I will address some Frequently Asked Questions in this section. Since I can already guess at a few, I'm going to answer them now and add more as I get them.
Who/What/Where are you?
Not really important. I was a tour guide and mad scientist for two and a half years, and a "rock expert" for another two. I have no formal training in paleontology, astronomy, geology, or chemistry, but have been largely self-taught in all of these fields. I am not an expert and I don't recommend using this site for citation unless you really want to. As for where I am....I'm sure that means nothing.
So what makes you qualified to talk about dinosaurs like an expert when you just said you weren't?
A paleontologist is someone who studies dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures from fossil and trace evidence. You do not have to make money doing something to be knowledgeable about it. Thus, by reading this blog, you too are a paleontologist!
Why do you draw your dinosaurs with feathers?
From the fossil evidence we've recently uncovered, it seems that most, if not all, of the carnivorous dinosaurs were covered in feathers. There are some exceptions. Spinosaurus for example, with its massive sail, probably did not have or need feathers to regulate body temperature. But if you look at the bones of the meat-eating dinosaurs, you see that they are very much like birds. Even the four-legged dinosaurs have birdlike features such as beaks or similarly shaped hip bones.
What, even T. rex?
T. rex almost certainly had feathers, at least as a baby. Some paleontoligists say that it lost the feathers as it grew to adult size. We have discovered T. rex skin impressions that appear to be feather-less, but we just don't have enough information yet.
You know the Earth is only six thousand years old, right?
We do not know for sure how old the Earth is, but we do know it is around 4 to 5 billion years old.
So you're an evolutionist! How do you know anything about what happened before the Bible was written? You weren't there!
Neither were you. There are many religions and many myths about how and when the Earth came to be. To our best guess, none of these are correct. The Earth seems to have coalesced out of galactic debris shed from dying stars. Heavier elements like iron form the molten core of our planet, a super-heated swirling ball of liquid iron powers our world's magnetic field and warms the mantle, allowing the plates on the crust to shift and move. These plate tectonics caught earthquakes, volcanism, islands, and continental shifts. They changed the continents from one super landmass called Pangea to the configuration we see today and will continue to change them as time passes.
This does not mean your religion is wrong. And it does not mean that your particular god or gods are imaginary. It does mean that religious texts written centuries ago by humans who did not know what we know today made their best guesses, and they were mistaken. Science has a self-correcting mechanism, and this is why you see changes constantly as our understanding of the world deepens and our knowledge increases. We will never know everything, but asserting as fact that which cannot be proven is NOT SCIENCE and I will not discuss it further.
So where do we come from? How did the world "just happen?" Do the tides "just happen?"
Basically, yes. The tides are caused by the moon's gravitational pull on the Earth. As it revolves around us, it pulls on the oceans, and these bulges cause the tides. The moon seems to have been created when a large astronomical body struck our very young and still-molten planet, breaking off a chunk that, caught in the gravity of the proto-Earth, cooled to become the moon. Our moon is large enough to stabilize what would otherwise be an erratic wobble that would give us bizarre seasons and possibly prevent life from happening. We do not yet know how life began on our world, but we are working on it. It is OK to say "I don't know." It is OK to not know something. I know that "I don't know" isn't satisfying, but it is honest. The truth is what's important. I don't have all the answers. Sorry.
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