Re: What do we know

[pwillis@ozemail.com.au (Paul Willis)]

>Paul Willis presented a list of only three things we KNOW for sure
>about dinosaurs.  I'll have to disagree.

So would I actually.

>There are many ways of knowing something besides seeing it directly.
>Moreover, seeing something directly does not always mean we know it.
>Our eyes and memories are notoriously fallible.

Agreed

>Yes, there are countless things about dinosaurs that are based mostly
>on speculation and imagination.  However, I think I could draw up a
>very long list of things we DO know about dinosaurs.  For example, we
>not only know about the existence of the fossils Paul lists; the same
>fossils (when well preserved) allow us to draw many reliable
>conflusions about dinosaurs, including how they looked and behaved,
>where and when they lived, etc.

Agreed, but I am just suggesting a little caution about these conflusions.

>For example, we know that Stegosaurus
>had large plates and spikes, even if some workers dispute (or did at
>one time) exactly how many, or in what arrangement.  We know that
>theropods and ornithopods generally walked about on two legs, and that
>sauropods and other groups walked on all fours, from studying both
>their skeletons and their footprints.  We know that most dinosaurs did
>not habitually drag their tails--unless the trackway record is very
>biased against tail draggers.  I think one could add many other things
>to this list.  If these are speculations or interpretations, they are
>such reliable ones that they still belong in the category of "knowing."

No debate here, this is all good stuff so far.

>    I agree that there are a lot more things we don't know about
>dinosaurs than things we do know, and that that in many cases what
>seems obvious to one worker may appear highly speculative to another.
>But I think most paleontologists could agree on a list of things known
>about dinosaurs that would be considerably longer than Paul's.
>Otherwise, we may as well question our own existence.

I may have been taken out of context here (or, more likely, I
expressed myself sloppily) and, unfortunately, I don't keep records of
postings so I am not sure exactly what I said (or even which post it
was). However, my recollection of a post I put up about what was
within the bounds of science and what is pure speculation seem to
agree with what Glen has posted here.  I'm not sure that I actually
said that there were only three things we know (I wonder which three
these would be?) and I wouldn't have said that (again, my sloppy
expression seems to creep in here. And I fully agree that deductions
such as dinosaurs not being tail-draggers because of the persuasive
weight of evidence against the proposition is well within the bounds
of science.

What I was bemoaning was the more far-fetched, unfounded speculations
of dinosaur biology presented by some quaters as science when it is in
fact little more than fancy. I am talking about cases like flapping
stegosaurus plates here, or spitting dilophosaurus or the constitution
of family groups in some groups of theropods. These are speculations
presented by some alongside more rigourous science with out
distinction between the two. I see the David Norman bemoans the same
issue in a review of Red Raptor and The Lost World in this months
Scientific American.

One more stab at clarifying what I am getting at;

We know about dinosaur structure from their bones.

We can deduce how they moved form study of their bone.

Both of these steps are within the realm of science.

Some of us then proffer fantastic assumptions about dinosaur behaviour
based on neither the fossil evidence nor logical deductions from the
study of those fossils. That is outside of science and must be clearly
distinguished as such.

Cheers, Paul

pwillis@ozemail.com.au