Word: dinosaurs
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...evidence that this Fred Flintstone version of prehistory is correct. For decades a strong piece of that "evidence" has been a cluster of fossilized tracks in the seasonally dry bed of the Paluxy Creek, near Glen Rose, Texas. One track of three-toed footprints was obviously made by a dinosaur. The feet that made another track, crossing the first at an angle, lacked the giant toes and looked human to some. The fact that the two varieties of tracks were made at about the same time, creation scientists have long claimed, shows that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. But thanks...
According to Kuban, whose conclusions were presented last month at a New Mexico symposium on dinosaur tracks and traces and printed in the current issue of the journal Creation/Evolution, the Paluxy tracks have been known to local folk since being uncovered by a 1908 flash flood. The world learned of them in the 1930s, when residents set up roadside stands to sell both real and fake samples of the footprints. When paleontologists went to investigate the source, they saw dinosaur tracks but found the man tracks too indistinct to identify...
...other words," says Kuban, "there was no question that a dinosaur was capable of making these elongated prints." He offers several explanations for the toelessness, all acceptable to paleontologists: soft mud might have filled the narrow toe marks soon after the dinosaur walked by. Then, too, some other material may have sifted into the toe marks long after the prints hardened. Or perhaps, for some reason, erosion distorted the prints. Even before Kuban's findings, mainstream scientists did not lose much sleep over the Paluxy footprints. Says Harvard Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who has visited the site: "Everyone knows that...
...should we care? If feminism has become alienated from most of the population, maybe that means it has outlived its relevance. Maybe feminism is a dinosaur. Of course, you could never get away with saying this about civil rights. But after all, most women students at Harvard have probably never experienced the kind of discrimination that Blacks or Hispanics may have by this time in their lives. Or at least not in the traditional sense...
...fossil find may have implications for the controversial theory proposed by a team headed by Physicist Luis Alvarez and his son Geologist Walter Alvarez, both of the University of California, Berkeley. In their view, at least some of the great extinctions, especially the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, were caused by the effects of giant comets or asteroids smashing into the earth. The impacts, they suggest, spewed debris into the atmosphere, obscuring the sun, causing temperatures to drop and bringing on a long "winter" that killed much of the life on earth. But, at least...