New dinosaur species is a missing link

[AsahinaKimi]

It's fitting that a place called Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, would yield the discovery of a scary-looking creature. But it's not a ghost - it's a dinosaur.

This dog-sized, ferocious-looking critter is called Daemonosaurus chauliodus, which means something along the lines of “buck-toothed evil lizard,” says Hans-Dieter Sues, lead author of the published research describing this dinosaur, and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

The illustration above compares the head and neck with a quarter. You can see that it has a short snout and enormous front teeth.

Scientists found the skull and neck of this previously unrecognized dinosaur, and described it in a study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

This dinosaur provides a link between what paleontologists consider "early" and "later" dinosaurs. There's a gap in the fossil record between the oldest known dinosaurs, which walked or ran on their hind legs about 230 million years ago in Argentina and Brazil, and other predatory dinosaurs that lived much later. Daemonosaurus chauliodus helps fill in a blank in dinosaur history.

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/12/new-dinosaur-species-is-a-missing-link/?hpt=C2

[RandySF]

1. Did Noah ride it?

[Puzzler]

2. Good Lord, the anti-evolutionists are out in full force in the blog's comment section

[AsahinaKimi]

3. ai yaaaaaaah you are so right

Richard Head:Sarah Palin says the earth is 4000 yrs old.I'm going with her.

John

Was this dog-sized creature, the remains of which were discovered recently in New Mexico, one of the animals that died about six thousand years ago in the great flood? It is probably just as well that none exist today. Visiting our national parks would be much different today if those guys were still roaming around. Maybe that's what we need; a natural enemy to keep the population in check.

blue

Oh God, you silly prankster putting those fossils there to fool us into thinking the Earth was older than 6000 years...

cynos

In the Book of Job there is a passage that could be construed as describing a dinosaur. Calling it Behemoth, God refers to an animal that moves its tail like a cedar tree. This might require someone to believe that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, however.

America, see what we have become?

[provis99]

8. I think you could apply Poe's Law to some of those.

I'm thinking trolls posing as religious freaks posted a lot of these.

[Rex]

4. Does that dinosaur have a mullet?

Clearly didn't come from no monkeys butthole.

[A HERETIC I AM]

5. Party in the back, nasty, chomping, scary, toothy business in the front. n/t

[Rex]

7. Clearly this is a hoax; I can see a coin hovering below

his jawbone. Those dam scientists and their tricks of magic! Everyone knows dinosaurs used the bartering system.

[Archae]

6. It is *NOT* a "missing link"

That term is a misleading but popular term used by the scientifically ignorant, most notably in the media.