Good News/Bad News: Dinosaur Farts

Hello and welcome to good news/bad news, the segment in which I scour the news to find stories that I deem to be either good or bad. Neutral stories cannot do, for that goes against the very spirit of this day’s post, and my opinions on what constitutes good and bad may appear to be a little out of whack. You can trust me when I tell you that there’s a reason for that, and if you’re a regular reader then it’s probably quite clear.

First of all, just in case you’re not completely sick of me/other people shouting at you about it; go and see the avengers. It’s bloody amazing. I’m going to see it for the second time on Wednesday and I’m sure there are hundreds or thousands of others like me out there. For a movie that’s beaten Harry Potter’s box office records, even then, it’s a work of genius.

Congratulations Joss Whedon, you have not disappointed me this time. I also quite liked Thor and X-men so you’re doing well, and although I have yet to see Cabin In The Woods I’m sure it’s pretty damn great.

But yeah, I suppose that’s sort of news… ish… the box office bit was anyway, that’s some pretty good news if you’re a fan of the movie and you wanted to move smug little Harry Potter from his number one seat and tell him the books were better.

But I suppose some of you might not even consider this news story bad, probably because you don’t care about the dinosaurs, or more likely because it doesn’t really affect you.

I assure you however, that potentially causing global warming with your farts is an incredibly serious issue.

Especially when you’re a thirty foot long hunk of scales, muscle and stomachs.

What am I talking about?

Well it turns out that Sauropod dinosaurs, as you might have expected, were a way worse methane factory than the cows we have today warming our air and being culled for delicious, delicious steak.

Check this out!

Yes friends, this is science at its best, and also at its most likely to hit headlines. And I’m just the kind of sucker to gobble it up and fling it all over facebook, twitter and anywhere else that will give eyes to this blog.

So, working out the methane input of these huge, four-legged, long-necked creatures, a team of scientists in the UK were able to determine that Sauropods probably had a pretty significant impact on the global climate of the mesozoic era.

Look it up.

It’s not surprising when you think about it, but it is pretty bad news in the way that we have millions of animal species as well as many other organisms, pumping out methane and CO2 like it’s nobody’s business, and to counter that… well, we don’t really have the trees anymore.

As humans we have possession of technologies that should really be utilised in a way that helps out ol’ mother earth.

So get on that engineers!

 

 

Jurassic Murgh…

Quick new thursday epic post before I fall into the abyss that you normal people call sleep.

Apparently I can’t write it at the moment but you know what it is, even if your printer has about enough ink to print out ‘help me I have no ink’ in ink language. For the sake of security I must enforce the truth that such a statement does not mean that I have been withholding the use of ink from said internet user’s internet; only that they could not access it themselves.

This is the world of the lord; and if you went to Catholic school, you shall know that it’s answered; ‘thanks be to God’; and thank Yoshi too, because cartoon dinosaurs are awesome.

It sucks.

People should love dinosaurs more.

Stephen Spielberg!

We demand more dinosaurs!

Apologies…

I’m just going to be honest here and let you all know, people of the republic of internet, that I cannot summon the courage, or rather I can’t suppress the headache rippling through my head, to write the incredibly detailed, humorous and thought-provoking blog post I would have liked to do today.

Instead, here is a picture of a dinosaur with a mohawk.

Don’t Patronise The Dinosaurs

Just to give you another example of the ‘aliens will look like us’ misapprehension from science fiction, let me take you to one that was deemed to be outside of fiction, despite what evolution has told us about how differently organisms with similar capabilities can appear. And by capabilities, I’m not talking about the convergent evolution, that’s the opposite of what I refer to, that is, the evolution of flippers and wings etc. in many different species.

No, what I’m talking about once again is intelligence.

What you’re looking at here is my example.

On the right there is Troodon, a theropod dinosaur that is thought to have been very intelligent.

And on the left is… well, Troodon, but not really.

You see with a mixture of speculation and arrogance (not within cognition, but in more of a cultural bias) the assumption was made that if the dinosaurs had not been wiped out and Troodon had survived, well, the species would have evolved further with intelligence as an evolutionary pressure and the end result would be this.

It is a false assumption however, to think that with intelligence comes a humanoid appearance.

When we look at crows, octopi, elephants and dolphins do we see the human form reflected in their morphology?

I think not.

And even if the belief that God made man in his image drives home the idea that all intelligent creatures will be in God’s and therefore our image, surely what we can observe in the natural world tells us otherwise?

Come back to me when elephants are walking on two legs and have Chris Martin under their skin.