Posted on 05/03/2011 9:41:13 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
Almost 50 million years ago, ants the size of hummingbirds roamed what is now Wyoming, a new fossil discovery reveals. These giant bugs may have crossed an Arctic land bridge between Europe and North America during a particularly warm period in Earth's history.
At about 2 inches (5 cm) long, the specimen is a "monstrously big ant," said Bruce Archibald, a paleoentomologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who reported the discovery today (May 3) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Though fossils of loose giant ant wings have been found before in the United States, this is the first known full-body specimen.
The fossil ant is from a well-known fossil site in Wyoming called the Green River Formation, but it had been sitting in a drawer at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Archibald said. When a curator showed him the fossil, Archibald said, he knew he was looking at something exciting. ..
"I immediately recognized it and said, 'Oh my god, this is a giant ant and it looks like it's related to giant ants that are known from about this time in Germany.'"
...
Monster ant
Archibald dubbed the new ant Titanomyrma lubei -- "titan" for its size, "myrma" for the Greek, "myrmex," or ant, and "lubei" for the fossil collector who discovered the specimen, Louis Lube. ..
Ants are tough bugs -- some can even create rafts out of their own bodies to survive floods. But a look at modern large ants showed Archibald and his colleagues that T. lubei very likely needed a warm climate to live, similar to modern-day giant ants. ..
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
They've been able to show some small variations in rate of decay, but it's many orders of magnitude less than what would be required to get 4.5 Billion years worth of apparent decay in just 6,000 years. The thermodynamics of having that much radioactive compressed to a timespan of a few thousand years would mean the Earth would still be millions of years away from having cooled down enough to even thave a crust.
Trying to explain it as "leaching" doesn't explain how samples taken from deep solid rock formations show the same ratios as samles taken near the surface of the formation.
If the Earth is only 6,000 years old, it should be relative easy to produce a sample of uranium ore consistent with only having undergone 6,000 years of decay. I haven't heard of anyone finding one. Have you?
This may come as a shock to you, but all 'dating methods' are not the same, and they are not all equally inaccurate, as defined by the most hyperbolic anectodotal incident you can find.
Look, you are barking up the wrong tree here, singing to the wrong choir.
You may go on believing that this place is a great big accident, that you are nothing more than a random collection of chemicals that just happened to come together and attain intelligence.
I do not. The universe, and man, was created by God, and we in His image. The bible tells of this process, describes it. My faith is there, thank you.
If any of the assumptions I stated were taken individually, sure, you could still say that this specific assumption, by itself, cannot account for the apparent age of the sample,
but all the assumptions are in effect in every age determination.
And I notice you had no comment on why different radiometric dating methods (uranium-lead, lead-lead, potassium-argon) often produce wildly varying ages on the same sample, resulting in a guess based on the index fossils (assumed to be of a certain age) located near the sample.
What’s a retread? Are you calling me a cheap tire?
Thanks
A retread is a Freeper who after being banned comes back on under a different name.
I agree that it is possible for contamination of a single sample to produce ambiguous results from differnet differential tests. I'd like to know the metrics and evidence to support the assertion that this "often" happens. A handful of anecdotal cases out of hundreds of thousands of sample analysis readings does not constitute "often".
If you're going to lie I have to post again. I didn't make that claim.
but all the assumptions are in effect in every age determination.
The assumptions are consistent with the observed physical properties of the radioisotopes. The calculated time spans are based on observed decay rates. An assumption of a maximum age of 6,000 years requires an assumption of a decay rate that has never been observed.
Conversely, variations in these assumptions do not allow for “billions” of years, either.
So, if the earth is a “mere” “millions of years old”,
what of the magic evolutionary requirement of TIME?
>> “An assumption of a maximum age of 6,000 years requires an assumption of a decay rate that has never been observed.” <<
.
No, it merely requires a more reasonable assumption of the original distribution of the elements that would better match the requirements of life on Earth.
This wouldn’t apply to tl, but it might to any “old earth creationists” that you might talk to.
How old would Adam have appeared to be an hour after he was created from the dust?
So, how old should a created earth appear to be now?
Why would Uranium consistently be distributed along with all the daughter elements of radiometric decay, in ratios consistent with billions of years worth of radiologic decay, at the molecular level? Stable elements do not exhibit this kind of homogenous distribution. What is reasonable about assuming that this distribution of radioisotopes is a requirement of life on Earth?
What variation disallows billions of years?
Your reply is essentially nonsequitur, and tends toward demolishing your owm assumptions.
>> “So, how old should a created earth appear to be now? <<
.
Topologically, the Earth does not appear to be even old enough to account for the years in the geneologies of the Bible.
If the Genesis 6 events were 4500 years ago, why have the severe landslides not yet abated? Why are great Earthquakes still occuring? The Earth by the visible evidence looks new still.
Yours is a shower of perjorative confetti, devoid of substance.
Kevmo petitioned heavily at one time for closed and moderated science threads but it never went anywhere.
***Actually, I consider the experiment to be a success. The religion mod allowed the opening of abiogenesis threads with the “scientism” tag, where scientism was acknowledged as a newly forming religion. The irony of the thing was that it was the scientism believers who had the most trouble with the concept. But basically, anyone who wants to open a science thread under a scientism tag under the religion moderator’s guidelines is free to do so, and the discussion is thereby more heavily moderated.
I’m curious about the size of the fossil picnic cloth.
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