Jurassic Park dino found, according to reports in BBC News and ScienceDaily 2 May 2017 and PeerJ, 2017; 5: e3217 DOI: 10.7717/peerj.3217.
Philip Mannion of Imperial College London and colleagues in France have studied a dinosaur fossil that has been languishing in a storage crate in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, since the 1930’s. It is a sauropod, a large, long necked plant eater, from the group that includes the massive Titanosaurs.
It has been named Vouivria damparisensis, relating to ‘La vouivre’, a local folklore legend about a winged serpent, and Damparis, the name of the village in France where it was found. Damparis is in the Jura region of eastern France. The dinosaur is dated as “Late Jurassic” approximately 160 million years old. According to Philip Mannion, “It’s the earliest member of a group that includes Brachiosaurus – one of the most famous dinosaurs we know – one of the prominent animals in Jurassic Park”.
Mannion commented to the BBC: “It starts to give us an idea that these animals were evolving much earlier than the fossil record previously has indicated. This pushes back a lot of origin times for a range of sauropod dinosaurs based on our understanding of how these different species related to one another”.
He also told the BBC, “We don’t know what this creature died from, but millions of years later it is providing important evidence to help us understand in more detail the evolution of brachiosaurid sauropods and a much bigger group of dinosaurs that they belonged to, called titanosauriforms”.
According to ScienceDaily, “The re-classification of Vouivria as an early titanosauriform will help scientists to understand the spread of these creatures during the Early Cretaceous period, a later period of time, after the Jurassic, around 145 – 100 million years ago”.
Editorial Comment: The only reason scientists believe Brachiosaurs “were evolving much earlier than the fossil record previously has indicated” is that this creature was classified as Jurassic, whereas most other titanosauriforms are classified as Cretaceous. However, the real reason this creature was classified as Jurassic is that it was found in the Jura Mountains.
Note well: the names given to rock layers do not mean millions of years. They mainly refer to the location that rocks with these fossils were originally described, e.g. Jurassic from the Jura Mountains, Devonian, from Devon in western England, Permian, from the region around Perm in Russia. Some refer to the composition or appearance of the rock, e.g. Cretaceous means chalky, Carboniferous means full of carbon, and Triassic means three colours.
Many of these names were originally given by early geologists who believed in creation and Noah’s flood, rather than long ages and an old earth. The millions of years were imposed on them later.
We predict this fossil will tell us nothing about the evolution of Brachiosaurs. It was a fully formed Brachiosaur, and its similarity to Cretaceous Titanosaurs does not mean it was going to evolve into any one of them.
Evidence News vol. 17, No. 8
17 May 2017
Creation Research Australia
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