ANCIENT SEA REPTILE GAVE BIRTH, DIDN’T LAY EGGS

PREGNANT FOSSIL SUGGESTS ANCIENT 
‘SEA MONSTERS’ BIRTHED LIVE YOUNG

Washington (AP) - The remains of a giant sea creature are providing the first proof that these prehistoric reptiles gave birth to their young rather than laying eggs.  Plesiosaurs, which lived at the time of dinosaurs, were large carnivorous sea animals with broad bodies and two pairs of flippers. Researchers have long questioned whether they would have been able to crawl onto land and lay eggs like other reptiles or gave birth in the water like whales. The newly unveiled fossil was originally discovered in 1987 in Logan County in Kansas. Encased in rock, it had been stored in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County until resources were available to separate the bones for display at the museum.  F. Robin O’Keefe of Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va., and the museum’s Luis Chiappe uncovered the bones of an adult plesiosaur (Plee’-see-uh-sawr) and the remains of a fetus inside her.

The researchers report on their analysis of the pregnant plesiosaur in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.  The museum dated the fossil, which is more than 15 feet long, to between 72 million and 78 million years ago. There had been evidence of live births in an ancestor of plesiosaurs. But the lack of proof for plesiosaur birth has been puzzling, said R. Ewan Fordyce, head of the geology department at the University of Otago, New Zealand, who was not involved in the research. “It would be hard to imagine these animals coming out onto land laying eggs somewhere,” he added, so arguing that all plesiosaurs were doing this is a reasonable hypothesis.  Scientists suggest a parallel between plesiosaurs and modern whales, also large animals that give birth to relatively big offspring. Like whales, they said, plesiosaurs may have formed social groups and tended their young.

A giant marine reptile was likely ready for her baby shower about 78 million years ago when she died.  The large size of the fetus, and the fact that the mother was only carrying one offspring, indicate that these marine reptiles gave live birth and may have invested a lot of time and energy into their offspring, similar to how humans invest years raising kids. The Śrīmad Bhagavatam, Ramayana, Mahabharata and other Vedic literatures often speak of fantastic creatures that may have once lived on this planet but science considers them myths and imaginary legends. Scientists should search for reliable knowledge in the Vedas.

WHAT DO THE VEDIC TEACHINGS TELL US?

Western scholars assert that the Bhagavatam was only written in the 9th century CE, the Ramayana in the 4th century BCE, and the Mahabharata between the 8th and 4th centuries BCE. But if this were a fact, then how did the writers of these books know about ocean-dwelling creatures, their size, their vicious aggression and their diets if those creatures had already been extinct for 1.5 million years?  Bhagavatam, Ramayana and Mahabharata all mention the existence of the Makara / Pliosaur and the Timingila / Megalodon, but where did the authors get their information?  Who told the Vedic authors about these creatures? ... Scientists and scholars will have to ponder this question, but for us it is simple - there have always been human beings on this planet from its earliest beginnings and the knowledge of all such things has been passed down thru the ages via the disciplic succession of gurus and disciples.

Śrīla Bhakti Gaurava Narasingha Mahārāja :
“Makara - Myth or Fact? - Dinosaurs in Srimad Bhagavatam”
Jul 10 2011 - Krishna Talk 127
Shri Narasingha Chaitanya Ashram
http://gosai.com/writings/makara-myth-or-fact-dinosaurs-in-srimad-bhagavatam