Old Space Shuttles and Modern Pterosaurs

image_pdfimage_print

I admit, it is a stretch to connect the Space Shuttle program with intestigations of reports of modern living pterosaurs. I also admit that I wrote another post, a few months ago, on my investigation “An Evolutionary Boundary.” But there are connections, and this deserves more attention.

On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up and was destroyed as it reentered the atmosphere, killing all astronauts aboard. The tragedy of those losses and the setback for that space program are not the subject here; it is about the survivors aboard the Columbia after it was destroyed. Yes “survivors,” for a scientific experiment involved a container of tiny worms, and those passengers did survive the crash.

It matters not that surviving worms failed to live long enough to encounter the humans who eventually recovered the worm container; the descendants of those worms did survive: Living worms were found therein. The point? Some worms survived the crash and were able to reproduce; and more to the point, small simple organisms survive better than large complex ones.

Before that Columbia tragedy, I had already given up on my original mathematical simulations involving populations of hypothetical organisms, not that there was any problem with it: I found a simpler method. But that earlier work was based on the observation that small-and-simple out-competes big-and-complex; that concept was obvious long before the Columbia crash (that tragedy dramatically proved the point, however).

I know that those things still do not tie space shuttles to modern pterosaurs, but there’s more.

My second project with mathematical simulations, the “Evolutionary Boundary,” lasted less than one year, but the results have influenced me to this day. They bolstered my confidence in the idea that Darwin’s common ancestry ideas (with the attendant assumptions about “ancient” extinct organisms) was incorrect, in fact ludicrously wrong; that helped give me the freedom to think in ways that made it possible for me to explore a remote tropical island in 2004, searching for living pterosaurs. And that played a role in the overall investigations that have bolstered the concept of modern pterosaurs, an idea that was more in the background of Western thought until the twenty-first century. We have now had two television programs (Destination Truth and Monsterquest) with episodes about the possibility of living pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea.

I admit that many Americans still keep the concept of modern pterosaurs only at the back of their minds, if they do even that. But the idea need not be referenced to a late-nineteenth-century newspaper story about cowboys in Arizona or a newspaper story about a pterodactyl in a tunneleven earlier, in France. Recent sightings, from around the world, prove the point: Those flying creatures are not extinct but very much alive.