People need to watch more Dinosaur Train II

The more I read some blogs, the more I thank my High School English teachers for all their emphasis on reading comprehension. Simile is not a declaration. If you say that something is like something, you are categorically saying that that thing is not that something, just like that something.

One of my last blogs was about how watching Dinosaur Train could correct the following misconceptions about mammals in the Mesozoic Era.

Many still think that mammals and dinosaurs, for example, never coexisted, or if they did it was only for a short period when only small shrew-like mammals were present.

Read People need to watch more Dinosaur Train for a brief overview why this supposed popular misconception has been known to be wrong since at least the 1850's.  Most mammals in the Mesozoic were small with the largest known fossils being about the size of a badger, but they were contemporaneous throughout the age of dinosaurs.

Werner argues in his books that modern animals are found in the Mesozoic fossil record.  Smith and Scordova share this view, Scordova being of the impression that mammals would be glossed over as contamination.  I do not have ready access to Werner's books, but his method strikes me as suspect.  Apparently, he is mainstream in creationist circles, both Creation.com and Answers in Genesis sell his work.  With all the millions of dollars at the disposal of Liberty University, Answers in Genesis, and Creation Ministries International, we have some guy going to museums taking photographs.  If this had merit could not a scientist have done comparative analysis from the peer reviewed publications.  Perhaps when I get a chance I will watch his full presentation.

Smith was kind enough to footnote his claims so that I can easily analyze them.

To the surprise of many, ducks,1 squirrels,2 platypus,3beaver-like4 and badger-like5 creatures have all been found in ‘dinosaur-era’ rock layers along with bees, cockroaches, frogs and pine trees. Most people don’t picture a T. rex walking along with a duck flying overhead, but that’s what the so-called ‘dino-era’ fossils would prove!

Let's look first at the duck.  Vegavis iaai was uncovered in 1992, but the concretions delayed its description until 2005.  As far as I can tell from the paper the V. iaai has 20 points in her skeleton that are only found in Anseriformes.  While there seems to be some controversy, I am willing to concede that V. iaai seems to be a true water fowl and that there were probably some ancestors of Galliformes in the Cretaceous.  However, I would not know how Smith would make such a prediction.  One, to call V. iaai a duck, seems to allow for more diversity than creationists normally allow in their "kinds".  Two, the prediction about galliformes assumes a genetic relationship between Galliformes and Anseriformes.  Three, it is important to note here that V. iaai, is a duck only in the broadest sense like geese are ducks.

Let's look at the squirrel.   Volaticotherium antiquus did actually make an appearance on Dinosaur Train as Vlad the vampire like mammal.  Just look at those canines! He wants to suck your blood! Wait! Do squirrels have canines?  Actually, one of the reasons that V. antiquus is not a squirrel is his presence of canines which most rodents do not have and no squirrel has.  V. antiquus actually was not a member of the order Rodentia, but a member of an extinct order of mammals called the Eutriconodonta which do not appear in the Cenozoic fossil record.

According to Smith, this is not common knowledge, but I have grown up knowing that platypuses are living fossils.  Among other things, they lack nipples and lay eggs.  However they are very poorly represented in the fossil record.  Like Anseriformes, monotremes have possible cretaceous fossils.  While molecular biology studies put platypuses and echidnas diverging 10-80 million years ago, the fossil evidence pushes this back 40 million years into the Mesozoic.  While it is surprising that platypuses may be older than we think, these possible monotremes are still 100 million years younger than the oldest mammals.  Yet as I read this article Smith uses at a source, I see a bit of a problem with his conjecture that "many more tens of thousands of fossil mammals in ‘dinosaur rock’ are likely being similarly ignored in other parts of the world, with the likelihood of finding even more representatives of the same kinds as modern-day mammals."  Consider this paragraph.

Tom began digging along the south-eastern coast of Victoria some 25 years ago in his original quest to find Australia’s oldest mammals. He kept finding dinosaur bones, but in 1996 the first mammal jaw finally turned up, causing international scientific headlines when it was published in 1997 in Science.

At the time of this article, Dr. Tom Rich had been digging in Australia for a quarter of a century looking for mammal fossils.  While dinosaurs may be more in vogue, there are certainly paleontologists researching Mesozoic mammals.  Also, a cretaceous (pre-flood) platypus may not help Smith, because now an Australian platypus needs to migrate to the Ark and then coincidentally migrate off the Ark back to Australia.

I'll deal with the rest of the claims in another post.

People need to watch more Dinosaur Train

Recently, an author going by Scordova wrote something for the blog, Uncommondescent.com.  Uncommondescent markets themselves as an intelligent design blog and like most in the intelligent design movement, they have a biblical creationist (young earth) bent.  In this particular entry, Scordova relies heavily on two articles written on Kent Hovind's Creation.com.  Neither site has proven to me their trustworthiness and this post is no exception.  

Scordova starts by listing Bill Nye's request for a mammal to be demonstrated in the "trilobite layers" (the Paleozoic).  This author seems to be one of those creationists that denies the geologic column (unlike many creationists), so one wonders if he understood Nye's request.  When he begins to present his evidence that would absolutely change Nye's mind, we know that he did not understand Nye's request.  Quoting extensively from Calvin Smith's The so-called ‘Age of Dinosaurs’ at Creation.com, he begins to attempt to prove that mammals are contained in "dinosaur rock".

"Dinosaur rock"?  When Nye said "trilobite layers", he clearly understood that he was talking about the Paleozoic Era.  Dinosaurs and mammals first show up in the beginning of the next era, the Mesozoic Era, which Smith refers to three times as "dinosaur rock".  So what is the big deal? Google Books has a book from 1979 called Mesozoic Mammals and those authors note a 1854 discovery of a Mesozoic mammal.  This is not even listed as the first discovery.   I grew up on PBS, Discovery Channel, Walking with Dinosaurs, and Walking with Prehistoric Beasts.  My children watch a PBS show called Dinosaur Train which teaches about these mammals along with dinosaurs and birds.  

Well, according to Smith, unlike my family, "Many people are surprised when they hear of these creatures being buried together and wonder why they never heard of it before."  Good question, why are the public not as educated on this subject as maybe they should be?  Perhaps, the Mesozoic needs to be taught better in schools.  Perhaps more children need to watch Dinosaur Train.  Well as you may expect, Smith has another answer quoting from one of Carl Werner's interviews.  Dr. Donald Burge notes that he does not have the time to process the fossils.  Burge specializes in reptiles and dinosaurs so he does not have the time or expertise to sort through the extra 20,000 pounds of clay containing mammal fossils.  

In his book, Werner argues that Mesozoic mammal fossils are constantly misidentified, because they actually belong to Cenozoic families.  Werner draws his conclusions not from professional research, but from combing through tens of thousands of photos his wife took at museums.  The 2001 Burge quote suggests to Werner and Smith that there are fossils of modern mammals coexisting with dinosaurs and they are just falling through the cracks due to massive evolutionary bias.  In the Uncommondescent blog, Scordova demonstrates his lack of understanding by taking it a step further.

So is there a possibility anomalies are edited out and instead a practice of false reporting (perhaps innocently done) has been perpetuated. They probably think something like: “We found a mammal, that’s clearly contamination because we know mammals aren’t in that era”. So thus we never hear official reports of the anomalies because the anomalies are regarded as contaminants since according to the false narrative, certain creatures didn’t live in certain eras.

Again, Mesozoic mammals have been known for at least a century and a half.  In the comment section of Smith's article someone makes this point.  Smith responds with this anecdote.

Your statement "...this comes as no surprise to anyone." is absolutely incorrect. I can tell you from personal experience that I have met many hundreds of people (both creationists and evolutionists) that have been exposed to this type of information at CMI presentations that were completely surprised by the fact that birds like ducks and mammals like platypus and beavers etc lived with dinosaurs.

Maybe these people should watch more Dinosaur Train?  Museums are filled with fossils that need to be studied.  I have little doubt that there are more people digging up mammal fossils than there are qualified researchers studying them.  However, the claim that paleontologists are missing modern mammals, this I doubt.  I'll deal with the following misconception in my next blog.

To the surprise of many, ducks,1 squirrels,2 platypus,3beaver-like4 and badger-like5 creatures have all been found in ‘dinosaur-era’ rock layers along with bees, cockroaches, frogs and pine trees. Most people don’t picture a T. rex walking along with a duck flying overhead, but that’s what the so-called ‘dino-era’ fossils would prove!