Posted on 05/30/2006 11:20:11 PM PDT by Marius3188
IQALUIT, Nunavut (CP) - A mysterious skull discovered on the edge of the Arctic Circle has sparked interest in what creatures roamed Baffin Island in the distant past, and what life a warming climate may support in the future.
Andrew Dialla, a resident of Pangnirtung, Nunavut, says he found the skull protruding from the frozen tundra during a walk near the shore with his daughter about a month ago.
The horned skull is about the size of a man's fist. It resembles a baby caribou skull, except at that age, a caribou wouldn't have antlers, researchers and elders have pointed out.
Its discovery has caused a stir in Canada's Eastern Arctic. Pictures of the skull, sent over e-mail, have prompted residents to speculate whether the skull might belong to a long-extinct deer or sheep that inhabited the land millions of years ago when the climate was much warmer.
Meanwhile, Dialla is considering shipping the skull south to be examined by Richard Harrington, a distinguished retired paleontologist from Ottawa's Museum of Nature.
Harrington has spent over a decade helping to excavate an ancient beaver pond on Ellesmere Island in Canada's High Arctic. That site, estimated to be four million years old, contained the remains of a now-extinct species of beaver, as well as vanished species of deer, horses, wolverines and bears.
This April, researchers announced another big discovery on Ellesmere Island - a strange creature, part fish and part alligator, which could have been the first to crawl from the oceans to shore 375 million years ago.
But little similar research has been conducted in the region where Dialla's mystery skull was unearthed, according to Mary Ellen Thomas, manager of the Nunavut Research Institute.
Several years ago, a fossilized stump of a tree did turn up near Pangnirtung, well above the tree-line, she said.
She hopes the buzz surrounding the skull could lead to more finds.
"This will perhaps interest people in south Baffin. That's good."
One thing Thomas and her colleagues do find themselves doing is fielding many phone calls from Arctic inhabitants who have spotted unfamiliar species of birds and insects such as wasps, previously unknown so far north.
Warm weather that researchers link to climate change continues to break records in the Arctic as more-southern species venture farther north.
So for millions of years the earth has been undergoing global COOLING?
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Velikovsky was a kook. He also wrote a book "Twelfth Planet (I think)" that contends that there is a planet in an excentric orbit that brings it close to earth every 10,000 years. The inhabitants of this planet visit us at that time. They are Von Daniken's gods in space-ships. Velikovsky, like Von Daniken, never worries about evidence, or science when it comes to proposing his theories.None of that is correct.
Those horns don't look familiar, can't think of what they might resemble.
Geologists have discovered in Antarctica the remains of three ancient deciduous forests complete with fossils of fallen leafs scattered around the tree trunks. The clusters of petrified tree stumps were found upright in the original living positions they held during the Permian period.
Could be a goat?
a kook, eh? So also thought Carl Sagan (and trumpeted constantly, thereby adding to the hue-and-cry from the rest of the scientific community thus labelling Velikovsky). Sagan also averred that the Earth's geological evolution was a benign one free of any impacts from stellar objects.
Yet today we see specials on the History Channel, or Discovery, about the science of Catastrophism, which was what Velikovsky maintained.
Yes he did come up with some weird stuff, but it's always interesting to me how often and continually the metaphoric "Pharisees unite against the upstart" paradigm appears amongst our (self-anointed...) intelligentsia... and how little credit if any is given to the Velikovsky's of the world when something does prove viable.
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