Oldest-Ever Footprints Scrambles Dinosaur Origin Theory
Walking through mud in what is now Poland, a dinosaur thought to be about the size of a domestic cat left behind footprints that paleontologists believe constitute the oldest footprints on Earth.
Reconstruction of cat-sized stem dinosaur Prorotodactylus isp. found in Stryczowice, Poland
/ American Museum of Natural HistoryThe footprints, preserved in fossilized form, date back 250 million years. If the findings hold up, that would mean dinosaurs existed about 9 million years earlier than previously believed.
The researchers who made the discovery in the Holy Cross Mountains of central Poland - Grzegorz Nied?wiedzki, Stephen Brusatte, and Richard Butler - detailed their findings online Oct. 6 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
"The oldest dinosaurs and their immediate relatives were small and rare," said Brusatte.
The dinosaur in question was a relative pipsqueak who walked on all fours. What's especially intriguing is the time line in which it apparently lived. The footprints left behind approximate a period in the Earth's history in which most life had been wiped out during the so-called Permian-Triassic extinction event. it was generally believed that dinosaurs made their appearance on the world's stage some 15 million years after that tumultuous event. But the footprints date to only a couple of million years after that mass extinction.
"The biggest crisis in the history of life also created one of the greatest opportunities in the history of life by emptying the landscape and making it possible for dinosaurs to evolve," said Brusatte.
The 246 million year old footprints of Sphingopus isp.
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She did however say that she knew that man and dinosaurs co-existed because she had "seen photographs," of fossilized footprints of both together. In fact, those are a famous creationist misreading of plain evidence as well as a deliberate hoax. (See the Paluxy footprint fraud.) Palin of course is a scientific illiterate...a "young earth" creationist.
Religious people tend to be inclined to believe the silliest things, and it helps them to think that there's an afterlife awaiting. It doesn't mean that they're bad people, just that their insecurity leads them to "believe six impossible things before breakfast."
What's particularly interesting about this story, however, is its factual inaccuracy. Polish scientists should have known better. There are fossilized tetrapod tracks that have been found in a quarry in the Holy Cross mountains in Poland that predate the tetrapod Tiktaalik, which was found in the Canadian Arctic islands, by 18 million years. That was long before the dinosaurs were a gleam in any creature's eyes.
History. Should we teach our children "real" history or keep lying to them about the USA and the world. We fight wars over and over and come to find out later it was all about money. The USA will create an enemy and attack a certain nation. Over 80% will be for the war. 10 years later only around 25% will be for the war.
One course that needs to be taught is about every day life. The hardships that some will face and what to do about them.
I know some of you do not think before putting the fingers to the keyboard... and than have Diarrhea of the fingers and just type what ever comes to the tips!
And for you nei-sayers and think the earth is only 10000 years old need to take your head out of the sand and get a new religion. Wake up folks the earth is much older... something like 4.5 billion years old or older!
Come on people. This is why we have a lunatic like sarah pain running for office while believing man rode around on dino's. She also believes that being able to see a foreign country from a large distance constitutes having experience dealing with foreign policy.
Anyone care to visit a doctor who says, "I'm not really a Doctor, but, I watched ER in a bar last night."
hagar39, I agree with most of what you said, but sorry, learning about where we came from can help us aim at where we want to go.
The word dinosaur means "terrible lizard", however dinosaurs are not lizards. Dinosaurs like crocodiles belong to the archosaur group, and are thus related, but one did not evolve from the other. The only animals that evolved from dinosaurs are the birds - they evolved from theropod dinosaurs. Lizards are a different group altogether. Dinosaurs had forward facing knees, like mammals today and may have been warm blooded, whereas lizards are cold blooded and have side-facing knees. Consequentially lizards have locomotion that is more efficient while dinosaurs had higher top speeds.
Dinosaurs can be generally described as terrestrial archosaurian reptiles with limbs held erect beneath the body, that existed from the Late Triassic to the Late Cretaceous.
They are being paid for research in their field.
I find it interesting, as an amature dinosaur hunter, that there were land based creatures before geologic history.
Also, "dinosaur" isn't some kind of solid category whereby a mother non-dinosaur laid an egg and out hatched a baby dinosaur. (In fact, <i>no</i> species is like that.) So if we want to stretch the "origin" of dinosaurs back another 9 million years, we haven't made any serious change to our understanding of the actual sequence of events.
Now, a "scramble" would be finding something like a T-rex in that strate, or, much worse still, an elephant.
Maybe a better word than "scramble" is "stretch". It just seems to me that a *scramble* of our understanding would involve some change in the sequence of dinosaurs to appear.