Re: Dinosaurs and Their Environs

[pharrinj@PLU.edu]

On Fri, 12 Jan 1996, Ronald Orenstein wrote:

> >How much of a myth is the popular dinosaur/volcano association? 
> 
> >----- Amado Narvaez
> >      anarvaez@umd5.umd.edu
> 
> I suspect that the tendency to include volcanoes in dino illustrations goes
> back to the "when the earth was young" idea that everything that happened in
> the past happened at the same time.  
> 
> This fallacy also shows up in almost every "lost world" story, in which
> prehistoric creatures seem to hasve survived from almost every past age.
> 
> It can't hurt to give students an idea of the scale of earth's history -
> teach them not only how long ago things happened but how vastly far apart in
> time some of these events were from each other.  
> --
> Ronald I. Orenstein                           Phone: (905) 820-7886 (home)
> International Wildlife Coalition              Fax/Modem: (905) 569-0116 (home)
> Home: 1825 Shady Creek Court                  Messages: (416) 368-4661
> Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L5L 3W2          Internet: ornstn@inforamp.net
> Office: 130 Adelaide Street W., Suite 1940    
> Toronto, Ontario Canada M5H 3P5             

In my freshman year of high school I wrote a piece for my English class 
about Jurassic Park inaccuracies.  Of course, most of the dinos in the 
book were from the Cretaceous, but there was one from the Triassic:  
_Procompsognathus_ (which they kept referring to, rather annoyingly, as 
"procompsognathids").  Oddly enough, the planners of the park were 
pleasently surprised to learn that the "compys" liked to eat brachiosaur 
droppings.  This is indeed surprising, considering that 
_Procompsognathus_ was as far removed from _Brachiosaurus_, temporally 
speaking, as _Tyrannosaurus_ is removed from us!

     Nick Pharris