Posted on 02/03/2011 12:44:21 PM PST by SeekAndFind
They just can't help themselves any more...
I recommend the following book which explains what happened then at the Permian extinction due to these massive volcanic eruptions.
Written by Peter D. Ward, it is titled Out of Thin Air, and describes the horrific oxygen crash that occurred when much of the life forms that created oxygen through biological processes vanished. The subtitle is Dinosaurs, Birds, and the Earth’s Ancient Atmosphere.
It is NOT exciting reading but basically describes what happened during that extinction and explains how dinosaurs came out of it with a type of respiratory process different than other creatures, and one birds inherited.
This explains why human climbers reaching the top of Mt. Everest with respiration packs have witnessed birds migrating over the Himalayas at incredible altitudes. Their bodies literally act like oxygen concentrators.
“...how life today might recover after human-induced crises,...”
What more does one need to know that this guy already knows the answers he wants to find?
I suspect that "soft tissue" is a misnomer, and what's left is no more the original soft tissue than skeletal fossils are the original bones.
Helen Thomas ate too many burritos.
Don't ask where she got the burritos.
This research could help point out which species might be more or less susceptible to extinction nowadays, and how the world might recover from the damage caused by humanity, scientists added.Whew! Glad they remembered to edit in the agitprop boilerplate.
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Preserved soft tissue might seem more likely to test "Old Earthers," actually.
Geologists associate the great Permian extinction with the Siberian Traps volcanism that spewed out 1.5 million times as much lava and associated nasty gases as Mt. St. Helen's.
Whoops [blush] thanks for the pings!
The fossils are exceptionally well-preserved, with more than half of them completely intact, including soft tissues. Apparently they were protected across the ages by mats of microbes that rapidly sealed their bodies off from decay after death.
New Ancient Fungus Finding Suggests World’s Forests Were Wiped Out In Global Catastrophe
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2358035/posts
Permian-Triassic Impact
http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/1992/split/pnu106-2.htm
Asteroid ‘destroyed life 250m years ago’
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2084610/posts
[1999 -- The letter of rejection from Nature for the following article is dated August 28, 1968. At the time most earth scientists would not even accept the fact that meteorites regularly impacted the earth. For example, Barringer Crater in Arizona was still thought by many to be of volcanic origin, as well as the craters on the moon. Bob Dietz had just published his work on shatter cones but I wouldn't say that had been generally accepted. There was not even general agreement on sea floor spreading and plate tectonics outside the radical few at Scripps, Woods Hole, and related institutions.]Possible Formation of the Guatemala Basin by the Impact of an Extraterrestrial BodyThe earth must be as frequently cratered per unit area as the moon. By a relative cross section argument, more than 13 times the number of craters the size of the maria on the moon exist, or existed, on the earth. Whether such events occur with sufficient frequency in recent geologic time to provide tangible evidence today of such cratering is uncertain. From the arguments set forth, and the continuing discovery of meteorite craters on the continents (Short, 1966, Baldwin, 1963, Dietz, 1961, and Prouty, 1952) it seems likely that the importance of the effect of extraterrestrial bodies impacting the earth has been, at least, underestimated (the Alverez's hypothesis concerning the end of the dinosaurs by such a mechanism was more than a decade in the future). Certainly there is as much evidence at present to support our hypothesis for the formation of the Guatemala Basin as other hypotheses advanced to explain the low heat flow found in this basin.
by Charles E. Corry and Miller L. Bell
With the tests for shock processes advanced by Short (1966), our hypothesis should be capable of field verification or rejection.
So who collected and cached them there?
And when?
A few years ago, I found a small cache of illegally collected fossils at Fossil Butte National Monument. I showed them to my wife, and photographed them, and then we notified the Park Service rangers. The went to the spot and recovered them, but never found who was illegally collecting.
Well done, btw.
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