lpetrich

Be careful. Tyrannosaurs did not have any molars, as can easily be seen from the picture of a T.rex skull here; all of its teeth were cone-shaped. However, as I've noted, some present-day carnivores have a similar sort of dentition.

Valentine Pontifex

Re: T-Rex a plant eater?


The AiG types deny the existence of death (at least for animals) before the Fall caused by the sin of Adam and Eve. Thus T-Rex had to be a plant eater.

You Vorlons might have planet killers, but those creationists have something worse: logic killers.

Oolon Colluphid

Not exactly John, but this was sent to a list I’m on. The last one is also useful in this context.

Cheers, Oolon

John Solum

He said that wolves were members of the dog kind. In fact he said that they had more genetic information than dogs, and that dogs are the result of the loss of genetic information from wolves. He didn't elaborate on what the other kinds included.

He didn't elaborate, he just put up an overhead with that number on it, and stated that most dinosaurs are known by either a single bone fragment or tooth, and that there weren't as many dinosaur species as paleontologists believe.


YECs are under the impression that mountains are covered with a veneer of fossils, but they need to realize that isn't the case. The rocks that mountains are composed of contain fossils, and that's a very different scenario.

The trees likely grew on floodplains and were buried during succesive annual floods. I don't think it'd be a problem for trees to remain undecayed that long, for example, there's a lake in Wyoming (in a place called the Gros Ventre) that formed when a river was dammed by a landslide in the 1920s. You can still see dead trees sticking up through the lake. Of course, modern trees are different from the trees that grew in the Carboniferous, but I think my example is still valid.



He said isotopic ratios were measured, but he implied these were independant of the date the lab returned. Personally, I've decided to use his approach to radiometric dating, it'll make my research a hell of a lot easier and less expensive.

John Solum

They're all definitely keepers, thanks a lot.

John

ps418

Aha!
I've been waiting and lurking, hoping to catch Patrick make a mistake... and after several months, he finally did.
The P-38's did NOT sink into the ice (the density of an airplane is far less than that of ice, or they wouldn't fly) as Kosh suggested... crevasses won't work... and thinning ice under the weight of thousands of years of accumulation is totally irrelevant to artifacts buried a few dozen years ago (Patrick's idea).


WHF-
You misunderstood the point I was making. My point was that the amount of time represented by a given thickness of ice increases downward, and recent annual layers may be ~inches to many feet thick depending on location. Thus, the suggestion the YECs make -- that if 250ft can accumulate in 50yrs, then the Greenland ice can not be 150,000+ yrs old -- is wrong, because it assumes a linear relationship between thickness and time

Thus, deeply-buried planes do not conflict with their recent emplacement. It is also the case, as you point out, that the planes landed in an area of high annual accumulation. Richard Alley points this out in his book, The Two-Mile Time Machine.

Patrick

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ps418

Regarding polystrate trees, these are outstanding evidence against flood geology. See <a href="http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/forests.htm" target="_blank">Fossil forests and the flood</a> and <a href="http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/aigcoal.htm" target="_blank">AiG on Coal and the Flood.</a>

ps418

Lpetrich:
However, a tree stump in a swamp may stay undecayed because the other decaying material there had caused the decay-causing microbes to consume all the oxygen. I remember from my childhood finding some undecayed leaves at the bottom of a lake that my father would take me to swim in.

JohnSolum:
The trees likely grew on floodplains and were buried during succesive annual floods. I don't think it'd be a problem for trees to remain undecayed that long, for example, there's a lake in Wyoming (in a place called the Gros Ventre) that formed when a river was dammed by a landslide in the 1920s. You can still see dead trees sticking up through the lake. Of course, modern trees are different from the trees that grew in the Carboniferous, but I think my example is still valid.

I just got done reading a USGS paper about a forest from western washington that was inundanted in 1700 as a result of coseismic subsidence. There are still plenty of these trees standing today, several meters above the surface.

Atwater, B.F, and E. Hemphill-Haley, 1997, Recurrence intervals for great earthquakes of the past 3,500 years at Northeast Willapa Bay, Washington, U.S. Geologic Survey Professional Paper #1576.

Even better, many of these trees show the same kind of heart-rot we see in many 'fossil forests.' [e.g. 'cast-trees']

I also just read two papers about several 'fossil forests' in the vicinity of Mt St Helens, most of which range in age from 1400 to about 1800. The date of burial can be precisely determined by tree-ring correlation with much older forests. Some great exposures of these forests were exhumed by lahars after the 1980 eruption. These trees are being silicified too. The authors of the paper noted that these recent fossil forests are outstanding modern analogues for the Yellowstone fossil forests exposed at Specimen Ridge.

Karowe, A. and T. Jefferson, 1987. Burial of trees by eruptions of Mt. St. Helens, Washington: implications for the interpretation of fossil forests. Geology Magazine 124:191-204.

There are several ways in which such polystrate trees can form -- burial by lahars, burial by ash, burial by river floods, coastal subsidence, etc. -- none of which require a Noah's Flood.

As luck would have it, Glenn Morton has a new webpage chastising a YEC author (Terry Mortenson) in which he discusses polystrate trees and lists many similar observations:

The fallacy of the polystrate fossil argument (which you, a non-geologist) feel is solid consists in the FACT that under proper conditions wood won't rot. Waterlogged wood simply doesn't rot! This is what you all absolutely miss or ignore. The Mary Rose was a British war ship which sank in 1545. It was rediscovered and raised again.(impossible if the wood had rotted over the 3 centuries) <a href="http://www.maryrose.org/index.html" target="_blank">http://www.maryrose.org/index.html</a>

Another example of 300 year plus wood preservation is:

<a href="http://www.vasamuseet.se/indexeng.html" target="_blank">http://www.vasamuseet.se/indexeng.html</a> which tells of a Swedish warship which sank in 1628 and was raised in 1961.

Here is a case of wood being preserved from the Roman times--thus being preserved for something like 1500+ years.

<a href="http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/blships.htm" target="_blank">http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/blships.htm</a>

Even wood from ancient Egypt has been preserved: Haldane, Cheryl Ward. "Boat Timbers from El-Lischt: A New Method of Ancient Egyptian Hull Construction. Preliminary Report" MM(1988) 74: 141-152.

One can see a picture of 5000 year old planks from a ship at <a href="http://www.abc.se/~m10354/mar/abydos.htm" target="_blank">http://www.abc.se/~m10354/mar/abydos.htm</a>

Now, the problem for the polystrate fossil argument is that you don't have a conclusive case to make that such features can't be formed normally as the evolutionists says. I used to live in southern Louisiana. A friend from there tells me of a fossil forest with trees 4-5 feet high buried under only 35 feet of deltaic muds from St. Mary Parish (down by the delta). This is not an old cypress forest as 35 feet of sediment doesn't take that long to deposit. New Orleans is sinking due to the dewatering of the shales which is a normal process. It is sinking at a rate of 3 feet per century (http://www.enn.com/enn-news-archive/2000/02/02012000/sinking_9520.asp) . Using half this rate, the forest my friend talks about would be of the order of 2300 years old--much the same age as the Egyptian boat.

In 1993 the Mississippi River flooded terribly. It dumped as much as 6

feet of sand and shale onto forests between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. This killed a lot of the trees which were rooted in the pre-flood sediments and whose trunks now are buried six feet by new sediment. They are polystrate trees now. In 10000 years some future young-earth creationists will be able to argue that they are evidence of a global flood. <a href="http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/replymortenson.htm" target="_blank">Reply to Mortenson about John Murray</a>

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excreationist

About the human population:

If we are all hunter-gatherers, the carrying capacity of the earth is about 5 million humans, and is sustainable.

With primitive agriculture the carrying capacity is about 500 million humans, and this would decrease as good farm-land becomes arid. (This has happened in the Middle-East and Northern Africa)

With modern agriculture the carrying capacity is in the billions.

I read that somewhere... the numbers are just wild guesses.

Anyway, as hunter-gatherers, the population would stabilize after a while, but with agriculture, it keeps on growing. And note that most of the world didn't have agriculture until a few centuries ago. If we start from today's growth rates and work backwards, it looks like the first humans lived only a few thousand years ago (when Noah and his family left the ark). On the other hand, this is about the same time that agriculture started spreading.

John Solum

Thanks a lot for the information Patrick, you've done your usual excellent work.