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.
Well, isn't there evidence of sea shells on Mount Everest? It COULD be "everywhere", but how much of the planet have we unearthed?
The theory of 'Catastrophism' (aka The Great Flood) is the relatively quick and obviously dramatic re-creation and total re-alignment of planet earth which entombed much of the planet's former life as...fossils, shell, and bone. Thus far, quite a bit of the "million year old" bones and fossils are found to have been swept and clumped together in the same strata.
No, never seen it, but I heard it's awesome.
I reckon some areas of the planet didn't drain into the sea as quickly as others. We know there were post-flood seas in Canada that did wind up draining -- perhaps back into the ground where much of the Flood water is said to have originated Moreover, who knows whether that water temp was so "hot"? And for how long?
All the theories about fossilization and "hydrologic sorting" of the bones to explain their appearance post-flood posit very hot and very turbulent water conditions. The amount of water required to hold the amount of salt left behind at Bonneville would require a water column that could not possibly be contained by the surrounding geography.
Yes, but where are the fossils of horses mixed in with them on Mount Everest?
The "mysterious forces" were the change in degree of radiation admitted onto the planet, dramatic climate change, the eradication of earth's original topography, geography, and mineral content change, earth's change in magnetic forces, and change in gravitational forces. It's proven that ferns grew at the poles and sea shells wound up on the top of Everest. The entire planet became another different planet -- calamitous, but hardly "mysterious."
Or dinosaurs? /s
Sorry -- the un-uniformity of fossil locations and finds does not prove any point.
All of those conditions can be re-created in a lab, and no one has ever been able to demonstrate the kind of decay rates they claim.
Is it possible the local surrounding geography at Bonneville was still undergoing a relatively late change? How do we know what geography was still in the precess of sinking or rising?
We don't know all the dynamics of the preservation of fossilization, obviously -- but they sure ain't 60 million year old bones as "science" has sworn. Or even 1 million year old bones.
The posted article claims it does. That all these fossils were found at the same location proves the account of the Great Flood is the entire premise of the article.
Many “creationists” are not “young earth” ones.
I have no idea of the proportions.
But there are many in related geology/biology professions who are not evolutionists but are not young earth believers.
Evos love to pretend that all people who are believe “God did it” are young earthers. Makes them sleep easier at night.
So...You're claiming 'science' can recreate the exact external and internal planetory conditions and atmospheric brew of the Great Flood? IN A LAB?? The decay rates are based on several unknown X factors. Thus it's impossible.
They're claiming that this one fossil bed is being overlooked because the evidence there proves the account of the Great Flood. If there are many and this all happened at the same time, produced by the same event then there should be many more like this one, with the same kind of distribution of marine and land fossils all mixed together. Where are they?
Needs to be repeated and understood.
Aren't you claiming to know that some specific combination of those produced a predictable change in the decay rates of those radioisotopes? You just told me it did. If none of these conditions you describe can be recreated, on what basis to you submit they produced the results you claim?
There are off-shoot theories that deviate in some respects.
MANY fossils and dinosaur bones are indeed found clumped together. that is the one that have been stumbled upon.
In no way do the affects of the Great Flood upon fossils, strata, and their coincidental discoveries within strata (instead of embedded in granite) discredit the main gist.
If I were to pick apart the farce of Evolutionism and its theory of "Uniformitariarism" aka "Gradualism," it'd only take a few days to totally discredit its entire theory (and it is JUST a theory which is regarded as less gospel in the scientific community with each and every passing day.)
If you could do that and settle this whole matter once and for all, why haven't you done it?
So if a condition can't be recreated in a lab, it doesn't not nor couldn't have existed? You can't be serious.
When "science" re-creates the X-factor degree of changed radiation/radioisotope levels of pre-flood and post-flood; re-creates the dramatic climate change, earth's ubiquitous and unknown volcanic residue, considers the eradication of earth's original topography, geography, and mineral content change, re-creates earth's un-measurable change in magnetic forces, and un-measurable change in gravitational forces, get back to me.
I haven't a few more hours to spare.
;-)
Hundreds of thousands of marine creatures were buried with amphibians, spiders, scorpions, millipedes, insects, and reptiles in a fossil graveyard at Montceau-les-Mines, France.
At Florissant, Colorado, a wide variety of insects, freshwater mollusks, fish, birds, and several hundred plant species (including nuts and blossoms) are buried together.4 Bees and birds have to be buried rapidly in order to be so well preserved.
Alligator, fish (including sunfish, deep sea bass, chubs, pickerel, herring, and garpike 37 feet [12 m] long), birds, turtles, mammals, mollusks, crustaceans, many varieties of insects, and palm leaves (79 feet [22.5 m] long) were buried together in the vast Green River Formation of Wyoming.
At Fossil Bluff on the north coast of Australias island state of Tasmania, many thousands of marine creatures (corals, bryozoans [lace corals], bivalves [clams], and gastropods [snails]) were buried together in a broken state, along with a toothed whale and a marsupial possum. Whales and possums dont live together, so only a watery catastrophe would have buried them together.
In order for such large ammonites and other marine creatures to be buried in the chalk beds of Britain many trillions of microscopic marine creatures had to bury them catastrophically.
credit: AIG
You're the one who stated unequivocally that combination of conditions came to be and produced that result. When you make the claim it becomes your responsibility to provide the evidence that it did happen, not everyone else's to prove that it didn't. That's the way science works.
I'll repeat a question I posed earlier - how many other possible theories are there that can be submitted on noting more that a claim that "it could happen", and how fast would you produce absolute gridlock if all of them had to be given equal consideration?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.