Posted on 12/11/2012 7:22:44 AM PST by lbryce
While working on a highway-widening project in the middle of South America's Atacama Desert, Chilean workers unearthed an eerie scene that had no business being more than a kilometer away from the ocean: a mass fossil graveyard containing more than 75 ancient whales, reports MSNBC.
Finding whale bones in the middle of the desert is strange enough, but scientists were quick to notice a deeper mystery. The fossils ended up right next to one another — some mere meters apart — as if to suggest that the whales all died at once, possibly during some cataclysmic tragedy. What could have happened?
"That's the top question," said Mario Suarez, director of the Paleontological Museum in the nearby town of Caldera.
According to Nicholas Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the whales probably died between 2 million and 7 million years ago, during a time when the area would have been a "lagoon-like environment," much different than the desert landscape it is today. The real mystery, then, has less to do with how the whales got there, and more to do with why they died.
Could they have beached themselves after becoming disoriented in the shallows? Perhaps the lagoon had become separated from the sea by a landslide, earthquake or storm, trapping the whales within? Maybe there was something else about this lagoon that made it a whale trap. Right now, scientists aren't sure.
"There are many ways that whales could die, and we're still testing all those different hypotheses," said Pyenson. But, he added: "I think they died more or less at the same time."
Of the 75 whales that have been discovered so far, 20 of them represent perfectly intact skeletons, making the site one of the best preserved fossil beds from that time period along the west coast of South America. Most of the fossils are baleen whales that measure about 25 feet long, and one startling fossilized scene depicts two adult whales with a juvenile between them, a possible family group.
Researchers have also discovered fossils of other unusual creatures at the site, including a now-extinct dolphin that had two walrus-like tusks, an extinct aquatic sloth and an ancient seabird with a 17-foot wingspan. All in all, the site represents a remarkable snapshot of the ecosystem millions of years ago.
Although officials have asked that fossils that rest along the path of the widened Pan American Highway be moved out of the way, the Chilean government has declared the site a protected area.
"We have a unique opportunity to develop a great scientific project and make a great contribution to science," said Suarez. \
LOL!
Save the whale George! Do it for me.
The sea was angry that day, like an old man trying to return soup in a deli...
One of the best episodes ever. :)
No, but suppose a heard of whales was swimming when the fountains of the deep were broken up in that local. Perhaps releasing extremely hot water and made a mess of whale steak. Just a theory, but it’s quite certain it took a flood of some type to get the whales to that location and it takes a rather large flood to raise the ocean level.
Really? Show me an ice age in the Bible.
No it was uniform. That's why Noah wrote about how hot it got on the Ark after floating on a boiling sea for over seven months.
The way the carcasses are lined up in some of the shots, I could certainly see how that would make someone scratch their heads and wonder what was up. Do you know if they were moved by people after being found?
But the fact that these things are still occurring certainly takes a lost of the mystery out of the fossil finding.
A. Nothing in the Bible speaks of the sea creatures having been destroyed!
B. nothing in the Bible speaks of “hot water”!
C. Nothing in the Bible speaks of Ice age
D. Noah got drunk and his sons had to hide his nakedness from his daughters!!!
Feel free to show me your version...
*********
Genesis 6-9
New International Version (NIV)
Wickedness in the World
6 When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. 3 Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with[a] humans forever, for they are mortal[b]; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”
4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.
5 The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. 6 The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. 7 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
Noah and the Flood
9 This is the account of Noah and his family.
Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God. 10 Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth.
11 Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. 14 So make yourself an ark of cypress[c] wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. 15 This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high.[d] 16 Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit[e] high all around.[f] Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. 17 I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you. 19 You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. 21 You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.”
22 Noah did everything just as God commanded him.
7 The Lord then said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. 2 Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, 3 and also seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth. 4 Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.”
5 And Noah did all that the Lord commanded him.
6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth. 7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood. 8 Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, 9 male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah. 10 And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth.
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. 12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.
13 On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark. 14 They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, everything with wings. 15 Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Noah and entered the ark. 16 The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah. Then the Lord shut him in.
17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. 18 The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. 19 They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. 20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits.[g][h] 21 Every living thing that moved on land perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. 22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. 23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.
24 The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.
8 But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. 2 Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. 3 The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, 4 and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. 5 The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.
6 After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark 7 and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. 8 Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. 9 But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. 10 He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. 11 When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. 12 He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.
13 By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.
15 Then God said to Noah, 16 “Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. 17 Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.”
18 So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. 19 All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on land—came out of the ark, one kind after another.
20 Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. 21 The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though[i] every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.
22 “As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.”
God’s Covenant With Noah
9 Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. 3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.
4 “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. 5 And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being.
6 “Whoever sheds human blood,
by humans shall their blood be shed;
for in the image of God
has God made mankind.
7 As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.”
8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 9 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11 I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: 13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. 16 Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”
17 So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”
The Sons of Noah
18 The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) 19 These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth.
20 Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded[j] to plant a vineyard. 21 When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. 22 Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. 23 But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked.
24 When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, 25 he said,
“Cursed be Canaan!
The lowest of slaves
will he be to his brothers.”
26 He also said,
“Praise be to the Lord, the God of Shem!
May Canaan be the slave of Shem.
27 May God extend Japheth’s[k] territory;
may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,
and may Canaan be the slave of Japheth.”
28 After the flood Noah lived 350 years. 29 Noah lived a total of 950 years, and then he died.
Footnotes:
Genesis 6:3 Or My spirit will not remain in
Genesis 6:3 Or corrupt
Genesis 6:14 The meaning of the Hebrew for this word is uncertain.
Genesis 6:15 That is, about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high or about 135 meters long, 23 meters wide and 14 meters high
Genesis 6:16 That is, about 18 inches or about 45 centimeters
Genesis 6:16 The meaning of the Hebrew for this clause is uncertain.
Genesis 7:20 That is, about 23 feet or about 6.8 meters
Genesis 7:20 Or rose more than fifteen cubits, and the mountains were covered
Genesis 8:21 Or humans, for
Genesis 9:20 Or soil, was the first
Genesis 9:27 Japheth sounds like the Hebrew for extend.
Lots of misinformation and assumptions on this thread. I posted the actual Gen:6-9 event (NIV) in 116, failed to ping you. Sorry about that!
These whales likely just got caught in the receding waters... or not. But, there were no living creatures on land or air left to devour their flesh (unless they made a very long trip really quick).
Psalm 32:10 - Many are the woes of the wicked, but the LORD's unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in him.
You earn a gold star for comprehending the ‘line up’ portion of the text, however you entirely fail concerning the ‘inexplicably in a desert’ part of the discussion.
That's the way the were found.
Heads towards land, tails towards water, they swam up together and stranded side-by-side, with just enough room maneuver between them.
No one knows exactly why.
Beach strandings are typically on gently sloped beaches, typically not by whales with strong echolocation ability, typically groups, speculation is disease/exhaustion/parasites though evidence is seldom found.
Some believe that animals too weak to swim try to support their weight on shallow sand to avoid drowning and become stranded with falling tide.
Some believe that the herd (pod) strands with the weak ones as mutual support.
If an individual stranded whale is refloated, it will typically swim in an arc back to the beach. No one knows if this is due to that mutual support thang, vertigo, half the body being "asleep" due to lack of circulation from the pressure of the sand, or suicidal tendencies...
I’m not a jack of all trades...
Would you like to cover the part about plate tectonics and the Chilean mountains being pushed up by plate collisions, or would you prefer to hear from a guy who has actually been there and mined in Chile?
Noah wrote that? Where (please read my post 126 and highlight your statement with facts!)???
Land creatures and air creatures died. Sea creatures didn't! (in mass!) Water flooding killed them, not hot water, as the dove brought back an olive branch. Hot water would have killed all vegetation, as well.
The dating of "between 2 and 7 million yrs ago" is just conjecture, based on some shaky presuppositions. The truth is, no one knows, or can know, with any degree of certainty how old these things are. All one can do is make hypotheses, on the assumption that dating methods that may be correct up until a certain point back would hold true beyond that, and that nothing could have intervened to skew the data.
I guess I really did need a </sarcasm> tag...
On this thread especially! Lots of "facts", not truths!
This is just what I was thinking. No need to posit a "super-heated water was what did it" theory. Simply getting trapped by the receding waters would be enough. Then, once the whales were dead, there may not have been any scavengers around in time to scatter the remains.
Even more so when the water covering the earth had to be pretty salty, after all 2/3 of the earth is now covered with salt water, dilute it by 1/3 and use it to water a garden. Bad things will probably happen. But then again, I'm an idiot; I could't even find that boiling sea bit. Does boiling olive trees in salt water enhance leaf production?
OK. The point is they believe these to be old ancient whales. While the dataing is a guess there is a huge difference between ancient and recent fossils. Anyone trying to link this to “the flood” is just pushing their young earth agenda.
Ah Hah! I know Someone that specializes in those...
Genesis 7:11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.
While the springs of the great deep would have provided much heat it presumably would have been offset by the tearing open of the heavens.
What you’ll want to read for more details is Walt Brown’s online book on the hydroplate theory.
Center for Scientific Creation - In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/IntheBeginningTOC.html
For those whales to be fossilized implies not that they were beached but were quickly buried under sedimentary mud. Most sedimentary layers would have been a direct result of the flood but indirect results/layers are also possible for many years afterwards with smaller localized floods where earthen dams eventually get breached. One could even regard the flow of the Niagara Falls much the same.
So much debris [consisting of various rocks, soils, water and life forms] would also be caught up in the initial breaching of the great deep fountains that Walt concludes this as the source of asteroids, meteoroids, and comets. Therefore anyone familiar with this theory is not surprised when we find traces of this debris on the moon, Mars and throughout our solar system.
Noah’s Flood is also presumably the beginning of vulcanism, the ring of fire and earthquakes. One gigantic land mass presumably was initially very violently torn apart with initial continental plates moving at up to 40mph while today most plates move only inches/year. However, let us not forget the last Japanese earthquake shifted some plates 6-8 feet.
Not necessarily a miracle. Don’t most plants return after drought, fire, and flood? The oceans were most likely not salty or only a little salty. In fact, the saltiness of the oceans is one of the natural clocks in support of 6,000 years since creation. The saltiest water is the water from the great deep - 6-10 miles below the Earth’s crust.
101 Evidences for a Young Age of the Earth...And the Universe
http://creation.com/age-of-the-earth
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