Caricature
Posted on 04/21/2014 8:26:43 AM PDT by fishtank
How (Not) to Date a Fossil by Brian Thomas, M.S. *
Do rocks and fossils hold clues that demand millions-of-years? Not the fossils from China's Daohugou beds. On the contrary, their clues speak to more recent origins.
Accessible from several outcrops northeast of Beijing, fossil hunters have been unpacking a trove over the last few decades, including some of the best-preserved insect and other arthropod fossils, as well as both familiar and unfamiliar vertebrate fossils.
When were they deposited? Authors of an extensive review of Daohugou vertebrate fossils, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, wrote, "Following the discovery of this locality, conflicting opinions rapidly emerged as to the age and correlative relationships of the Daohugou strata."1
The study authors cited peer-reviewed reports that assigned Daohugou layers to Middle Jurassic, Upper Jurassic, and even Lower Cretaceous—a span of about 40 million years in conventional thinking. If these fossils contain clear clues about when they were deposited, then why would researchers propose these conflicting opinions on their ages?
The main technique used to assign ages to these layers involves correlating similar-looking fossils. It works on the assumption that the fossilized creature that is used to date the layer in which it is found lived during a particular evolutionary time frame. In other words, the method assumes millions of years of evolution before any dating assignments are even attempted. It also assumes that similar fossils found elsewhere are of the same evolutionary age, even if they are on separate continents.
However, many Daohugou fossils span multiple layers. Thus, the same creature survived unchanged for millions of years—assuming each layer represents such vast time spans—erasing these fossils' usefulness as time indexes.
The study authors may have unwittingly made this point when they admitted that certain fossils "might be expected to persist for considerable spans of geologic time."2
But couldn't this logic explain away any fossil-based age assignment?
This admission should nullify the whole method, since any index fossil might have lived before or after its fossil occurrence, but researchers insist on moving forward, selecting arguments and fossils that best fit their preconceptions.
In another example from the same report, the team described how certain plant and insect fossils correlated with the wrong layers. They wrote, "However, even brief survival of some plant and invertebrate taxa regarded as Middle Jurassic index fossils into the Late Jurassic in northeast China would be sufficient to resolve this apparent contradiction."1
In this case, the authors "solved" the contradiction by imagining—without fossil evidence—that ancient creatures failed to evolve for millions of years. Dating fossils with fossils seems quite subjective.
Their report has several more examples of fossil finagling. Its authors seem to struggle to force the evidence into an evolutionary time scheme, such as a salamander fossil (which the Daohugou beds are famous for) called Liaoxitriton. According to the Journal, this fossil looks like the "modern salamander clade Hynobiidae." If very little change has occurred between the fossil and its living counterpart, then it also stands to reason that very little time has elapsed since the day it was fossilized.
Thus, "The presence of Liaoxitritonat both Daohugou and the [supposedly millions of years younger] Yixian Formation locality of Shuikouzi implies that these sites must be reasonably close in age, unless Liaoxitritonis a rather long lived genus."1
Who knows how long the salamander lived as a supposedly unchanged genus unless one first knows the ages of the layers in which it is found? And who can know the ages until one first knows how long the creature lived?
Do the problems that secular researchers encounter when assigning ages to fossils stem from a lack of clear clues, or from the faulty reasoning inherent in the method itself?
Apparently, evolutionary thinking blinds its proponents from even considering clues that confound their worldview, like original tissues still inside un-mineralized fossils. The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology report's press release even displays a Daohugou feathered bird's original bone material and soft tissues that reflect UV light differently than the surrounding mudrock.3 The idea that such biological material—portions of intact soft tissue—can last for even one million years, let alone 160 million, stretches credulity way past the breaking point.4
Do the fossil plants, insects, salmanders, birds, mammals—including one that resembles a flying squirrel and another that resembles an otter with a scaly tail—and other reptiles like pterosaurs and dinosaurs in the Daohugou sediments require millions of years to form? Not at all. They make much better sense as deposits from Noah's Flood. Clearly, some muddy calamity swallowed all these different creatures and preserved them together—a feat that everyday processes simply don't perform.
In this context, a rock layer does not represent "a window on life," as the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's press report said, but instead a window on death by watery cataclysm.3
References
Sullivan, C. et al. 2014. The vertebrates of the Jurassic Daohugou Biota of northeastern China. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. 34 (2): 243-280. Their quote in context, from ref. 1: "Vertebrate paleontologists have sometimes argued that the vertebrate assemblage preserved at the Daohugou locality resembles Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous rather than Middle Jurassic equivalents, supporting the inference that the Daohugou strata are relatively young. However, these vertebrate-based correlations are not persuasive because they involve supraspecific, and in almost all cases even suprageneric, taxa [life forms] that might be expected to persist for considerable spans of geologic time." Prequel Outshines the Original: Exceptional Fossil of 160 Million Year Old Doahugou [sic] Biota. Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Press Release, posted on vertpaleo.org accessed March 24, 2014.
Thomas, B. A Review of Original Tissue Fossils and Their Age Implications. In M. Horstemeyer, ed., 2013, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Creationism, Pittsburgh, PA: Creation Science Fellowship.
Image credit: Copyright © 2014 The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. 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 April 21, 2014.
Next Article Topics
1) Assert that the Bible says the entire universe is only 6018 years old (It doesn’t, Archbishop Ussher said it does, but it doesn’t)
2) Ignore all evidence, whether it be the shear volume of rock above it, the clearly defined annual layers, the actual counts of tree rings, the matching strata, the ratios of radioactive elements to their daughter products, unless of course there is so little carbon 14 left that the technique can’t be used to date the sample, then insist that too old to date means the technique can’t be used on younger samples, and means that older samples are younger!
3) Assign a date that is less than 6018 years old.
4) Congratulate yourself on this stunning blow for God.
5) Gather a bunch of like minded individuals and tell each other how wise you all are.
6) Tell everybody else they’re going straight to Hell.
The only accurate way to date anything on the Earth is to count all the begets in the Bible,
every good creationist knows that,
why do atheistic science classes waste kids time teaching them about atom’s and molecules and the speed of light???
Those fanged ideas come from straight the devil...
All they need to know is the begets.
My mistake, its a creationist poster here.
Add up the begets then assign a time period for each beget that adds up to the desired earth age.
All our kids need to know is rithmatic just like the Lil Rascals learned in theire schoolhouse by Mrs Craptree, not the devils lessons in modern science.
The Daohugou fossil fields present complex dating problems due to the faulting and folding of the rocks containing the fossils. This results in some cases in older fossils being “ on top” of younger fossils. However, radiometric dating is being used to sort this puzzle out. The time ranges are from 120 mya to 170 mya. However, the dating problems are found in the structural geology of the formation along with sampling protocol.
It is obvious that some species are longer lived than others which may present problems in dating. Trilobites were a extremely successful creature but all disappeared with the Permian Extinction. Thus, if you have rock with trilobite fossils, you can be fairly certain the rocks are 250+ mya. The potential exception comes when those fossils become incased in younger rock by erosion, faulting or volcanic means. That is one of many reasons radiometric dating in combination with good geologic examination of the formation being sampled is important.
Straw men again dominate the creationist argument. Science isn’t easy and false conclusions are frequent which is why peer review and reexamination with newer tools is important. In this case though the science has been refined and paradoxes resolved. Science doesn’t have written instructions guiding and determining its conclusions.
Wow! I had no idea scientists were there 65 million years ago and witnessed the t-rex’s death. Impressive!
They were obviously “begging the question.” The 65 million years is religious dogma, unshakable faith, so anything that comes along which doesn’t make logical sense must be somehow incorporated into that faith. Rather than question the 65 million years that the gelatinous heme must have survived, which would have been logical, they instead illogically declare that it could survive 65 million years. Tremendous faith!
The existence of this heme appears to be “contradictory evidence” on its face, that calls into question the 65 million year time line.
Slick wants to know if a fossil is anything like a mummy.
Beat me to it.
See, I did read the thread for once...
5.56mm
The age of things is not determined that way as it is not a known, predictable variable.
“Why whattaya know! Dead men DO bleed”
(What a patient who was convinced he was dead said when the doctor pricked his finger.)
Heck, I didn't even know that all those people who say OJ Simpson is guilty were actually there at the crime scene. I guess you learn something new every day.
You missed one. Send checks payable to list maker needs inserted somewhere.
Caricature
Timbers. Motes.
bump
““Why whattaya know! Dead men DO bleed”
(What a patient who was convinced he was dead said when the doctor pricked his finger.)”
I have no idea what you are attempting to convey with this cryptic message. This a coded spy message? “Ducks fly at midnight.”
You can start by refusing to take their calls...
You know, some of us have just finished lunch...
As far as the corporate accountant knows, that girl is Jane Smith, his long lost ‘Niece’, and he’s helping her with Miscellaneous Expenses and Various and Sundry Services Rendered. Jane never itemizes her Invoices, (too boring), she just shows the total amounts spent (so far). It’s what we used to call A Gentleman’s Agreement.
Even that accuracy is largely illusory. All those begets add up very differently in the Septuagint, the Peshitta, and the Masoretic texts.
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