Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Money for Footprints

ABC News of Australia is reporting that a fossil site yielding a trove of dinosaur footprints is getting a financial boost from the government to continue the work at the site. That is good news. Chrissy Arthur writes:

Lark Quarry, near Winton, attracts about 20,000 visitors a year to see thousands of fossilised dinosaur footprints - believed to be 95 million-years-old.

Heritage Minister Peter Garrett has announced funding for the quarry's conservation park to improve toilets and waste management at the site.

Winton Mayor Ed Warren says it is long overdue.

"It's the only preserved site in the world that's a recording of dinosaur footprints and we've got to have strategies in place to try and look after it and preserve the area for people to come and view this wonderful expanse of dinosaur footprints," he said.

So, the question that is lurking at the back of my mind is "how do flood geologists explain all of those footprints?"

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6 comments:

  1. Good question. The logical leaps are mind boggling.

    Speaking of the land down under, it could be the poster child for evolution. How is it that all the platypuses and marsupials ended up there? (Not to mention the flightless birds of Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia.) Did they all walk there from Noah's Arc?

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  2. Oh come on. That's way too simplistic of a question for you to ask!

    Either they were an area that got lots of dino tracks before the Flood and was somehow preserved instead of being washed away,

    Or, they were made relatively shortly after the Flood.

    The difficulty would be if these layers are supposed to have been laid down BY the Flood, but I don't know the layers these are supposed to be, or how the Flood geologists would categorize them - Flood or post-Flood.

    If you want to pose a more substantive/difficult question, you've got to look at what layers the prints were found in, what sort of materials they are, when and how those materials are supposed to have been laid down, etc.

    Ask Paul Garner. He has a blog and he's one of the resident geologists for ICR. Snelling would probably be the more authoritative source, but he's not particularly interactive.

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  3. Absolutely right, Kent. There doesn't seem to be any answer to that one. The Noah's Ark model clearly has them walking to Wallacea, at which point, there is a "stop sign" telling the placentals to stop in their tracks and settle Asia instead. In reality, it is the Sunda Trench that keeps placentals from making the trip. If your geological model has the trench forming at the end of the Cretaceous (which is what the vast majority of geologists think) then the whole thing makes sense. Otherwise, like soooooooo many other parts of the Noah's Ark global food explanation, it just doesn't.

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  4. J, then it seems to me that what you have to is explain why you have dinosaur tracks, then deposition, then more tracks, then more deposition, then trees and so on. You actually have hatched dinosaur eggs in the fossil record, as well as burrows, sand dunes (with a flood going on??), dessication cracks and coral reefs, just to name a bit. Neither the ecological zonation model or the hydrodynamic sorting model explain these things. Flood geology's model rests on the idea that the entire geological column can be explained by Noah's flood. It simply doesn't hold up. Do you know what happens when archaeologists excavate bronze and iron age sites? They find dirt, not rock. I excavated sites in Japan that were between 6 and 10 thousand years old. We dug through dirt. There is no way, without multitudinous miracles, that sediment will settle that fast and turn into rock--especially with all of that water around. There are numerous web sites that detail the incredible problems that flood geology encounters when you factor in the geological evidence. It makes much more sense to view it as a localized flood.

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  5. Sorry, I was being too snarky. I agree with you, but was pointing out that, to the question you put forward, there are standard Creationist responses.

    It's not until there are more detailed investigations that the questions posed to Creationists begin being difficult for them to answer.

    The sand-dunes-in-a-Flood question is one I've asked before, and the answer is that they are actually sand-waves formed underwater in the Flood. It's not until the problems of how other things could exist in sand-waves formed under hundreds of feet of rushing water, that the real problems show up.

    Just asking how there could be footprints there is a really simple answer for Creationists to answer.

    What is the environment of Lark Quarry? Is it a layer that is supposed to have been laid down by the Flood, or is it post-Flood? Were the prints made in mud or sand? What else is found in the layer? How was the layer formed? Etc.

    That is when the question is actually an interesting one.

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  6. Sorry, J. I missed the irony. Larks Quarry has a deposition history of forests, swamps and plains above the dinosaur tracks. The combination of these things would never form in a world-wide, year-long flood. The prints were made in a mudflat.

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