I’m a guy who knows his way around an embryo, and is also knowledgeable about evolution, and to a lesser degree am interested in space exploration, so this article title is major league clickbait to me: Dinosaur eggs with fossilized embryos on the Moon. Awesome!
It’s a rather funky weird image, but I’m curious to know how they collected embryos from the Moon. Were these found in rocks brought back by Apollo or some other probe that scraped up some lunar dust, or pebbles, somehow? I had to read the methods section to find out. No, they aren’t looking at samples. They’re looking at Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) images.
Their published images all include latitude and longitude (that picture above is from Lat. 38.39144, Lon. 321.00588), so you can go directly to the LROC database and look at it for yourself. Here it is, straight from the source.
Huh. There’s a crater there with some clutter in it. Is that it? It’s hard to tell, especially since the authors defy convention and don’t include scale bars in their images. But then you have to realize that the LROC camera has a best resolution of 0.5m per pixel, look at the number of pixels in the “embryo,” and it’s suddenly clear: that “egg” is about 20km across. It’s a heavily processed and pseudocolored photo of a lunar crater!
This is justification to assign a scientific name to them, in their minds.
The two fossils of dinosaur embryos described here have not been reported anywhere so far and may belong to different genera and species than the known dinosaurs of the Earth. We tentatively name them as Lunasaurussaxenaii (Gen. novelsi, Spp. novelsi) [the author’s name is Saxena, so he’s naming it after himself] and Chandrasauruspolaris(Gen. novelsi, Spp. novelsi) (‘Chandra’ is a Sanskrit word, meaning the Moon), respectively for reference.
He also indulges in some raving speculation about how they got there.
The images presented here could be the first direct evidence of presence of higher form of life on the Moon during some stage of its evolution and example of extraterrestrial life answering the Fermi Paradox (Sandberg et al., 2018). Since dinosaurs became extinct at the Cretaceous – Tertiary boundary period coinciding with a massive asteroid impact on the Earth, it may be possible that a few dinosaur eggs and fossils and other animal fossils may have been ejected from the Earth along with rocks and debris due to the impact and could have reached the Moon due to the huge force of the collision and pulled towards the Moon due to the lunar gravity. However, in that case, the eggs would have not remained intact. Alternatively, there could have been life on the Moon in various forms during its evolutionary history and large animals may have persisted for some time on the Moon after its separation from the Earth but vanished later on due to unfavourable ecological and atmospheric conditions and hostile climate on the Moon
Nowhere does he address the observation that these things are many kilometers across.
He’s got a substantial collection of articles, all published in cheap-ass pay-to-play journals, with many interesting claims based entirely on mangling and misinterpreting NASA images. For example, he thinks he has found a Hindu temple on the Moon.
The present report is the first record of discovery of a mysterious object with Sri Yantra like shape near the Shackleton crater on the South Pole of the Moon suggests of earliest attempts of colonization of the Moon by Hindus.
He also claims to have disproven the theory of relativity, which is rather mundane crankery, and of course he has a mathematical proof for the existence of God, which he illustrates with this pretty scrawl:
I tried to extract some sense from the text, but couldn’t find any. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what the hell he is babbling about.
Ed Conrad lives?
Ummm … how did such huge animals evolve on a Moon devoid of water or air? Unless the fossils are terrestrial in origin and were taken there on the same WWII Consolidated PB4Y-2 Privateer bomber which spirited Hitler away up there?
DINOSAUR ABORTIONS ON THE MOON COVERED UP BY BABY-KILLING LIBERAL CANCEL-CULTURE!!!
There’s your clickbait headline. Yer welcome…
Come on, we know all the dinosaurs are hiding on the backside of the moon.
Remember when we had involuntary commitment for the insane?
I bet a 20 km tall dinosaur could just jump to the moon.
You people are jerks. This is clear evidence that dinosaurs were spacefaring tens of millions of years before humans. Maybe they grew their young in chambers like the Green Martians.
Oh, man, this takes me back to the Journal of Irreproducible Results! They published the “photo quiz” where you had to guess astrophotography or microphotography, surface of the moon or embryo?
Great fun!
These people are lunasaurs. Mad as a sack of hammers.
I am so tempted to put the “trigger points” figure in my next presentation. Good thing you linked the paper for attribution.
Fossil dinosaur embryos – nonsense! That first pic is obviously a Cretaceous parrot baby.
Dinosaur schminosaur – that’s a Godzilla egg! Flung up there by King Kong!
Everything old is new again. Back in 1976 George H. Leonard wrote Someone Else Is on The Moon. The book reprinted a bunch of blurry NASA photos of the Moon, with Leonard’s annotations showing where alien stuff could supposedly be seen. Looking for the book online I saw someone suggest it may have been a spoof, and that Leonard later disavowed the book. Since he wrote a couple of apparently rather tepid sci fi novels it’s possible it was simply a cash in on the UFO fandom, and he didn’t believe what he wrote. But I’m sure it’s no surprise that some people still take the book seriously decades later.
Pareidolia, not just for the supernatural.
Besides, the giant moon bunny is lots bigger than those dinos.
The muslim Dawah crowd embarrass their more educated brethren by publishing images of long valleys on the moon (remnants of collapsed lava tubes) and proclaiming these scars prove the claims by Muhammed that the moon was seen being torn in half.
(The dawah are the muslims prozelyting for converts. They are just as dishonest as the anti-abortion christian activists).
I like good science fiction and hate bad science fiction. This is very bad.
The Giants Causeway in the British Isles was BTW built by real giants.
The extra-terrestrials have little reason to go to the moon.
The moon and Mars have only a tenth of the diversity of minerals you find on Earth, as the rocks have not been processed by plate tectonics (most of the iron ore was processed this way during the proterozoic).
If there were little green men, you would find them taking rock samples and looking for useful ore deposits instead of sexually assaulting people with low credibility.
You know, when the Australian wombats poop those cubical droppings? It is a racial memory of The Black Monolith.
That crater has a name — it’s Mairan A, whose diameter is 16 km. So you have overestimated just a bit!! Also, do I need to point out that the circular floor of Mairan A, where we see the Lunasaurus embryo, is barely half that diameter. So, an egg from (say) the KT event — one possibility suggested by the author — need only have been about 8 km wide when it impacted the moon. And, as the author notes, the egg would probably not have remained intact, so the absence of shell fragments is easily explained,
Historically, sexually assaulting low credibility natives had been a side hobby of resource-extracting colonizers of the human persuasion. Why should we expect extraterrestrials to act any different?
@Matt G, # 7: Ever see the Sci-Fi Channel movie “Anonymous Rex?”
#21: I stand corrected.
Not even moa’s had eggs that big and their eggs were bigger than any dinosaur’s.
The Muppet Show:
“Piiiigs iin Spaaaace!”
drsteve @ 22
Er… yes, but Greys do not have any external dangly bits.
It would be different If they were Japanese anime demons.
Or just ordinary demons – just google
“GAM 196: Alien Intrusion: Unmasking a deception” where the ‘demons-disguised-as-aliens’ get the full God Awful Movies treatment from Noah, Eli and Heath.
I think we can all agree that the worst crime here is his utter mangling of the poor Latin language and inability to come up with a Linnaean binomial that makes sense.
I mean “Lunasaurus” is okay for “moon lizard”, though it does combine the Latin noun for moon with the Latinised Greek “saurus” (lizard), where traditionally when dinosaurs are named one would use Latinised Greek for the whole thing (Selenesaurus).or for modern lizards completely Latin (lacerta lunaris).
But one doesn’t simply amend a poorly Latinised version of one’s name to this. If you want your name in it that becomes the species part of the binomial. Also, if your name ends in an A it becomes a first declension noun, so the genitive would end in -ae (Saxenae). The -ii ending is strictly for second declension nouns ending -ius. But he has no doubt seen neo-Latin names on binomials with this before.
Also, what’s with (Gen. novelsi, Sp. novelsi)? Surely you’ve already given it a genus and a species? And is that supposed to be “novel” but cod-Latinised? Latin already has a word for that – novus / nova / novum.
1/10, must try harder
Dinosaur embryo. No way. Clearly the thorax and legs of an arachnid, tail of a scorpion wrapped around onto Elmo’s face. There, aced that Rorschach test! Not sure why Elmo is featured in my worse nightmare of a ~10km long creature that nests on the moon. It is probably just a molted exoskeleton, and nothing to worry about. There can’t be that many crater shaped nests on the moon.
I think that he took a graph from another source and then wrote in as time goes to infinity spone goes to infinity.
Then I realized he needed to brush up on his cursive or stick to print.
Maybe this the embryo of a scorpion-horse-locust as described in the book of hallucigenic BS revelations written by John of Patmos.
@ 31, Scratch that- there were no fire-breathing Jews nearby…
It’s a nephilim- that explains the size.
It was thrown to the moon by Leviathan.
Seán Doran (sadly his youtube channel is now private) used Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera data to produce some fabulous 4K videos (Orbit the Moon, The Splendor of Arid Seas – A Voyage Around The Moon, Selene – Orbit the Moon).
They are about an hour long and it’s like you are floating above the moon looking down (the LRO is currently in a 50/80 km elliptical orbit but I believe it was in a 50 km circular orbit for the video data), music by Chris Zabriskie, a truly ethereal experience.
Earth rise is spectacular.
It’s artwork, evidenced by the side pieces.
Also, it’s a face, easily noticed if the image is rotated clockwise 90 degrees.
It’s probably an early study for the Face on Mars, where the artist decided against the side pieces.
dorght@29 is a bit off on some details of Arachnida, but on the right track of what this is. Obviously, Dr. Meyrs[1] published this to deflect any research into the fact that a female galactic spider has put its egg sack in orbit around Earth and one of the embryos is almost ready to hatch and drop down to begin feeding. In just a few more years the atmospheric temperature of Earth will be most conducive for dropping spider space tethers to the surface of Earth allowing quick descent and rapid spread across the world. Coordinating with the galactic spider using his lab to generate a spider corps to help her in this invasion has been Dr. Meyrs’ primary goal for decades. His secondary goal was to provide the best location for the first descenders, far from large military installations yet close enough to plentiful food sources to ensure a successful invasion.
[1] His real name to throw off any googlers looking for his background in early 20th century German biology experiments.
@21. rblackadar : “That crater has a name — it’s Mairan A, whose diameter is 16 km.”
Thanks for that. Save dme from looking it up here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mairan_(crater)
On wikipedia.
@20. birgerjohansson : You know, when the Australian wombats poop those cubical droppings? It is a racial memory of The Black Monolith.<
@21. rblackadar : “That crater has a name — it’s Mairan A, whose diameter is 16 km.”
@20. birgerjohansson : You know, when the Australian wombats poop those cubical droppings? It is a racial memory of The Black Monolith.
Accounting for their famed reputation for intelligence? (Sarc – wombat’s have kinda the opposite reputation here – which is rather unfair really.)
Also yeah, that’s right.
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-do-wombats-poop-cubes-scientists-get-bottom-mystery
Conical poo.
@23. christoph : “@Matt G, # 7: Ever see the Sci-Fi Channel movie “Anonymous Rex?”
I hadn’t. I checked wikipedia :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_Rex_(film)
Thanks!
Also looked on yoiutube fuinding this 1 min long trailer and this 9 mins long moview review by Bone Zone B Movie Reviews and, well, it looks better, more fun and more plausible than the dino embryo crater & Lunar Hindu temples ideas of the crank in the OP.
I wonder what happens at the radiologist. “Omg omg I’ve got a dinosaur GROWING ON MY LEG!!!!”
“Sir, that’s your patella”
Runs off to write paper about his special dinosaur dna. Re-names the patella after himself.
I didn’t understand what was going on until I saw the mathematics it was based on. Now it all makes sense.
Trying to think of what the aging universe would be more “saturated” with, and the only thing I can think of is the quantum vacuum.
Baryonic matter is decaying, and all the decay products are part of expanding space-time, meaning that there would be, at least by proportion, more quantum vacuum?
@ ^ jasonfailes : fading,slowly cooling heat energy and stray photons? Ever escalating entropy?