Inconsistent Sadness over Dinosaur Ailment

by Cowboy Bob Sorensen

This post will have a rather substantial interruption, since one thing led to another in my research. While going down rabbit holes can be fun, it can be a huge distraction for this child (and many other folks). The topic is how secular scientists were sad about a disease found in a fossilized dinosaur. I searched for news of a fossil where a hadrosaur was injured by a T. rex before it took a dirt nap. Stay with me while I discuss a snarky anti-creationist, okay?

Sauropod, Flikr / tadekk (CC BY 2.0)

Plaintive Paleontologists

There are advertisements designed to tug at viewers' heart strings by showing suffering animals, you can help by giving them money (use caution and check them out first). Sure, those are living things, and decent people don't want to see them suffer. But why would researchers grab tissues over a sauropod fossil? It is demised. It is no more. It is an ex-sauropod.

The sauropod showed signs of having a painful disease, and they speculated about how awful everything was before "Dolly" died. Yes, they named it after Dolly Parton. Because reasons and stuff. The sauropod was of an unknown type, and its sex was unknown. There are other dinosaurs in the fossil record that showed ailments in the past, but I found no mention of scientists turning on the waterworks over them.

Intermezzo — An Anti-Creationist Dispatched

I was looking for something on how a fossil was found showing the results of a dinosaur fight. There are several, but one at Creation Ministries International caught my attention. A Tyrannosaurus rex was in a fight with another, and it was badly injured. "Sue" was named after the fossil hunter that made the find.

There are anti-creationists who look for excuses to disparage creation science ministries. The CMI article referenced above that described the condition of Sue the T. rex was criticized by Franklin Koch (in a site that has not been updated since 2009). He complained that a link in Dr. Sarfati's article did not take him to the expected place, and he apparently felt compelled to write a hit piece.

Is he new to teh interwebs? Links change. I've had to use link checkers to find out which of my thousands of links are no longer valid, and try to correct them; it's a bane of websites and weblogs. Also, Franklin's piece appeared in 2009 according to the page source.

The Wayback Machine had been available since 2001, so mayhaps he would have found the page in question like I did. (His page is archived there as well.) However, a link was broken that was referenced in the article at CMI. It mentioned Sue's injuries and a tooth fragment embedded in a rib, and this may be the original reference. If not, it's mighty close and supports the article. Here's another site with information on that T. rex, but it's definitely not creation science material.

Before disparaging people about things on the web, people like Franklin need to do their homework.

Return to the Topic — Why Cry?

Dolly may have had aspergillosis, a fungal disease that would have been extremely painful. Feeling sorry over it is inconsistent from an evolutionary worldview. Darwin's views mean that death created new life forms. Hey, survival of the fittest, humans climbed to the top of the heap and can do whatever we please. Other things die, including the weak, old and infirm humans. To use the vernacular: too bad, so sad.

But we do have compassion on other people and creatures, and make efforts to take care of them and alleviate suffering. That's because we are created in the image of God! Secularists tacitly admit their naturalistic paradigm fails, and they are standing on the Christian worldview — beginning in Genesis.

Scientists described the first evidence of a possible respiratory illness in a fossil. The common soil fungus Aspergillis can infect birds and reptiles today. The resulting disease, also called aspergillosis, causes the trachea’s soft tissues to attach to nearby bones. This causes odd bone bumps—the subject of discovery in a dino nicknamed Dolly. But the human sympathy that these scientists expressed over Dolly’s presumed disease draws at least as much attention as the fossil itself.

To read the rest (which is much shorter than you've already done), click on "What's So Sad About This Dino's Disease?"