Skydancer

Or an ichthyosaur. He gives the game away by stating that it was dated to the Cretaceous by the ichthyosaur remains present in the strata. The carpals are much too massive to be human - looks to me like he's hoping most of his True Believers won't have any idea how much the skeleton of a flipper resembles that of a grasping hand if you fudge the thumb.

braces_for_impact

Honestly, that was my first thought as well that the ichthyosaur had something to do with it.

gravitybow

If genuine, I'm sure a trained paleontologist could have identified the fossil by now. What's Baugh waiting for? Wanna take bets on how many years he plans to pass it off as a human hand?

I hope he displays it prominently in his museum. I'd like to go down and see it for myself.

MrDarwin

Of course, it's a well-established fact that all tetrapods (at least those with limbs that are not highly specialized) have essentially the same hand bones.

But the more I look at those photos, the less they look like human hands. There's something about the wrist bones, especially, that's not quite right.

B. H. Manners

I figured they were the bones of a turtle or maybe some sort of other aquatic creature. I just wanted to see what you guys think. this just goes to prove that a well-rounded education keeps one from being deceived (at least not as much as if you did not have the education).

The Lone Ranger

Well, in <a href="http://www.creationevidence.org/colombian/hands_hands700.jpg" target="_blank">this</a> picture it looks suspiciously as if the bones have been painted over, in order to make them more prominent. That's not necessarily a dishonest thing to do, but it would have been nice if they'd said so.

In any event, those clearly are not human carpals. Also, take a look at the thumbs. It's hard to be sure from the photograph, but they don't appear to be opposable.

I'd say it's almost certainly an ichthyosaur.

Cheers,

Michael

Amen-Moses

Well speaking as an amatuer geologist (i.e done the course but noone pays me ) I reckon they are front and back flippers rather than a pair. The "wrist" structures are definitely different.

The middle phalanx of the pinky is around twice the length of that in the thumb of index finger, check your own hand for comparison, it should be the other way around.

Definitely a marine vertibrate IMO. I went with Turtle because the flippers are so close together, any other vertibrate I can think of would have them much further apart. (assuming of course that we are looking at an undisturbed deposition)

Amen-Moses

Oolon Colluphid

Well I'm no expert, but a browse through Aiello and Dean’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0120455919/qid=1033467499/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/104-5212433-6463114?v=glance&n=507846" target="_blank">Introduction to Human Evolutionary Anatomy</a> (which one day I hope to properly understand ) makes it pretty clear to this layman that those ain’t no hominid hands...

Here’s the illustration from Gray’s. Make your own minds up





Cheers, Oolon

PS: (a) Sorry if these pics bugger the page, but they need to be big to see the details.

(b) can someone remind me how to do Amazon links for Infidel credit please? I’ve lost that info

[ October 01, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

MrDarwin

<a href="http://courses.science.fau.edu/~jwyneken/sta/SeaTurtleAnatomy-Skeletal_Anatomy.pdf" target="_blank">This article</a> (pdf file) has a good diagram of the bones of a modern sea turtle's flippers.

And here are a few images of Archelon, a giant Cretaceous sea turtle (note how similar the flipper bones are to those of a human hand):









[ October 01, 2002: Message edited by: MrDarwin ]</p>

MrDarwin

Very astute observation. Perhaps that's what was bothering me about the wrist bones, which are clearly different between the two. If these were indeed human hands, they should be mirror images of each other.

So, anybody going to wrap all this up with a pretty bow and send it to Carl Baugh for Christmas?