Dinosaurs and Fish Lizards Keep Getting Bigger

Is it just my imagination, or are paleontologists finding more extremely large dinosaurs and such? There was a time that Brontosaurus was impressive, even having the name that means thunder lizard. Probably because you could hear it walking. Now it is dwarfed by other sauropods.

Indeed, scientists had to come up with impressive names to tack onto their discoveries, such as titanosaurs. Several more of these have been discovered. Curious, the impressive name game does not seem to happen to plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs, but a candidate for the largest of the latter has been presented.

Ichthyotitan severnensis, Wikimedia Commons / Ansh Saxena 7163 (PD), modified at PhotoFunia

Darwin's disciples are having a great time evosplaining the critters through the fiction of convergent evolution, a cheap rescuing device. After all, there is no evidence for dinosaur origins or ancestors — it is like they were created, not evolved. Rapid speciation was also mentioned, but that has nothing to do with evolution. It is something that biblical creationists accept.

The pre-Flood world had some truly massive dinosaurs, and the largest of them were in the group Sauropodomorpha. Within this group were titanosaurs, which include the gigantic Argentinosaurus that is estimated to have weighed over 100 tons. Not only were the titanosaurs the largest dinosaurs, but they also had a unique design showing “a characteristic ‘wide-gauge’ limb posture, in which the forelimbs and hindlimbs were angled out from the side of the body and the hands and feet planted on the ground far apart.”

You can read the rest if you step on over to "New Titanosaur Species Discovered in Uruguay and Argentina." Be sure to step back here for the second installment.

There are not many bones to work with for the new fish lizard, but the jaw bones that were found and some other considerations prompted paleontologists to give it a new genus and species name: Ichthyotitan severnensis. It may have been about the size of a blue whale. 

There are some interesting things in this find for creation science. One is the rocks and conditions of their burial mentioned by secular scientists may fit a creationary hypothesis. Another is the size of the critter. Reptiles do not stop growing, although they slow down after they reach maturity. Many creationists believe that animals lived longer before the Genesis Flood — which would have buried the creatures discussed in this post and the links.

Paleontologists have discovered portions of a giant ichthyosaur’s lower jawbone on Blue Anchor Beach at the southern entrance to the United Kingdom’s Bristol Channel. Although ichthyosaurs have a superficial resemblance to dolphins, which are mammals, they are actually reptiles. A similar ichthyosaur jawbone was discovered nearby at Lilstock in 2018. Long bones, originally thought to belong to dinosaurs, discovered near Aust Cliff at the northeastern end of Bristol Channel are also thought to possibly have belonged to giant ichthyosaurs. Details of the two jawbone discoveries can be freely read online, as well as a preprint of the paper describing the original discovery of the long bones near Aust Cliff.

To finish reading, see "A Giant Ichthyosaur: Largest Ever Marine Reptile?"