Joel Kontinen
In 2003, palaeontologists from the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Illinois unearthed a dinosaur they thought looked like a tiny cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex. Half the size of the notorious killer, they dubbed it Nanotyrannus.
But then some researchers began having doubts. What if Nanotyrannus was a juvenile T. rex?
After all, older specimens of many animals look very different from the young.
This was not the first fossil of a smaller Tyrannosaur that was found. Disagreement about its status had begun decades earlier.
In 2009 National Geographic aired a documentary called Dinosaurs Decoded. It claimed that a third of all dinosaur species never existed. It suggested that Nanotyrannus was a young T. rex.
Later, researchers said that Torosaurus did not exist. They suggested it was an adult Triceratops.
Seen from a creation perspective, these developments mean that Noah had to take far fewer dinosaur kinds on the Ark than previously thought.
Nanotyrannus should also remind us that it is often very hard to draw conclusions from old bones that cannot speak for themselves.
This also applies to fossils purported to belong to our family tree.
Even some Darwinists acknowledge that our (assumed) evolution is a difficult puzzle. The existence of Australopithecus sediba, for instance, makes it a mess.
When it comes to dinosaurs, we would do well to remember that with radiocarbon (C-14) and soft tissue, they certainly are our friends, helping to refute the old dogma of millions of years and uphold the historicity of Genesis.
Source:
Riley, Alex. 2016. Meet Nanotyrannus, the dinosaur that never really existed. BBC Earth (17 August).
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