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, butlike a whole ancient zoo buried togetherlizards, 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 horseone with a tiny stature and long hind legs for its sizesurrounded 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 dokeep 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 am sincere in my comment. We are all subject to current worldly thinking. That is why it is so important to go back to the classics to get closer to the truth.
You are sincere in your insults? That makes me feel much better.
What do you mean by “the classics,” anyway, when it comes to science? Back before we knew anything about genes? Before we understood how old the Earth is? I prefer to get closer to “the truth” by acquiring knowledge, not by abandoning it.
Do you have any reading comprehension skills. Do you understand any of the points being made with you. I said I was sincere in my comments to you to make you think. But YOU decided to be insulted, rather than think.
I am sincere in that too many people get their “truth” from the common media, from cartoons and even movies and many lies and partial truths in text books. That is why the classics and foundation are so important to build on. But as you say, that is not important anymore.
Are you honestly unable to make the connection between Mendels work and your observations regarding size of dogs? But then you would have to admit you don’t know it all, which is very humbling. I have been humbled by the best because they took time to make me think.
I have presented in my comments regarding hogs and mammoths some evidence to your point. You think because we have mapped the sequence for dogs and maybe identified a gene for large and small dogs that that is the final answer? There is MUCH DNA and processes in the cells we don’t understand. And the more we understand the bigger the mystery. All this “junk” DNA we have to ignore because we haven’t a clue as to its purpose and function.
To even think that all of this happens at random and by mutation is very illogical. Let me change just one item of code on any computer program and let me know the odds of making it a better program or even a working program.
If the universe and its process are all random, why would you look for any pattern and understanding? If it is all random, there is no logic in your understanding of the universe.
If you understand there is a design, then it gets exiting and you work to understand the design and how it works. If it is all random mutation, why bother with science? It can’t be understood or replicated.
You're being insulting again, and condescending on top of it. If you sincerely want to get somebody to think, it works better if you don't start by accusing them of watching too many cartoons. Really, this is interpersonal relations 101.
You have no idea how much I've thought about these subjects, how old I am, where I get my information, or anything else. It seems like you're choosing to attack a straw man because you don't actually have anything to say about the points I'm making or the facts I'm presenting.
That is why the classics and foundation are so important to build on.
You still haven't said what classics you're talking about.
You think because we have mapped the sequence for dogs and maybe identified a gene for large and small dogs that that is the final answer?
The final answer to what? To the question of why some dog breeds are small and others are large, and why there's a lot more variation in the size of dogs than in the size of wolves? Maybe, maybe not. But that wasn't my point.
There is MUCH DNA and processes in the cells we dont understand.
Yes, of course. That doesn't mean we should ignore what we do understand. I don't have much time for the "we don't understand everything, therefore we understand nothing" argument.
To even think that all of this happens at random and by mutation is very illogical. Let me change just one item of code on any computer program and let me know the odds of making it a better program or even a working program.
Life is not a computer program. And, of course, there are computer programs that change their own code, or write new code themselves, to generate better solutions. They're called "genetic algorithms."
If the universe and its process are all random, why would you look for any pattern and understanding? If it is all random, there is no logic in your understanding of the universe.
If you understand there is a design, then it gets exiting and you work to understand the design and how it works.
What makes you think I think the universe and its processes are all random? Obviously they're not. But nonrandom doesn't necessarily mean designed. I think of the course of a stream. It's influenced by random-seeming events, like a stick falling into it here or a crumbling of the bank there, but its overall course is constrained by certain physical properties--as are the random-seeming events for their part. So the stream's course isn't really random; but it's not designed, either.
The Lost World of Fossil Lake
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo14707097.html
http://fieldmuseum.org/users/lance-grande
Lance has been a curator in the Geology Department of Field Museum for over 21 years. He was Chair of the museum’s Science Advisory Council (an elected representative of the curatorial staff) from 2001 through 2004, and Chair of the Field Museum Scholarship Committee (the museum’s main funding organization for visiting scientists) from 1986 through 2004. He holds the appointment of Adjunct Professor of Biology at both the University of Illinois and the University of Massachusetts. He is a member of the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago, and a Research Associate in the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Nessie?
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