At www.sciencealert.com/dinosaurs-were-warm-blooded-after-all-ancient-eggsh… … this and the following links were sent in by Robert. Were dinosaurs cold blooded, like reptiles, or warm blooded, like birds. A new study seeks to resolve the issue and suggests the latter. There appears to be a concerted endeavour to see dinosaurs as bird like rather than reptile like and this study is one more in a chain of such claims. The view is based on the composition of chemicals inside fossilised dinosaur egg shells. It all began with the idea dinosaur bones were light like birds and has progressed since than. This has put a stop to one argument, that gravity must have been different in the Jurassic otherwise such huge beasts could not have walked yet alone waved their tails around or run like mad in pursuit of prey. Big beasts pop up in the fossil record at diverse moments in time – even as recently as the Pleistocene.
However, scepticism remains – see for example https://crev.info/2020/01/questioning-another-dino-bird/ … which is about feathered dinosaurs – and dinosaurs where the feathers are not too extravagant. The classicfication of dinosaurs as dinosaurs should perhaps on occasion be defined as birds rather than dinosaurs.
At https://crev.info/2020/02/desperation-to-keep-dinosaur-soft-tissue-old/ … which appears to be a rebuff of the February 18th post, two days ago – and the discovery of blood vessels in a T Rex haunch. Obviously, Creationists see no problem with the survival of blood vessels as they foresee dinosaurs as pre-flood creatures (and fairly recent in age). They are saying in this link scientists and evolutionists are desperate to explain soft tissue away in order to keep the gradualist narrative alive and kicking. Needless to say the Young Earthers are not impressed and it seems we have two extremes – old earthers and young earthers (and a big hole between them). Robert adds to the debate by saying paleontologists and mainstream in general require any fossil to fit into a preconceived plan (uniformitarian geological time) but what if, instead, they looked at any fossil as an isolated record (without trying to fit it on to the evolutionary tree of life). Perhaps there was a pre-catastrophe earth with a biosphere one can hardly imagine – extremely complex and varied. It is just a matter of luck that some life forms have survived and others have not. The fossil record, he continues, is really a record of catastrophic events. What died in those catastrophes is what we have as fossils. It is not a matter of survival of the fittest, he says, or necessarily the products of a divine creation. The time scale, we might add, is irrelevant – but obviously a lot older than a Noachian flood. Scientists, including geologists, learn to live with numbers learnt during tuition. They are just compartments in which to box up the various fossils or layers of rocks.