A Dinosaur in the Wrong Place, Wrong Time?

What’s also very interesting is that if you look up the Wiki article on Diplodocus, you find that the best knowledge is that the tail consisted of “about” 80 vertebrae, and the neck “about” 15, and that they’ve never identified a diplodocus skull with confidence. Even with this weakness, it’s evidently one of the best studied dinosaurs.

In other words, there is a tremendous amount off guesswork involved in paleontology, to put it mildly, and we might infer from the distribution of bones (and lack of large body parts) that the process of burial was rather violent.

When visiting the Wild’s my children often like to play with the slingshots. They have a great setup and it is a lot of fun. Every time we are there playing, I am amazed at the number of rocks that are strewn about a very small place. I often think that 2,000 years from now, some archeologist will be digging in this spot and will find a large collection of stones and will try to infer what happened here, probable relating to some kind of religious activity as old records indicate that this was a religious camp.

The massively limited amount of information and the utter lack of our understanding of anything really shows that the amount of guessing we do is huge in this field. Most people would be amazed at how many bones actually exist for some species of upright apes/man and the guesses of what happened with ranges of millions of years is amazing. The fact that man has progressed so greatly in just the last 10,000 years of recorded history should really question that some group of people remained “still” for millions of years. It confounds me that scientist are so dogmatic with so little.

I have always wanted to write a book or study the concept of how you can approach a single particular object with two different viewpoints and develop a fully structured defensible model. While a particle physicists at Fermi, I would often sit at a table with a bunch of super smart people and they would argue some very interesting concepts. And one that really struck me was that the table split themselves in half and one side argued that a light bulb was a light emitter and one side argued that a light bulb was a dark absorber. I can tell you both sides were very convincing. In fact, they would argue that darkness travels faster than light. Just proves how far we really are off on dinosaurs and early life.