Inquiry into Nature in the Spirit of John Ray
As a follow-up to a class discussion of the nature and validity of historical and experimental science, I came into class yesterday and posed three questions to my students: Why were T. rex’s arms so short? Does repeated head trauma on the football field cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)?, and Why do our fingers wrinkle […]
Dinosaur eggs are surprisingly (to the non-biologist) similar in size. Even the very largest dinosaurs laid eggs that were hardly any bigger than the largest eggs found today. These are observations from the fossil record and these observation make sense biologically even though all we see are fossilized eggs. Eggs are limited in the size they attain for several reasons but one of the most important is that the embryos in the eggs must have oxygen to grow.
This is a follow-up to my previous post on the 15 juvenile dinosaur fossils found in a nest. In that post I mentioned one of the explanations by flood geologists (ie. young earth creationists) for the presence of fossilized dinosaur eggs in the fossil record is that dinosaurs somehow escaped the initial stages of […]
Another remarkable fossils find has been reported in the past few days. This involves 15 complete or nearly complete fossils of juvenile dinosaurs all preserved in what is apparently a large 2-3 foot wide nest. I have obtained the original journal article that described this fossil find in detail. The paper “A nest […]
This is part of a continuing a series of posts on John Ray’s correspondences. Quotes are from the publication of Ray’s letters (Further Correspondence of John Ray) edited by Robert W. T. Gunther and printed for the Ray Society in 1928. The first is from a letter to Mr. Edward Llwyd at the Museum of […]
