Posted on 09/22/2015 11:17:09 AM PDT by george76
Construction workers in California's Santa Cruz mountains were subject to a surprise delay last week when a team of archaeologists took over the site to remove an ancient whale fossil.
The project site was expected to have a high potential for archaeological finds, so a monitor was assigned to the Scotts Valley development and found the fossil amid construction vehicles on Sept. 4.
This project site is not the only one in California with fossils
...
Since the 19th century, paleontologists have been studying the Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed near Bakersfield, California, where fossils and bones of ancient whales, seals, dolphins, sharks, and fish have been uncovered.
...
At 25 feet long, the archaeologists assigned to the project believe the remains belong to a mysticete whale, an ancient ancestor of the baleen whale.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
There's a fungus among us.
Not to bust your chops too much, but that's liberal thinking...
The question supposes the earth is a static system, never changing, as opposed to a dynamic system...
Liberals think in terms of a everything is a static system, never changing unless they change it though leveraging power...
That's one reason they actually think us mere specks of humanity can change and control the global climate...
Which on it's face is completely absurd, but liberals believe lots of absurd things as long as it lets them acquire power
I might add there are several accounts of a world wide flood, biblical and other ancient writings..
Aliens with big ole straws. ;)
So it's just as well Noah managed to get a couple of whales and a pair of breeding pigs on his boat or there wouldn't have been any lard or whale oil harvest possible; the prime lubricants and light sources before the discovery of oil seeps, initially utilized in the production of kerosene...
THE PRIZE The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, by Daniel Yergin.
One might conclude that it was the oil industry which saved the whale.
Maybe for the same reason there are seashells in the Sandhills of Nebraska.
Ozzie, Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart...
Darwin, C. R. 1890. Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the various countries visited by H.M.S. Beagle
...Although I examined so many hundred miles of coast on the Pacific, as well as Atlantic side of the continent, I found no regular strata containing sea-shells of recent species, excepting at this place, and at a few points northward on the road to Guasco. This fact appears to me highly remarkable; for the explanation generally given by geologists, of the absence in any district of stratified fossiliferous deposits of a given period, namely, that the surface then existed as dry land, is not here applicable; for we know from the shells strewed on the surface and embedded in loose sand or mould, that the land for thousands of miles along both coasts has lately been submerged. The explanation, no doubt, must be sought in the fact, that the whole southern part of the continent has been for a long time slowly rising; and therefore that all matter deposited along shore in shallow water must have been soon brought up and slowly exposed to the wearing action of the sea-beach; and it is only in comparatively shallow water that the greater number of marine organic beings can flourish, and in such water it is obviously impossible that strata of any great thickness can accumulate. To show the vast power of the wearing action of sea-beaches, we need only appeal to the great cliffs along the present coast of Patagonia, and to the escarpments or ancient sea-cliffs at different levels, one above another, on that same line of coast.
The old underlying tertiary formation at Coquimbo appears to be of about the same age with several deposits on the coast of Chile (of which that of Navedad is the principal one), and with the great formation of Patagonia. Both at Navedad and in Patagonia there is evidence, that since the shells (a list of which has been seen by Professor E. Forbes) there intombed were living, there has been a subsidence of several hundred feet, as well as an ensuing elevation. It may naturally be asked how it comes that although no extensive fossiliferous deposits of the recent period, nor of any period intermediate between it and the ancient tertiary epoch, have been preserved on either side of the continent, yet that at this ancient tertiary epoch, sedimentary matter containing fossil remains should have been deposited and preserved at different points in north and south
[page] 369 CORRELATION OF TERTIARY BEDS XVI
lines, over a space of 1100 miles on the shores of the Pacific, and of at least 1350 miles on the shores of the Atlantic, and in an east and west line of 700 miles across the widest part of the continent? I believe the explanation is not difficult, and that it is perhaps applicable to nearly analogous facts observed in other quarters of the world. Considering the enormous power of denudation which the sea possesses, as shown by numberless facts, it is not probable that a sedimentary deposit, when being upraised, could pass through the ordeal of the beach, so as to be preserved in sufficient masses to last to a distant period, without it were originally of wide extent and of considerable thickness: now it is impossible on a moderately shallow bottom, which alone is favourable to most living creatures, that a thick and widely extended covering of sediment could be spread out, without the bottom sank down to receive the successive layers. This seems to have actually taken place at about the same period in southern Patagonia and Chile, though these places are a thousand miles apart. Hence, if prolonged movements of approximately contemporaneous subsidence are generally widely extensive, as I am strongly inclined to believe from my examination of the Coral Reefs of the great oceans or if, confining our view to South America, the subsiding movements have been coextensive with those of elevation, by which, within the same period of existing shells, the shores of Peru, Chile, Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, and La Plata have been upraisedthen we can see that at the same time, at far distant points, circumstances would have been favourable to the formation of fossiliferous deposits, of wide extent and of considerable thickness; and such deposits, consequently, would have a good chance of resisting the wear and tear of successive beach-lines, and of lasting to a future epoch...
http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=F59&pageseq=1
;')
page 343:
In most parts, perhaps in all parts, of the Cordillera, it may be concluded that each line has been formed by repeated upheavals and injections; and that the several parallel lines are of different ages. Only thus can we gain time at all sufficient to explain the truly astonishing amount of denudation which these great, though comparatively with most other ranges recent, mountains have suffered.
Finally, the shells in the Peuquenes or oldest ridge prove, as before remarked, that it has been upraised 14,000 feet since a Secondary period, which in Europe we are accustomed to consider as far from ancient; but since these shells lived in a moderately deep sea, it can be shown that the area now occupied by the Cordillera must have subsided several thousand feetin northern Chile as much as 6000 feetso as to have allowed that amount of submarine strata to have been heaped on the bed on which the shells lived. The proof is the same with that by which it was shown that, at a much later period since the tertiary shells of Patagonia lived, there must have been there a subsidence of several hundred feet, as well as an ensuing elevation. Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of this earth.
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