http://gh.gresham.k12.or.us/~currier/Bizarro%20re%20dinosaurs.jpg.
Questions & issues to consider:
In light of this report, what will be your reaction to the next dinosaur exhibit you view? Explain.
Consider the short reading you read and summarized earlier this semeser titled, "Evaluating Scientific Claims." What are some questions that you would want to pose to the scientists and museum exhibit creators about the new exhibits? Why would those questions be important to you?
What is your reaction to the argument presented for a shorter tail for tyrannosaurus rex? Do you find it convincing or credible? Why or why not?
What is your reaction to the following quote from the article? "These bones begin to dictate to you the way that they want to be put back together again," says Fraley, "the way they want to be lifted up or held."
12 comments:
I think that the comic illustrates a very good point. All of our information and interpretation of dinosaur theory is subjective. Scientists truly do not know what dinosaurs are like. They must take the liberty to imagine what they could be like. Is it so unreasonable to imagine dinosaurs dancing? Has anyone ever seen a pet “dance”? Do animals have mating dances? Our view of dinosaurs.. Pause that for one second. The subject of my response is the interpretation of the life of a dinosaur. However to even have that subject I must assume that dinosaurs even exist. Here I am plugging away that, “Who says dinosaurs can’t dance?” and all the time there is was right in my face. “Who says there were dinosaurs?” I have heard about “dinosaurs” that were thought to have some bone structure until someone thought that they should have a different one. The article talks about how they now think that the T-Rex should have a shorter tail. There is really no way to know what kind of a tail he had. There is really no way to know if Dinosaurs really did even exist. I mean, sure they have bones, but all kinds of animals have bones. If you gave me an assortment of different creatures bones I could come up with a pretty mean looking beast that could fly, swim, climb trees and bite elephants in half. Who knows if the “scientists” haven’t done that do any degree. The article itself admits that there is a certain amount of art that goes into dinosaurs. Some people would say, “There are countless fossil records of dinosaurs.” Really, how do you know that bones that were found make up the body that we have put to it? How do we know that they weren't fuzzy? Where are all the dinosaurs now? What happened to them? How do you know that happened? Upon considering the art and interpretation involved in creating the dinosaur, it would lend me to move books concerning dinosaurs from the science shelf's to the fanstasy section.
I thought it was most interesting in the article when one of the scientists remarked that exhibits in the past showed things like "disarticulated" spines. She specifically said that those who put the bones together into a display had to put the bones in such a way that they would have thrown the dinosaurs back out...because they thought that was how it should go. She doesn't say that there was scientific evidence that the spines should be contoured a certain way, or that the bones fit together well in that way. She actually says that they didn't fit well that way at all, but the people making the display were sure that was how they should go. Because we've never seen a live dinosaur, we get these ideas about them that must be a composite of all the crazy animals we can recall. Because those people working on the exhibit had seen other animals with their vertebrae aligned a certain way, they assumed that must be the way with dinosaurs. They ignored important clues because they needed to superimpose their predispositions in order for the dinosaur to make sense to them. I think we do this a lot with the unfamiliar. As we try to make sense of it, we pull from other experiences and see if they fit. When something is so completely different, like a dinosaur, we often still try to make it fit the mold. I know from studying biology that living organisms have complex structures that oftentimes only fit in the exact way they were created...so we should be able to piece together the skeletal systems of dinosaurs based on how the bones must have functioned and how they work together. However, we cannot discover how their skeletal systems might be so very different from other animals if we try to make them resemble those skeletons with which we are most comfortable.
This article made me realize how much we rely on scientists and others for information. Is it really such a shock that the T-rex' tail is shorter? I don't see why that matters. The article said that there are no markings on the ground of the tail dragging after the footprints, and the only reason I can think that this is a break through discovery that the tail is shorter is because of how dinosaurs are presented in movies and the media. In movies like "Land before Time" and "Jurrasic Park" the dinosaurs are created through artists and presented to us film viewers who are taking their word for how a dinosaur really looks because we ourselves have not seen one because they are extinct. So then how would THEY know what a real dinosaur looks like? Shouldn't they have known that the tail was shorter all this time if it has been studied for many years? The bones are evidence that dinosaurs exhisted, but even then it is questionable. After seeing the comic strip I thought it was funny because people question dinosaurs and the comic strip just seemed to mock that even more because no one knows what dinosaurs were really like.
okay this is really weird cuz i assume alot the scientists are right all the time and know what they're talking about and when i come across something like this where what i was told isnt correct i kinda wonder why bother believing anything they say? its like every couple years the information changes and more evidence is found to prove what we know....or what we thought we know, wrong I wonder if they'll get to a point where no other explanations can be reached or are the possibilities infinite? now next time i go to a meusem ill probubly question everything and wonder if what im seeing is actually the truth.
but you cant really blame them because scientists go off the information they're given and must find conclusions based on their findings. but is it cheating if they take an educated guess? who knows how many things in this world scientists used educated guesses on. does this make their findings less accurate? I think wwhat it does is allow everyone to witness that science is always changing and we shouldnt always count on things to be 100% accurate. we shouldnt let our minds get comfertable with just one idea because one day it could all change.
I think that an interesting question was brought up about being able to trust anything ever said by scientists. But, if we could never trust anything that science turns up, then why even study it in the first place? There has to be enough evidence in order to form a conclusion. Obviously some of the conclusions are a little bit off, but there was always justification and the main intent of science seems to be to try to explain the world we live in. If that is true, then why would they purposfully decieve us? If the intentions are good and there is evidence to back up a claim, why not believe it (as long as there is the knowledge that the new discovery may not be the whole truth)? I think that the comic strip may also be mocking the idea that there are people who believe in the craziest things and say that they are right because no one can prove them wrong.
Scientists? Preachers of truth, observers of the universe, the light of our intellectual darkness? I would refer to them the ‘middle men’. They are making the deductions to present to because frankly we cannot decide for ourselves. But how could we? The average person knows little to nothing about dinosaur fossils, but scientists must have some idea, and that is the only idea. They are the ones to debate and render a new conclusion if applicable.
Now, what is the point of all this, I mean, trying to figure out what dinosaurs looked like? No matter what WE think they looked like or acted like is not going to alter the past. The history of these dinosaurs is set, it’s done, it’s the truth. So why do we need to discover it, what will be the impact of that? Well, the only thing I could come up with is that we (the human race) would then have the truth vision of what dinosaurs were and how they acted. So, this quest for discovery seems like an act of self indulgence, where scientists are middle men attempting to satisfy themselves and the public. In that case, arrange those dinosaur skeletons any way that satisfies you to be true....
Dinosaurs have always held a very weird place in my life. I’m not sure if they ever really existed. I believe in a higher maker and I also believe that after we were made that the maker just let nature run it’s course and see what kind of trouble we could get into by ourselves. In saying that I would say that being dinosaurs lived millions of years before humans (according to scientist) that dinosaurs never existed before humans. Dinosaurs make any religion believing in a “God” that created man first a total lie from the start. If dinosaurs exist than Christianity can not. Because I do not believe that any “God” would make something just to kill it, sense dinosaurs died so quickly. It just doesn’t all fit together. To me Dinosaurs are just scientist needing more people to fill their museums and pay their rent. Survival of the Fittest, right?
Agree with Oluchi, i believe a lot of not most of what scientist tell us, and if they can just change theyre minds like that how do know what to believe or why believe them in the future when later on they may decide to change their idea. It also brings up a good point. Scientist assumed that Dinos were mean creatures that set out to kill, going with what Cody said how do we know that their huge teeth werent like our Apendex, just something that has been stuck in our body with no meaning, something we could live without. Also is these bones have been getting dug up for years why all of sudden, after seeing millions of these, decide now that the tails must be shorter. It takes me back to the beginning of the year when scientist changed their minds about Pluto being a planet, its now a moon...why?
I don't tend to take dinosaurs very seriously. They just seem too outrageous to have actually existed. And all scientist have to go on is some jumbled bones and their imagination. I don't envy their position. They have to tell the past from a bunch of old rocks. And the scientific community relies on their accuracy, but they have no way to tell if they're doing it right.
This article is very interesting. Whenever I have seen dinosaurs on tv or in movies I automatically thought that that was the way that they acted and looked. I had never been shown anything different and so never questioned their movements or structure. It is hard to put together dinosaurs becuase unlike puzzles they don't have a defined border and so much of the construction is left to guessing. No matter how many times they redo the bones they will not get them exactly right. Why do they continue to rebuild them if they are not even completely sure of the way in which the dinosaurs were proportioned or how they move. I think changing the bones and rearranging them is superfluous. If I go to an exhibit that they redesign with dinosaurs I will take what they do with a grain of salt. I think we should do that with everything involving math and science because they are constantly changing and the facts that the experts build up are unstable, because they may be proven wrong shortly after.
I think that the point the article brought up should be obvious and could have been discovered long before this. No one alive, regardless of whether or not they are a scientist, has ever seen a living dinosaur, so how can anyone know for sure how they lived or what they looked like? We can only make estimations based on the biology of animals we know today. It is true that we can see a lot of similarities between dinosaurs and some modern species, like reptiles, but how can we be sure that the dinosaur physiology was not completely different from anything we could imagine today. What today makes something a reptile with scales could have created a very different animal millions of years ago. This is why we cannot make assumptions with our knowledge and take things as truth without logically thinking through whether or not the evidence we have is plausible , because then there will almost always be flaws in our collection of knowledge.
I think it's interesting that the comic is kind of making a spoof of other claims that people have had where one of their main arguments is that no one can prove that it did not happen. This comic kind of shows the absurdity of that statement because then almost any claim could be made. I think that we have to trust scientists because their purpose is to learn more about our life and our world, so they won't purposefully decieve us. We just have to bear in mind that it is very possible for scientists to make mistakes or not see all the facts. We shouldn't discredit science just because they can't prove something to a point where it can't be denied.
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