Posted on 11/26/2011 6:26:37 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Recreating the spectacular pose many dinosaurs adopted in death might involve following the simplest of instructions: just add water.
When palaeontologists are lucky enough to find a complete dinosaur skeleton – whether it be a tiny Sinosauropteryx or an enormous Apatosaurus – there's a good chance it will be found with its head thrown backwards and its tail arched upwards – technically known as the opisthotonic death pose. No one is entirely sure why this posture is so common, but Alicia Cutler and colleagues from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, think it all comes down to a dip in the wet stuff.
Cutler placed plucked chickens – both fresh and frozen – on a bed of sand for three months to see if desiccation would lead to muscle contractions that pulled the neck upwards – a previously suggested explanation for the death pose. The chickens decayed without contorting. When seven other chickens were placed into cool, fresh water, however, their necks arched and their heads were thrown back within seconds. Sustained immersion of the birds for up to a month slightly increased the severity of the pose, but the major movement of the head occurred almost immediately.
The result contrasts with a study carried out in 2007 by Cynthia Marshall Faux at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, and Kevin Padian at the University of California in Berkeley. The pair found that salty water did not alter the pose of dead quails. They concluded that the arched back seen in so many fossils was instead the result of the expiring dinosaur's final death throes (Paleobiology, DOI: 10.1666/06015.1) – an idea that was first suggested by pathologist Roy Moodie in 1918.
Why dunking dead birds in water produced different results in the two studies is not clear.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Thanks again. :’)
Immanuel Velikovsky
Earth In Upheaval: The Aquatic Graveyards
(p 19)
An identical picture can be found in many other places all around the world, in similar and dissimilar formations. Of Monte Bolca, near Verona in northern Italy, Buckland wrote: “The circumstances under which the fossil fishes are found at Monte Bolca seem to indicate that they perished suddenly. . . . The skeletons of these fish lie parallel to the laminae of the strata of the calcareous slate; they are always entire, and closely packed on one another. . . . All these fishes must have died suddenly . . . and have been speedily buried in the calcareous sediment then in the course of deposition. From the fact that certain individuals have even preserved traces of colour upon their skin, we are certain that they were entombed before decomposition of their soft parts had taken place.”
The same author wrote about the fish deposits in the area of the Harz Mountains in Germany: “Another celebrated deposit of fossil fishes is that of the cupriferous slate surrounding the Harz. Many of the fishes of this slate at Mansfeld, Eisleben, etc., have a distorted attitude, which has often been assigned to writhing in the agonies of death. ... As these fossil fishes maintain the attitude of the rigid stage immediately succeeding death, it follows that they were buried before putrefaction had commenced, and apparently in the same bituminous mud, the influx of which had caused their destruction.”
The slory of agony and sudden death and immediate encasing is told by the red sandstone of Scotland; the limestone of Monte Bolca in Lombardy; the bituminous slate of Mansfeld in Thuringia; and also by the coal formation of Saarbrucken on the Saar, “the most celebrated deposits of fossil fishes in Europe”; the calcareous slate of Solenhofen; the blue slate of Glarus; the marlstone of Oensingen in Switzerland and of Aix-in -Provence, to mention only a few of the better-known sites in Europe.
In North America similar strata, “packed full of splendidly preserved fishes,” are found in the black limestone of Ohio and Michigan, in the Green River bed of Arizona, the diatom beds of Lompoc, California, and in many other formations.
In cataclysms of early ages fishes died in agony; and the sand and the gravel of the upthrust sea bottom covered the aquatic graveyards.
/bingo
But suppose they were around for only a couple of thousand years?!?!?
A whole 7 minutes!
Thats like from the days of the dinosaurs. lol
>>Now why on earth would so many extinct animals die in some sort of freak drowning event???<<
Clearly they didn’t wait at least an hour after eating...
How many of each animal was on the ark? Where is the T-Rex of today?
Nope.
As a Catholic priest, you might like to get into contact with Father Guiseppe Leonardi. His family have been scientists since the 15th century and the family home has the skeleton of a dwarf elephant on the third floor. That fossil is a million years old. He is a specialist in dinosaur tracks, and while studying for the clergy at Rome University, pursued a Ph.D. in paleontology.
Priest to priest, he may be able to better explain the geological study of stratigraphy in terms you could understand, and how it would be nigh impossible for fossils found on mountaintops to exist there after only two thousand years.
Noah didn’t have enough room for all the meat animals to feed a T-Rex. ;-)
OTH I read an article about the almost universal prevalence of flood "mythology". Any clue?
I find the following Bible passage touching because God Himself speaks so humbly:
"And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth." (Genesis 9:12-16)
Is it not humbling to read the Lord Himself say, " . . . that I may remember . . . ". It that not redolent of what Jesus, the Christ, said, "This do in remembrance of me . . . ".
Kennedysorus was driving ?
Maybe a flood?
Thats because there was a great flood... :)
Yep. Probably a bit of the lemming-syndrome, too.
If this had anything to do with the flood, I wonder why Noah didn’t have any dinosaurs on board?
Trilobites were around for some 300 million years, declining slowly through the Devonian and with the final order disappearing in the Permian extinction. Some tie their decline with jawed and semi jawed fish able to crush their protection. The last order liked shallow water. We still have their relation, the horseshoe crab.
No one thing or time period can be said to have caused their extinction, rather it was likely many things over may millions of years. Scorpions, jellyfish, sea pens, corals, sponges, etc. all have survived from the time their ancestors lived alongside the trilobites.
So are you saying that normally BYU doesn’t support the Bible, I can agree with that.
Actually, Rip is trying to slide an oblique insult about Jim Robinson into the mix. Saundra Duffy and restornu do it, too.
Thanks!
That’s 420 seconds, practically forever.
Gee, why don’t you ping him? You guys usually do when we complain that this is becoming more and more an anti Mormon site.
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