Spinosaurus, a new analysis suggests, was “The First Dinosaur Adapted for Swimming.” It was really big and really scary — on land or in the water:
At 50 feet long, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus exceeded the size of Tyrannosaurus rex by 9 feet. Its spines were at most 6.5 feet tall — around the average height of a professional basketball player. “It was an incredibly large dinosaur, especially as far as predatory dinosaurs go,” says Matt Lamanna, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh who was not affiliated with the study.
… What really makes Spinosaurus special are its unique adaptations that may have allowed the dinosaur to hunt underwater. Like crocodiles, Spinosaurus had a long narrow snout with nostrils mid-skull, perfect for submerging. It also had a second pair of openings, likely neurovascular slits that are also found in crocodiles. Spinosaurus had a long neck, like a heron or a stork. Large, cone-shaped teeth and powerful, clawed arms might have been used to catch and eat fish, a behavior supported by previous oxygen isotope analysis that pointed to Spinosaurus being a pescatarian.
All very cool, but here’s why this new analysis of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus is getting a lot of attention among those of us who spend time playing whack-a-mole with the lies of young-Earth creationism:
“It was a chimera: half duck, half crocodile. We don’t have anything alive that looks like this today,” says study co-author Paul Sereno, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Chicago.
As Hemant Mehta, James McGrath and Zack Hunt all noted, that description — “half duck, half crocodile” — is amusingly close to Kirk Cameron’s hypothetical “croco-duck,” which the child-actor-turned-fundie-apologist said would be necessary to prove the reality of evolution. Here’s Cameron making his infamous “croco-duck” argument on Fox News:
“Darwin said in order to prove evolution,” Cameron says, “… you’ve got to be able to prove transitional forms, one animal transitioning into another. And all through the fossil record and life, we don’t find one of these — a croco-duck.”
And with that, a smirking Cameron holds up a picture of a duck with the head of a crocodile poorly Photoshopped onto it, thereby proving the existence of God.
Poor Kirk Cameron is a willing, but not an able, spokesman for “scientific creationism.” What he’s shooting for here is the young-Earth creationists’ claim that the fossil record is full of missing links — that transitional fossils have never been found.
The professional scientific creationists — the folks who are well-versed in this stuff and make their living promoting it — know that’s a lie. And because they know it to be a lie, they understand how the lie is meant to work, and thus they’re able to tell that lie much better than Cameron. He believes it, but he clearly has no idea what it is he believes. So he goes for the “croco-duck,” which demonstrates about the same level of understanding as the ever-popular, “Oh yeah? Then why are there still monkeys? Hah!” argument.
The first response to the OhYeahStillMonkeysHah business has to be to point out that evolution does not suggest that humans came from monkeys. Or from apes. We share common ancestors with our fellow apes, but we are not directly descended from them.
The same thing needs to be said in response to Cam-Cam’s “croco-duck.” We will never find a transitional fossil that’s half-way between crocodile and duck because ducks are not descended from crocodiles. Go back far enough and they do share a common ancestor, but they’re very, very distant cousins.
The officially curious Emily Graslie explains this helpfully in a both post and video form. Yes, crocodiles are largely unchanged from the form in which they existed 83 million years ago, but that doesn’t make them “living dinosaurs,” because even though they lived during the age of the dinosaurs, they’re not dinosaurs.
“It’s all in the hips,” Graslie reminds us. Crocodiles, like Dimetrodons, have those sprawling out to the sides lizard-hips — unlike dinosaurs such as Spinosaurus, T. rex., or the ducks at the local petting zoo.
But the more important point here, as Graslie puts it in her Brain Scoop video “Dimetrodon Is Not a Dinosaur” — “You can’t be an ancestor of your cousin, or vice versa.” Crocs and ducks are cousins, so the search for a transitional form between the two is misguided.
When Dr. Sereno describes the Spinosaurus as “half duck, half crocodile,” he’s not talking about its ancestry or evolutionary development. He doesn’t mean that it’s the transitional croco-duck that the confused Kirk Cameron is triumphantly pointing out doesn’t exist.
Unlike Cameron, the professional hucksters driving young-Earth creationism — the Ken Hams and Al Mohlers of the world — understand enough about evolution and common ancestry to recognize that the search for a croco-duck is nonsense. They offer a more sophisticated version of Cameron’s “transitional forms” argument — one that is less ignorant and far less honest.
They recognize that their claim about a lack of transitional forms and fossils is simply not true. But they also recognize that doesn’t matter, because they can keep playing this game indefinitely in a kind of Zeno’s paradox of deliberate obtuseness. Zeno’s paradox originally involved a race between Achilles and a tortoise (not a dinosaur — note the hips), but those details aren’t important. Here’s a useful paraphrase of the key idea:
Suppose I wish to cross the room. First, of course, I must cover half the distance. Then, I must cover half the remaining distance. Then, I must cover half the remaining distance. Then I must cover half the remaining distance … and so on forever. The consequence is that I can never get to the other side of the room.
This is what the “transitional forms” shell game is meant to do when creationists raise it as an objection to evolution.
“Ah,” they say, “you claim that 2 evolved from 1, but you cannot show me any transitional form midway between them.” You show them 1½ and they say, “Ah, but you cannot show me any transitional form midway between 1 and 1½.” And so you show them 1¼, and they say “Ah, but you cannot show me any transitional form midway between 1 and 1¼ …” And on and on, to infinity and beyond.
The longer they play that game, the less possible it is to believe that they’re acting in anything like good faith. And they’ve been playing that game for a very long time.
Their steadfast refusal to draw the obvious conclusion forces us to draw an equally obvious conclusion: These are not honest brokers. They’re lying. On purpose. With intent to deceive.
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