Thread: How would you answer the dino-man coexistence question?

The question that seems to be going around in polls dealing with evolution is whether man and dinosaurs coexisted. This is misleading since birds are now classified with dinosaurs, so how would you answer?

I would answer "No" because dinosaurs and hominids did not exist in the same geologic periods. Dinosaurs are ancestral to modern birds, but there are some distinct differences between these taxa. In particular, the genera that YEC nuts claim coexisted with hominids are long extinct and never existed alongside hominids. The amount of evidence that supports this is more than sufficient to label those who say otherwise as under-educated and/or nuts.

I agree with Skinwalker. Birds aren't dinosaurs, but they are descended from them apparently. I picked number 4.

What about these?

http://www.doc.govt.nz/upload/docume...ara-lowres.pdf

The larger point is that the taxa we commonly refer to as actual dinosaurs existed millions of years ago. Descendants of these taxa are just that: descendants. What nutters like Hovid, Gish, Hamm, et al claim is that species like Lesothosaurus or Pachycephalosaurus were contemporaneous with hominids. The reality is that at the time of the last dinosaurs, the dominant species of mammals were probably vole- or rat-like rodents.

The dinosaurs, as we mean the term colloquially, never co-existed with hominids. However birds are considered to be dinosaurs by paleontologists and biologists. Specifically they're the only remaining clade of the clade aviales (avian dinosaurs). This is true in the same sense that humans are apes, albeit largely hairless bipedal apes, rather than merely being descended from apes. In evolution, descent from a clade equals membership of that clade. To define dinosaurs as a group excluding a descendant species would be improper. The colloquial meaning is an imperfect group, rather as the colloquial meaning of apes, excluding humans, is an imperfect group, albeit on a smaller scale. It's not correct to use these colloquial meanings in a scientific context.

Taxonomically, modern birds belong to superorder dinosauria, suborder theropoda, which contains the aviales clade, a superset of the aves class to which all extant birds belong.

I selected option 3, because I assume that this question used the word dinosaur in the colloquial sense. If it did not, I would choose option 1.

Originally Posted by Geo

What about these?

http://www.doc.govt.nz/upload/docume...ara-lowres.pdf

Read the first few lines. Tuataras are members of a clade that existed contemporary to the dinosaurs. That doesn't make them dinosaurs any more than it makes us dinosaurs because synapsids existed contemporary to them.

For the sake of additional context, I thought I'd post this geologic timescale.



From: Sampson, Scott D. (2009). Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. 24.

Nice diagram. Really puts us in our quite incidental place...