everything has undergone evolution. Thus, it is reasonable to say that this bird moves like a velociraptor.
How did velociraptors move? That is a difficult question to answer. Nobody has ever observed a velociraptor in motion; thus, it is impossible to know exactly how it moved. The problem is that pop culture has forged an image of how various dinosaurs moved. For instance, people believe that the triceratops moved like an ox, tyrannosaurus rex moved like a large bird, the large long necked dinosaurs moved like elephants. These assumptions are virtually unquestioned today.
In addition, evolutionists are presupposing that dinosaurs had feathers. This assumption brings people to believe that birds move like dinosaurs, when, in reality, we just portray dinosaurs moving like birds. The only sources of information that scientists have concerning dinosaurs in motion is their footprints, postures, and other fossilized tracks that have been uncovered. Scientists can also study
creatures that most resemble them in today's world. Today, the closest creatures we have to dinosaurs are other reptiles.
Let's stop passing along the fairy tale stories (in educational material) to our kids, when the stories reflect nothing more than our imagination.
Or maybe you can have a strong suspicion of how a body moves by the structure of its skeleton. You can sequence DNA and see if there are strong similarities between fossilized remains and current day animals.
ReplyDeleteAnd if those two correlate closely to eachother, you might make some assumptions about those species being similar. Then when Michael Chrichton writes his book, he can draw from the educated guesses of scientists based on the information in our living world to write a compelling work of fiction.