"Dinosaur" is a fashionable word of abuse. For many people it epitomises everything that is antiquated, old-fashioned, dull-witted. We see that perception when it is used by spin-doctors and the media to describe awkward ex-politicians! With reference to the creatures themselves, many members of the public view the demise of the dinosaurs as the inevitable consequence of their "primitiveness". Palaeontologists like Stephen Jay Gould deride notions of progress through evolutionary time, but such views stubbornly persist in the public consciousness. Modern-day animals are regarded as somehow "more advanced" than those that have become extinct. However, this idea is mistaken. Dinosaurs may be extinct, but it is difficult to regard them as "primitive" in any meaningful sense. On the contrary, they display innumerable features, many of which were mentioned in BBC TV’s Walking With Dinosaurs, that point to an origin by intelligent design.
Take Stegosaurus for instance. This dinosaur gets its name, which means "roofed reptile", from the large bony plates that run along its back. At one time these were thought to be defensive structures and there was considerable controversy about how they were arranged in life. Reconstructions often placed them in a single row along the back, or even sticking out sideways to protect the flanks of the animal.
However, in 1976 these views were challenged by palaeontologist Jim Farlow.1 Close examination shows that the surface of each plate is riddled with tiny grooves, and cross-sectioning reveals a honeycomb of spaces rather than solid bone. This indicates that each plate was richly supplied with blood vessels, a fact that is difficult to explain if they were intended as armour. Farlow proposed instead that the plates acted as radiators and solar panels to allow the animal to regulate its body temperature. Stegosaurus used its blood in the same way that we use water in our household central heating systems. Dr David Norman of the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge comments:
"He was able to back up this proposal by wind tunnel experiments, which also had a bearing on the probable arrangement of the plates. The tests showed that the optimal design for the plates if they were used as radiators was approximately a diamond shape - as indeed they were. It also showed that the best arrangement of the plates for heat loss and heat uptake was in a staggered series of two rows."2
Note Norman’s statement about "optimal design". Evolutionists may not believe in intelligent design but they find the language difficult to avoid! Walking With Dinosaurs suggested an additional function for these blood-filled plates - as a colourful warning to predators. The programme showed a Stegosaurus warding off an attacker by pumping the plates full of blood so that they flushed red.
We can also perceive intelligent design in dinosaur posture, of which there were two main types.3 The bipedal dinosaurs were the more lightly built. Their legs were often long, relatively slender, and would have permitted fast running. The foot was held in a digitigrade ("toe-walking") position which increased the strength of the leg and was also energy efficient because it meant that the body did not have to be raised and lowered each time the animal took a stride. Such dinosaurs had compact chests and very upright necks so that the tail did not have to be extremely heavy as a counterbalance. The bipedal design is seen in the carnivorous theropods (such as Tyrannosaurus) and the herbivorous ornithopods (such as Iguanadon). On the other hand, the quadrupedal dinosaurs, which tended to be larger, had stout pillar-like legs designed to carry their great weight. The bones of the foot were arranged in much the same way as in modern elephants, and the heel was a thick fibrous pad that artificially raised the foot bones off the ground. This was also an energy efficient design, preventing the creature from having to lift the entire body weight up and down with each step. The quadrupedal design is typified by the giant sauropods (such as Diplodocus) which were constructed like suspension bridges. The front and back legs are the upright towers of the bridge and the backbone is the road running between them. The long neck was counterbalanced by the long tail. Along the backbone ran a massive, slightly elastic tendon:
"This arrangement allowed these dinosaurs to have an economical system for supporting both neck and tail, which did not require vast amounts of muscular power. In life these animals would almost certainly have been able to stand at rest with both neck and tail suspended clear of the ground with very little effort."4
In the biomechanics of these dinosaurs we see the application of sound engineering principles. Similarly remarkable adaptations are displayed by the flying reptiles (pterosaurs) and marine reptiles (ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs) that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs. Pterosaurs were highly sophisticated flyers. The fourth finger of the pterosaur hand was greatly elongated, and this served as a support for a tough yet flexible wing. The weight of the body was minimised by a lightly constructed skeleton of hollow bones. Some of the pterodactyloids - a short-tailed group of pterosaurs - were gigantic, with wingspans of 12 metres or more, and it is surely a tribute to their designer that such creatures were able to take to the air at all! Ichthyosaurs, with their porpoise-like streamlined bodies, were equally well designed for life in the oceans. This is true even of the earliest forms such as Grippia from the Early Triassic and Mixosaurus from the Middle Triassic.5,6 The genus featured in the BBC TV series was Ophthalmosaurus, which had a very long, slender snout and particularly large eye sockets. This design would have suited an animal living in low light conditions. Surrounding the eye was a circular array of bones which is thought to have maximised its focusing capability.
The recognition of such exquisite design features in living things presents a challenge to the theory of evolution. The neo-darwinian mechanism consists of natural selection acting upon random mutations. A major stumbling block, however, is the complete absence of any modern-day examples of mutations that increase functional genetic complexity. Even mutations that are observed to be beneficial in terms of survival result from a loss of information from the genome or a reshuffling of information that already exists. It is therefore a matter of considerable faith to believe that the neo-darwinian mechanism can produce the remarkable adaptations that we see in the living world, including those evident in the dinosaurs and their contemporaries.
Paul Garner (December 1999)
References
- Farlow, J.O. Plates of the dinosaur Stegosaurus. Science 1976, Volume 192, pp. 1123-1125.
- Norman, D. Dinosaur! Boxtree Limited, London, 1991, p. 172.
- ibid., pp. 148-155.
- ibid., p. 154.
- Norman, D. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, Salamander Books, London, 1985, p.178.
- Benton, M.J. Vertebrate Palaeontology. 2nd edition. Chapman & Hall, London, 1997.
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