Posted on 06/20/2013 6:51:51 AM PDT by fishtank
New Fossil Book Won't Showcase Obvious Catastrophe by Brian Thomas, M.S. *
Not just horses and fish, but—like a whole ancient zoo buried together—lizards, alligators, stingrays, snakes, squirrel varieties, bats, long-tailed turtles, lemur-like primates, birds, frogs, insects, and sycamore, palm, and fern leaves were all fossilized in Wyoming's Green River Formation. A new book showcasing some of the more spectacular fossils provides secularists another opportunity to reinforce their ideas about how these diverse creatures were encased in what became a giant rock formation. Commonsense observations refute their slow-and-gradual scenario, however, and point to a more violent explanation.
Lance Grande collected the stunning fossil images for the book, The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Snapshots from Deep Time. He works as one of the curators at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. One of his images shows a now-extinct variety of horse—one with a tiny stature and long hind legs for its size—surrounded by fossil fish. Horses and fish don't usually hang out together, but apparently they died together. How did they end up in the same fossilized bed?
LiveScience featured some of the book's images on its website, including the "Mini-Horse." There, its image caption reads, "Researchers aren't sure how the horse ended up at the bottom of the middle of Fossil Lake but they suspect it drowned, possibly trying to escape a predator."1 Then, supposedly its carcass sank neatly to the bottom without having been scavenged by any of the many fish represented in the formation's fossils.
The horse body's next trick also defied commonsense. According to LiveScience, "Over thousands of years, dead animals rained down into the muck deep below the surface of long-gone Fossil Lake."2 Not only does the slow-and-gradual story require a magic wand to wave off the persistent problem of scavenging, but it calls upon the ancient deep "muck" to do what experiments have shown it cannot do—keep a carcass from rotting away to nothing.
And what strange process preserved these animal bodies so well as they supposedly rested on the lake bed before the slow-settling sediments covered and buried them over the long years? This story defies horse sense. Clearly, they had to have been buried deeply by fast-building sediment in order to preserve at such high quality.
Supposedly, a lack of oxygen preserved the whole carcasses. But God created microbes to function even without readily available oxygen. The problem is that fish and other animal carcasses rot in just a few weeks, even when buried in mud that has very little oxygen.3 What the scavengers don't eat, anoxic microbes quickly consume. That is why today's anoxic lake and ocean bottom muds form no fossils.
Whatever buried the horse did so rapidly and catastrophically. Fast-flowing water mixed with fresh volcanic ash and washed over the diverse assembly of creatures, burying them alive and trapping them in the Green River's series of basins.
The Genesis Flood provides a context for that catastrophe. Some creation geologists suggest that residual catastrophes immediately after the Flood formed Green River Formation, while others propose that it formed when water ran off the continents in the waning Flood months. Either scenario sets a catastrophic-enough stage to trump slow-and-gradual speculations and to bury alligators, horses, lizards, and fish together quickly and completely.
References
Gannon, M. Images: Stingray Sex, Mini-Horses & Other Curiosities of Fossil Lake. LiveScience. Posted on LiveScience.com June 9, 2013, accessed June 10, 2013.
Gannon, M. Lost World Locked in Stone at Fossil Lake. LiveScience. Posted on LiveScience.com June 9, 2013, accessed June 10, 2013.
Donovan, S.K., (Ed.) 1991. The Process of fossilization. New York: Columbia University Press, 120-129.
Image credit: Lance Grande from The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Snapshots from Deep Time, © 2013, the University of Chicago Press. Adapted for use in accordance with federal copyright (fair use doctrine) law. Usage by ICR does not imply endorsement of copyright holders.
* Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.
Article posted on June 17, 2013.
I did not ask about their opinions. I asked about the data.
I think I should be making decisions based on the evidence, not what somebody else tells me the evidence must mean. I'll entertain arguments about why I should be doing it differently if you don't think that's the right way to do it.
You say that seemingly without realizing that the advent of these methods pre-dates the claimed occurrance of the flood. There is no comparative data in existence upon which to base that assesment.
We seem to have a failure to communicate.
a) To reiterate and clarify; scientific dating methodology "seem to work better" during ages since the Great Flood. That's not to say rock and fossils dated at "millions" of years old were actually merely quite young -- as in recent. cases: MANY.
b) Carbon-14 Dating -- though notoriously inaccurate -- appears to be the best "dating" method available. But again, due to contamination of factors, its limitation seems to be up to 100,000 years (which might give or take thousands of years coincide with what many of us believe was the pre-Genesis of Man's existence: CREATION.
c) Yes, lack of data and validity of dating assessments IS a great problem. Am I to understand that you agree?
Maybe you can be MUCH more specific about your claims over my statements and assault upon my integrity so I can defend myself from your scurrilous charges. Thanks.
Sorry. You're presuming to read my mind while stating the obvious -- that any scientific instruments or methodology was available before the flood. OR for the next thousands of years until Man became a Genius and Science a Religion.
For practical purposes, ONLY recorded history is the source of any claimed "age" -- as per the account of Moses etal. in Scripture as well as Egyptian accounts (that are fairly consistent with the Bible.) That said, there are no verified archeological datings predating @3000 BC. So what did they have? Besides that? Tree rings.
By 1862 scientist named Thompson proclaimed the earth's age at 20 million years. In 1897 he DOUBLED the age to 40 mil. Science nodded. "Science" again moved the goalpost just two years later to 90 mil. By 1921 Science finally hit the sweet spot: a nice round ONE billion years. After that "Science" kept jacking up the age until ot's reached FIVE billlion. ALL the while, perpetrating the lies of "Evolution," TEACHING Evolution, creating fake "ancient man" skulls and bones and displaying them at museums around the world.
This is sociopathic to me - no sense of what is truth and what is fabrication, no standards that apply equally to both sides, no conscience.
Again -- IF you're able to extricate yourself from your high horse (or Unicorn), what or who are YOUR "standards" of both "truth" and "scientific proof"? And I'll try not to ridicule you personally, or your own motives and agenda.
Of WHICH "methods" do you refer?The same ones you claim worked better "after the flood".
Care to expound with any degree of specificity?
I understand that's not going to be an acceptable answer...
Only because it's incomplete and vague.
... and there's going to have to be something wrong with me for questioning it in the first place.
Get back in your saddle and merely answer the bell.
If you think horse evolution has been debunked (it hasn't), I'm not going to bother trying to come up with something else.
as far as I know no one has mapped the genome of the dog.
Actually, they have. That's how they found the small-dog gene. But regardless, they've found the gene whose one form leads to large dogs and whose other form leads to small ones. If they could find dogs with each form, someone should be able to find a dog with both, if your hypothesis is correct.
What does "seems to work better" mean? Radiometric dating methods are based on half-lives of radioisotopes, and those can range from a few seconds to billions of years depending on which ones you're measuring. Short half lives let you determine age very accurately, but not very far back (pretty soon there's not enough left to measure). Long half lives give you more range, but less accuracy.
That's not to say rock and fossils dated at "millions" of years old were actually merely quite young -- as in recent. cases: MANY.<\i>
I cannot make any sense of that statement. If you are saying that rocks and fossils that have been dated at being millions of years old are acutally "quite young", on what do you base that assesment? Was there some other test that was done that produced a different result? If so then you have two tests that disagree. On what basis must it be assumed that one must be correct and the other flawed? Can the test that showed them as "quite young" be repeated reliably? Has anyone do it, and where is that documented?
b) Carbon-14 Dating -- though notoriously inaccurate -- appears to be the best "dating" method available. But again, due to contamination of factors, its limitation seems to be up to 100,000 years (which might give or take thousands of years coincide with what many of us believe was the pre-Genesis of Man's existence: CREATION.
What makes it the best "dating" method available, when there are many other isotopes available that aren't nearly as prone to contamination?
It's every bit as specific as the claim it was in response to. When you submit vague claims, you get vague questions about them.
Your article boils down to a very few points:
1. The researchers hyped their discovery in an unprofessional manner. That’s a judgment call, but it doesn’t affect the validity of the discovery.
2. It’s just a fish. Like I said above, they were looking for a fish, and they never said it wasn’t a fish. This is a straw man.
3. It’s a fossil! How can we learn anything from a fossil? This is just an argument from and for ignorance.
4. They were looking for a transitional form. That doesn’t say anything about whether they really did or not.
5. Scientists have called other fish “transitional forms” before. So what? Scientists have long ago abandoned any notion that evolution proceeds in perfectly linear, stepwise fashion, and fossils are just snapshots of parts of a complex process. One fossil might shed light on the development of legs, another on the development of lungs—they’re both transitional forms, but not necessarily on the same line of development.
Harrub is relying on the ignorance of his readers to make it sound like there are problems where there really aren’t.
New layers can be formed as often as the wind or currents or tides change. Go dig into a recently built sand dune. Many, many fine layers awaiting lithification..
Are you actually denying the collusion of thousands of scientists is impossible? Never happened? Do you vaguely recall the exposed political/scientific hoax of "Global Warming recently? Or the century-long claim of thousands of scientists that man has "evolved" from lower primates -- based on accepted phantom proof AND several contrived hoaxes? Or of "evolution" of species in general? I don't just "wave" that BS away, I swat it like gnats that just don't ever go away.
First, I suspect he's lying about his conversation with a staff member, or else the staff member meant he didn't want to waste his breath explaining it to someone who believed the Anasazi lived with dinosaurs. Real scientists are happy to explain it:
Have you ever watched the clouds go by and thought you saw one in the shape of an animal, or seen the “man in the moon”? These are examples of pareidolia—seeing what we believe to be a significant shape or pattern when it isn’t really there. This phenomenon also explains the “dinosaur” on Kachina Bridge. Upon close inspection by Senter and Cole, the “sauropod dinosaur” turned out to be made up of distinct carvings and mud stains. It is definitely not a depiction of a single animal, and, viewed in detail, it looks nothing like a dinosaur. The separate carvings and mud stains only look like a dinosaur to those wishing to find one there.While certainly the most prominent, the supposed sauropod was not the only dinosaur carving creationists thought they saw on the bridge. Three other dinosaur depictions have been said to exist, but Senter and Cole easily debunked these, as well. One of the “dinosaurs” was nothing but a mud stain; a proposed Triceratops was just a composite of petroglyphs that do not represent animals, and what has been described as a carving of Monoclonius was nothing more than an enigmatic squiggle. There are no dinosaur carvings on Kachina Bridge.
The Kachina Bridge petroglyphs were not hoaxes or frauds. They were carved by people who once lived in the region, but there is no indication that any of them represent animals, living or extinct. What creationists thought they saw in the rocks has turned out to be an illusion, but I wonder how many of them will actually admit their mistake?
That is the weakest reply I ever heard, Now they are liars..?
I smile in your direction.. :)
have a good day
“...ones. If they could find dogs with each form, someone should be able to find a dog with both, if your hypothesis is correct....”
as with typical evolutionist, you will ridicule or ignore fact (or evidences) and offer your “explanations”
So, it is pointless, you may “cling” to your religion, and I will cling to mine!!
Thanks,
You may have the last word... :)
Not impossible, just vanishingly unlikely. Do you realize the recognition that awaits the scientist who overturns the evolutionary paradigm?
The proven collusion regarding global warming involved a relative handful of scientists. And if you're offering the idea that man evolved from lower primates as evidence of a century of collusion among thousands of scientists--well, you're making the mistake of basing your conclusion on your own assumed premise again.
I don't understand this comment. Here's what scientists have done, following the scientific method (these are facts):
1. Observed that there are large and small dogs, in a range much wider than the wolves they developed from, and wondered why.
2. Hypothesized that they would find a gene associated with the size difference.
3. Mapped the dog genome and compared the results for large and small dogs (i.e., performed an experiment).
4. Found a difference in a gene known to be associated with size variation. Evolution would explain this by positing a mutation in that gene at some point in the past.
Now, let's take your hypothesis:
2. God created a dog "kind" with the genetic information for both large and small dogs, which information is expressed differently in different animals.
Now, the experiment I proposed is to look for a dog (wolf, coyote, whatever) that has both the large-dog gene and the small-dog gene. This would go a long way toward confirming your hypothesis. For some reason, you seem reluctant to embrace that approach.
You may have the last word... :)
Thank you. It's nap time anyway. Good night and God bless.
There is genetic variation from one generation of an organism to the next, some of which is due to mutations (i.e., something new).
Get some classic science background.
won’t we eventually had dogs that had lost the code for black, white, red, or any other color?
Watched a program on the Ice Age and after “millions” of years of large mastodons, the final refuge was an island off Siberia where the last of the mastodons were half the size of the former. Some would say that nutrition might have been the cause but it still takes some incredible genetic programing to respond to that outside factor.
Our young friend here has grown up with the word mutation. Seen many movies where radiation has changed something. Mutation are fatal in a complex system. He hears about microbes that are resistant to penicillin and thinks that is evolution, something new. He doesn’t understand it is survival of the microbe that is already resistant.
So the answer to your original thought is both are probably true, we do lose some but there is also this is amazing system that retains it, but hidden away.
But of course this would imply that there is something greater than man and we don’t want to hear that.
You are demonstrating the aptness of your screen name. Perhaps you should find a discussion more suited to your level of competence—maybe there’s a thread somewhere about why the sky is blue.
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