N.Wells
Posts: 1836
Joined: Oct. 2005
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Sorry in advance for a long post, but Sal's latest BS over at UD merits it.
Sal has done another instance of his usual disgusting misrepresentation of stratigraphy, sedimentology, and structural geology. He says, | Quote | | “The first thing to realize is that few if any places on the Earth do we have the following column intact, in fact many of the “layers” are only layers in one’s imagination since they can be side by side or in some cases INVERTED!” |
The earth has been active and changeable over a very long time, with bits of the crust going up and down like a very slow yo-yo, to the extent that we would not be surprised if nowhere ended up preserving a geologic column that had strata representing every geological period. However, there are actually at least 30 such places (http://evolutionwiki.org/wiki/Entire_geological_column_doesn%27t_exist), with precise numbers depending on how you define “period”, but there are a lot more if you include places where you can cross all the layers obliquely because the layers have been tilted, as in Great Britain. In contrast, there are no places where you can find different “layers” side by side or inverted without clear evidence of an unconformity or faulting (e.g., strata filling a Paleocene valley that was cut into Cretaceous strata, hence putting Paleocene strata next to Cretaceous strata, or Precambrian strata clearly thrust up over Lower Paleozoic strata such as along the Lewis Overthrust in Glacier National Park, notwithstanding YEC misrepresentations to the contrary). Strata do get overturned or thrust up onto younger strata, but this happens in areas such as deformed zones between colliding continents, where an asteroid blasted slabs of rock out of its impact crater, or where a slab of strata slid off a swelling volcano.
Sal says, | Quote | “So do we have something that ought to change Nye’s mind. Absolutely!. | Quote | “Many people are surprised when they hear of these creatures being buried together and wonder why they never heard of it before. Below is one evolutionary paleontologist’s explanation.
| Quote | | “We find mammals in almost all of our [dinosaur dig] sites. These were not noticed years ago … . We have about 20,000 pounds of bentonite clay that has mammal fossils that we are trying to give away to some researcher. It’s not that they are not important, it’s just that you only live once and I specialized in something other than mammals. I specialize in reptiles and dinosaurs.” |
Consider how many more tens of thousands of fossil mammals in ‘dinosaur rock’ are likely being similarly ignored in other parts of the world, with the likelihood of finding even more representatives of the same kinds as modern-day mammals.” |
So is there a possibility anomalies are edited out and instead a practice of false reporting (perhaps innocently done) has been perpetuated. They probably think something like: “We found a mammal, that’s clearly contamination because we know mammals aren’t in that era”. So thus we never hear official reports of the anomalies because the anomalies are regarded as contaminants since according to the false narrative, certain creatures didn’t live in certain eras." |
So, what we have here is misrepresentations piled on misunderstandings piled on outright lies mixed with attempted sleight of hand and nasty insinuations. The clear implication is that mammals in dinosaurian strata are somehow embarrassing and get pushed under the carpet. As someone who once got to be part of a paper in Nature because of half a mammal tooth in a dinosaurian deposit (because it fulfilled expectations, not because it refuted them), I’ve got to say that Sal is completely delusional here. He knows better than this: he and I have had discussions (back before ARN went extinct) about paleontologists' views of the fossil record, but apparently Sal expects scientists to lie as easily as he does to protect his cherished world-view.
Mammals are inferred to have evolved in the Jurassic, so of course they are expected to be present in Jurassic and Cretaceous strata. They are however very rare and belong to very primitive groups of mammals. They also tend to have been overlooked, because people searching in dinosaur strata have mostly been dinosaur paleontogists who have been looking for large fossils, the sort of thing you can spot from horseback or while walking around upright. Mesozoic mammal fossils (typically small jaws and very tiny teeth) tend to be hard to see with a microscope, let alone while prospecting in the field, even if you are crawling, or digging very carefully, so few discoveries were made until searching methods were changed. With dry and wet sieving and bulk processing of concentrate back at the lab, sites that have yielded dinosaur bones tend also to have yielded bones of frogs, small lizards and mammals, which makes sense because if conditions were right for preserving one fossil they were probably good for preserving several more. That being said, you may have to process a ton or two of dirt to get a mammal tooth or two.
What we don’t have in the Mesozoic are fossils of modern types of placental mammals. Also, Cenozoic placental mammals all occur in their own very marked and exception-free sequences in Cenozoic strata
Sal then cites a particularly revolting Dutch creationist video that perverts large areas of sedimentology and stratigraphy in devious ways. It is a somewhat more sophisticated version of the ignorant YEC tripe that Sal usually deals in. We have known for a couple of centuries that deposition can vary from extremely slow to astonishingly fast (although our knowledge of both extremes has expanded considerably), so instances of fast sedimentation do not disprove instances of slow deposition elsewhere. We know that thick fast deposits tend to be characteristically different from slow deposits (although not infrequently we lack the clues that can tell them apart), and that they occur in characteristically different settings. Mudflows, landslides, impactites, floods, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions all have a high potential for very rapid deposition. They tend to do things like bury soils and whatever is living immobile on the surface that is about to be buried. Allluvial fans, areas around volcanoes, deltas, rivers, and areas below fault scarps and the like all lend themselves to instances of rapid deposition. Lake floors free from river influx and deltas and abyssal plains in deep oceans experience fairly slow deposition. Although many fossil deposits clearly record catastrophic floods, many others do not (not all floods are gigantic, and not all fossil deposits involve water, let alone moving water). The Dutch video really needs book-length refutation, but does not merit it. Any sed/strat text will show why the video makes a sham of its misrepresentation of time-transgressive stratigraphy (rock units that cross time planes). For example, when a delta fills in a lake or builds out into the sea, you get a “delta layer” (really a delta package) that is older at the back end than at the front end because it built out laterally over time. (Likewise, the upwind end of a snow drift is usually older than the downwind end, because the pile has grown downwind over time.) However, this in no way overthrows standard ideas about stratigraphy: go back to Dunbar and Rogers (a classic text from 1957) for a clear explanation of how this happens, why it is expected, and how to tell if you are dealing with an instance of it, albeit at a fairly coarse scale. The video also puts a lot of stock into ecologic and hydrologic sorting of fossils. Both occur, of course, but trying to explain the whole geological column and biostratigraphy this way is just delusional. Note that insects that were buried in amber occur in geological strata according to their evolutionary order, NOT according to the shapes and sizes of the chunks of amber that contain them: how did that happen? The earliest grass fossils occur much higher in the fossil record than the earliest fir trees: is this because fir trees cover lowlands and grass only grows on mountain tops? Likewise, water lilies first occur later than the first tree ferns: is this because water lilies can outrun tree ferns? Without exception, all reefs of scleractinian corals occur in strata younger than those with all reefs of tabulate and rugose corals: given that reefs vary from less than car-sized to more than city-sized, what is there about scleractinian coral reefs that allows them to get sorted separately and deposited later, and how did so many (or for that matter, any) happen to get transported and deposited right-side-up, balanced on little tiny triangular points exactly matching their growth position? YEC geology is bullshit from one end to the other, and Sal is completely full of it.
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