Basic and Remedial Fossil Identification

OFF TOPIC, for the time being anyway. DO NOT RESPOND

Faith for starters why don't you explain how the Flood would deposit the animals and plants in the following order, from lowest layer to highest layer, based on the sequence linked here:
http://jersey.uoregon.edu/...ick/AskGeoMan/RelTimeScale.html10.Man + everything below except dinos.
9. No more dinosaurs but everything below is there.
8. mammals + everything below
7. dinosaurs + everything below
6. reptiles + everything below
5. amphibians + everything below
4. land plants + everything below
3. fish + everything below.
2. shelled animals + unicellular life
1. Unicellular life.Edited by AdminNosy, : No reason given.

Ok I had an off topic response regarding the whining but I see it has been addressed.Edited by deerbreh, : Remove off topic response to Faith

Sorry - posted wrong placeEdited by deerbreh, : Posted wrong place.

Well what would a floodist say? This seems to me to be spot on topic. Why are fossils found in certain layers and not others?
I for one would like to hear the floodist explanation for why fossil ferns are first found in the Middle Devonian layers http://www.7cs.com/fossils/fern.htm (nowhere near the lowest layer, with all of the Precambrian and half of the Paleozoic layers below)
but fossil grasses are not found until the late Cretaceous in dinosaur coprolites. Just a moment...
http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/timescale/timescale.htmlThere are many rock layers in between the first ferns and the first grasses and neither ferns nor grasses are present in the very lowest layers. Ferns and grasses can't "run away" from a flood so why aren't they found together in the lowest layers? Please give me the floodist explanation as presumably there were no sediment layers before the Flood (no rain).

No the ferns do not show up in the lowest land layers. They don't even show up in the lowest layers that contain land plants and land animals. Note that I said "Middle Devonian". By the BEGINNING of the Devonian there were already non vascular plants and arthropods living on land. That is about 100 million years worth of layers. Are you telling me that a fern plant which has true roots and is anchored in the soil is going to be more likely to be picked up and moved by flood waters than slow moving arthropods and primitive non vascular plants without roots?

You cannot go by the chart divisions. The chart division represents a period of time - or if you like, a group of layers. The "Devonian" covers almost 40 million years and many individual layers of rock. Exactly. But the problem for the floodists is that there IS perfect correspondence between flora and fauna species and where they ended up. It is a huge problem. On the one hand the floodists are claiming enormous turbulence caused by "opening the waters of the deep," volcanic activity, and rapid continental movement (some anyway). On the other hand, there is no mixing of the fossils but rather perfect deposition by taxon with the most "primitive" types in the lower layers and the most "advanced" types in the upper layers in EVERY case world wide, except in the few instances where layers got shoved around - an in those cases there is still no mixing - each layer contains its distinctive group of species. And in the cases where the layers have been shoved around there is plenty of geoligical evidence as to what occured. Edited by deerbreh, : Corrected age span of the Devonian

No you can't go by the chart divisions only because they cover a period of time (or if you prefer, multiple layers). It isn't that you can't accept that ferns appeared during that time period. It is that you can't say that ferns and something else appeared at the same time just because they occur in the same division on the chart. The Ordovician covers some 80 million years. Organisms could appear 10 million years apart and still both have appeared during the Ordovician. George Washington and I both lived in the second millenium A.D. but we didn't live at the same time. Come on, you are slipping here, Faith.It is not a case of "I say, you say." I am basing what I say on the geological evidence. You are basing what you say on a propositional truth (The Flood story being literally true). But yet you told Jar this in Post 83: So there is enough turbulence that "most sea life would certainly have been killed" (by the way, funny but not enough turbulence to prevent an orderly deposition of sediments with all of the taxa carefully maintained in their original groupings based on when and where they were picked up? Do I have that right? So you are an armchair paleotaxonomist as well as a geologist and a geneticist?
I am quite sure I am going to take the word of scientists who have spent their lifetimes studying fossil taxonomy over some armchair paleotaxonomist.
By "primitive" and "advanced" I mean simple and complex, respectively. Single celled organisms being the most simple, warm blooded animals and flowering plants being the most complex. The only sorting in fossils is from simple to complex as we go from lower layers to higher layers. There is no sorting according to size or mobility as the floodists have suggested, except where size happens to correspond with level of complexity. For example, only single celled organisms are found in the lowest layers containg life forms.

Well I am sure Jar will answer for himself but this is such a softball I had to take a whack at it also. Faith, he did not say only conifers. He said the conifers were the only TREES. And he was comparing conifer trees to angiosperm trees. So it is a good question. Conifers and angiosperm trees often coexist in the same habitat so why in the first layer where conifer fossils are found do we not find ONE angiosperm fossil but yet as soon as we get to a higher layer where angiosperm fossils are found we find conifer fossils as well?

What kind of thinking is that? I can make any claim and say I know that it happened and I don't know how, just give me time and I will explain it eventually. Usually one looks at the data and then develops an explanation of what happened. I hope you never serve on a jury.

Yeah I know. I corrected it. Looked at the tic marks incorrectly.

I rest my case. You tell that to the judge and see if he lets you serve on the jury.

It is a big deal because pollen and spores are evidence of the plant and they can quite specifically be matched up with the plant. We know what grass pollen and fern spores look like because grasses and ferns still exist. I am not sure where you get the idea that pollen and spores aren't found with the plants that produced them. They are. It is true that pollen and spores are also found without the plants sometimes. So what? Pollen and spores are more easily floated in water than a rooted plant so they are often carried by water - no need for a flood at all- and deposited in sediment. So for example the pollen present in sediment layers where a river flows into a lake can be used to identify the plants in the watershed.

Same layer, yes. I am not talking about the same layer. I don't know how to make it any clearer. The Devonian, the Ordovician, the other "chart divisions" are not made up of a single layer. They are each made up of multiple layers. Well my information said Devonian. But so what? It doesn't really matter. Someone may have found a fern fossil in the Ordovician. That still doesn't take away from the fact that within the geological column the flora and fauna are sorted from simple to complex life forms from lowest layer to highest layer. When a life form occurs in a layer, it is then found in the succeeding layers until (if) it goes extinct. Ferns appear and are then found all the way up. Many layers up dinosaurs appear and there are still ferns but no grasses. Many more layers up the dinosaurs disappear but now we find grasses and ferns all the way up. Many layers up from the first ferns but before the grasses conifers appear and are then found all the way up. Many layers later angiosperm trees appear and are then found all the way up. This evidence fits sorting based on the evolutionary model of the appearance of new (and increasingly complex) life forms through time. It does NOT fit the kind of sorting expected by a world wide flood, whether turbulent or not (which is it, by the way?) False choice. The Ordovician is NOT one layer. But I am repeating myself.

Not sure how you get that but then I don't follow most of your logic so I guess nothing is new. The pollen and spores will not be in a layer that is lower than where the plants that they are associated with first appeared. I don't see how that supports the flood model.
If they did appear in a lower level you might have something.Edited by deerbreh, : quote format codes

Except if it can't. Which you don't, ever. So repeating this over and over as you do without following through with an actual credible physical explanation does not score any debating points. The terminology doesn't really matter. Focusing on it is a red herring. The point is that the conifers occur in lower layers than angiosperm trees and the evolutionary model explains that quite well while the flood model does not. Focus on that.How are fossils found in layers a "huge strike against" (the evolutionary model)? Organisms die and sometimes are captured in sediment layers and form fossils. It is the lack of fossils that YECs usually trumpet about until, unfortunately for them, the fossils show up. The presence of unique sets of fossils in multiple layers supports the evolutionary model because it can be explained as what would occur over a long period of time. On the other hand, one would expect many fewer layers for a flood model and the fossils should be much more jumbled up.