Friday, October 11, 2013

What are the 60 dinosaur kinds?


I keep asking about these 60 or 50 dinosaur kinds.  This was one of the main questions that led me to reject Young Earth Creationism.  What are the orders of mammalia? Google it.  You will find a debate over whether there are between 19-29 orders.  Start looking for Dinosaur kinds.  What you will not find is a debate among creationist about 60 or 50 kinds of dinosaurs.  What you will find is an assertion of it's validity and one or two examples of a Dinosaur kind.  The most common example of a dinosaur kind is ceratopsia.
The sub-order ceratopsia includes both bipeds and quadrupeds.  This transition from semi-bipedal to quadrupedal is accepted by both evolutionists and creationists.  However if we accept that the sub-order ceratopsia is one dinosaur kind, how can there be half a hundred dinosaur kinds?  That level of diversity would seem to imply that Oviraptor and Tyrannosaurus Rex were the same kind or for comparison that hyenas and cats are the same kind.  That is just what Carl Kerby seems to do in his blog post, Phylogenic Charts
He gives fourteen different sub-orders and clades of dinosaurs that he terms as "one thing, stayed one thing, and never changed from, or into, anything else."
  • j Deinonychosaurs. 
  • h Oviraptorosaurs. 
  • m Carnosaurs and Coelurosaurs. 
  • n Segnosaurs. 
  • o Prosauropods.
  • p Sauropods. 
  • q Fabrosaurids. 
  • r Scelidosaurs. 
  • s Stegosaurs. 
  • t Ankylosaurs. 
  • u Ornithopods. 
  • v Heterodontosaurids. 
  • w Ceratopsians. 
  • x Pachycephalosaurs.
Creation.com shrinks the groups even further in their Dinosaur Fairy Tales with only eight kinds (in fairness they leave out Heterodontosaurids, Scelidosaurs, and Fabrosaurids).

  • Ceratopsians
  • Pachycephalosaurs
  • Ornithopods
  • Stegosaurs
  • Ankylosaurs
  • Theropods (Segnosaurs, Deinonychosaurs, Oviraptorosaurs, Carnosaurs, and Coelurosaurs)
  • Prosauropods
  • Sauropods
The point is that if ceraptosia is a dinosaur kind, what are the other 49?  How can there be another 49 let alone another 59?  More importantly where is the list of 50 dinosaur kinds?  In trying to find this list, I was amazed at how much evolution had been accepted by creationists as microevolution.  Also, I was amazed at how often creationists made the claim of tens of dinosaur kinds, but never backed it up.  What kind of worldview does that?  Not a worldview that I could continue to hold.  I did not only abandon young earth creationism, because of this, but it was a start.  





Thursday, October 3, 2013

But it's still a frog?

Anurans are made up of an extraordinary number of species living in highly diverse habitats, and with highly diverse lifestyles, behaviors, and design features. The above descriptions were meant to provide a glimpse of the variety and taxonomic challenges inherent in the study of frogs. New molecular data is being collected every day, while new species are being identified every year. This is causing frog taxonomy to be in constant flux and highly tentative. Furthermore, seven species from the genera Crossodactylodes (3), Rupirana (1), and Zachaenus (3) have not been categorized to date. Therefore any attempt to determine the number of anuran kinds is a daunting task (Amphibiaweb 2013). With the above in mind, I tentatively place the number of extant anuran kinds on the Ark at 140. Whatever the number actually was, it is clear that frogs and toads represent the amazing diversity that is consistent with the Creator’s triune character and the creative wisdom required to build fascinating creatures with the ability to persist and thrive, in a fallen world.

Frog kinds

I really didn't like this movie...



If the Separatist Pilgrims (1620) left us a monument built in 1888, over 250 years after Plymouth, then can we say the apostles left us the church fathers?  Also, this movie seems to ignore the Great Migration (1629-1640), when about 20,000 Puritans immigrated to New England dwarfing the Separatist population.