The pre-birds found in the dinosaur layers are different from modern forms. None of these pre-birds are found in higher layers. No modern birds are found below modern layers. The different layers in which bird and pre-bird fossils are found is part of the pattern of increasingly different fossils with increasing geological depth.
Yes, Percy, I understand your thinking, but I think like a floodist and it seems to me that the facts support my thinking as well as evo thinking. I'm not so sure that the deeper fossils are all that much more different from modern types than the wooly mammoth, the sabre-toothed tiger or eohippus are different from modern types. The idea of the Flood includes the idea that the pre-Flood world contained some dramatically different forms of life than we see now, in keeping with the observed Geo Column forms. They are simply different varieties of their "Kind" and the genetic possibilities for those varieties were extinguished by the Flood. The creatures that look like birds may be flying reptiles. They may be related to dinosaurs. Birds may or may not be. How would anybody know for sure? Analogous physical features don't necessarily prove it. The assumption of inheritance has no more certain justification than the assumption of similar design. Genes might prove something. DNA might I guess. The variety of creatures is fascinating, but inheritance isn't PROVED by any physical correspondences or lack of them. Especially if you're bringing in natural selection to explain a "transitional" kind. It's possible the genetic potential of the huge reptiles was rich enough before the Flood to produce a flying type as well as many other variations. I really think that's possible. But the idea that the flying type is a descendant through modification by natural selection from a previous shared ancestor requires a bunch of trial-and-error intermediaries that don't exist between ANY postulated generational connections the ToE makes. Yes, now I know I've put myself beyond the Scientific Pale again. Oh well, it seems to be my permanent abode.
The creationist explanation for the finding of different kinds of creatures in the same layer (are they ever found together or usually in separate digs?) is that they simply occupied the same piece of geography.
You find birds with the land animals in general because birds were as good at finding temporary safe haven as the higher land animals.
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In a flood scenario, flight would be a significant advantage for survival above all others (excepting water dwelling creatures), even above humans, so one would think birds would dominate in the upper layers. But they don't.
I suggested a different scenario: that they were likely soon overcome by the torrential rain, which would severely limit their ability to survive as they couldn't fly far in that. And as far as water dwelling creatures go, as I also proposed, their survival potentials would in fact be the lowest because of the huge quantities of sediments that would have been sent into the water continuously from the beginning of the flood, both stirred up from the bottom of the oceans ("fountains of the deep") and eroded off the land everywhere on earth.
Water dwelling birds like ducks would have a particular advantage since they can both fly *and* float, but they aren't represented in the higher layers in any greater proportion than other birds.
Locale, habitat, heavy heavy rain for forty days straight, all their usual food dead.
After the appearance of real birds in the fossil record beginning around 50 million years ago in the Cenozoic (the current geological era) they are fairly evenly represented in the geological layers. Flightless humans aren't found until a just a few million years ago. And flightless birds seem to be sorted in the fossil record no differently than their flighted relatives.
I never gave them the supposed greater advantage you do. I don't think their advantage was any greater than most of the land creatures had.
What you would find with the dinosaurs is simply whatever varieties lived in the particular locale with the dinosaurs, and you would find them together also because they were able to put off the inevitable just about as well as the dinosaurs were.
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Let us say we visit a region that includes layers from the Eocene (35-55 mya), the Jurassic (150-200 mya) and the Permian (250-290 mya). In your flood scenario all these creatures lived in this region at the same time. All three layers include carnivores and herbivores and creatures of every type. But no mammals or dinosaurs or birds are found in the Permian, the deepest layer. It is mostly inhabited by reptiles. The next layer up, the Jurassic, contains dinosaurs and reptiles, but none of the types of reptiles that were found in the Permian layer, and it contains very few mammals of tiny varieties, and certainly no large mammals or modern mammals. The highest layer, the Eocene, includes none of the reptiles from the Permian, no dinosaurs or reptiles from the Jurassic, but it does include a great variety of mammals, reptiles and birds that are found in none of the lower layers.
Sorting by locale, sorting by preference for the company of their own kind, sorting by survival strategies. But I still have to ask, in how many places do you find these Eocene, Jurassic, Permian layers with their corresponding fossils? There is always this problem for someone trying to trace the evidence that what is presented is the CONCLUSIONS from the evidence, not the evidence itself. We are TOLD that such and such a creature is ONLY found in the "Eocene," we are NOT told where these layers exist around the world, how many fossil specimens are found where, etc. How many fossils are we talking about? Are any of them actually grouped together or are they placed in the same "era" by extrapolation from the Geo Timeline? Are their layers of the same kind of sediment or different kinds of sediments in different parts of the world? If you find a "gap" between such a layer /time period and others above or below, what REAL evidence is there to justify assuming it ever existed in that locale?
You need a flood scenario that accounts for this arrangement of fossils in the geologic layers. You haven't provided a scenario for this thus far, which is why I tried to create one for you in my previous message, as a means of moving the discussion forward.
I didn't think your scenario worked, and I don't think your scenario this time works either. I HAD proposed a scenario of my own or at least was in the process of developing one. You are wrong to say I haven't provided one, and I've repeated some of it here.
You agreed that the scenario I developed wasn't reasonable, but asserted that there *were* reasonable flood scenarios. One recent proposal from you involves tides. Rather than me again trying to guess the details of your scenario, can you describe how a flood combined with tides could account for the distribution of fossils I've just described? Keep in mind that tides only happen at the margins of bodies of water.
I proposed the tides to explain a layer of marine life high in the column, not for anything else. Land animals would have died on the land and while I assume they too were pushed around by the tidal action I supposed they were probably buried in roughly the same vicinity as their natural habitat. I've also proposed that as the flood receded at least some of the tides could have been huge, not normal, flooding the drying land for huge distances inland, partly because of the undersea volcanoes and earthquake activity that was triggered by the release of the "fountains of the deep."
Somebody pointed this out, but I also didn't claim that ability to flee was the only factor. I started out considering only the dinosaur case to explain the observed facts about that ONE situation, and pictured them huddling on a high place from which their corpses were carried downstream as the flood receded, accounting for the appearance of something like a riverbed in the layer as well as their being all jumbled together in a heap at their final destination.
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Staying with my example of the region with Eocene, Jurassic and Permian layers, since they all lived in the same region, why do no mammals from the higher Eocene or reptiles from the lower Permian huddle with the dinosaurs atop this high place?
You are now telling me that they all lived in the same region. I assume they were washed from DIFFERENT high places, preferring their own kind.
But nobody knows, ALL of it is speculation. The evidence to my mind definitely suggests that the fossils in the layers couldn't just have died in the normal course of life over millions of years but were encased in mud, all of them, bazillions of them. How the layers got themselves in the disposition they are in is what I'm trying to think about and creationists have generally come up with these kinds of scenarios.
What evos have a BIG problem with that is NEVER acknowledged is how millions or years would have produced many horizontal layers of anything at all over so much of the earth, rather than heaps and valleys, and layers that contain fossil life in such apparently quickly-covering wet-sediment type "environments" too. Yes I know I've argued this already and everybody just informs me that it did in fact happen and this or that current observation of local smallscale geological processes explains it.
It's funny too. I tried in the original sediments deposition thread to draw some conclusions from the great extent of the geological column over all the earth and was hooted down on the basis that the geological column is not such a perfect extensive thing in reality, heck those layers aren't even parallel. But when I start arguing from its being fragmented and scattered I get it proved to me that in fact it exists in perfect form in many places.
Also, I think you're letting a couple examples of many jumbled fossils in one place overly influence your thinking. The reason these examples are so well known is because they're so unusual. The vast majority of fossils are not found like this.
It helps to understand how most fossils are found. Paleontologists do not in general do any large scale excavation for fossils. It's expensive and would damage the fossils. For the most part paleontologists have to wait for fossils to appear near the surface, as happens in American west where famous paleontologists Cope and Marsh did most of their work. Fossil rich areas are usually regions where erosion exposes the landscape or the cliff faces a little more deeply each year, and so paleontologists return year after year to see what new finds weathering and erosion have exposed. Most fossils do not stand up well to weathering, so once the first sign of a fossil is revealed it must be excavated very soon or the exposed portion will disappear.
Any fossil rich area drained by a river system will constantly deliver fossils into the water where they'll be taken downstream. Depending upon conditions and circumstance they will either dissolve or be reburied at points in the river or be delivered to a lake or carried out to sea.
Thank you, that's the kind of information I'd never be able to find on the internet. So really the fossils that are actually found anywhere are the tiniest imaginable proportion of the entirety. And any washed out like that wouldn't be traceable to any particular layer either.
You need to explain how the various qualities of creatures could influence how their remains would be distributed in a flood.
Which is exactly what I've been trying to do. But I started with the one dinosaur bed only to answer PaulK. The actual bunching of the dinosaurs at the foot of an apparent "riverbed" certainly does support a massive one-time event better than the leisurely scenario given at the monument. And this is what brought in the concept of high ground as they would have been washed DOWN to their destination.
This would have to be an extremely strong sorting influence, because fossils from different layers are never found mixed together.
I really need a picture of the distribution of fossils within their layers over great distances.
In fact, one of geology's first practical contributions occurred back in the 1800's when they first realized that some fossils are always found in certain layers and not others. They introduced the concept of indicator fossils because such fossils were frequently an indication of coal, and later in the 20th century of oil.
Yes, I know if this initial impression really does hold up over all cases rather than being extroplated into the timetable in most of them, that a very convincing sorting principle is needed. There is probably more than one sorting principle involved. I am happy with the idea that marine animals would have died first and been buried first, precipitated out of the flood onto the land first. The principle of their sorting among each other I don't know though.
And if it took quite a few days for the flood to build to the point of threatening all land life then they wouldn't have needed to be speedy to get to high ground in time if they needed to and it was within reasonable distance.
This "high ground" concept that you keep mentioning isn't what we find in the geological layers. If you consider the layers of the Grand Canyon, for the most part they look like this:
----------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------- -----------------------------------------------
If fossil ordering were really determined by flood waters encroaching upon slopes, then we should find something like this:
--------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------------------------
While discontinuities somewhat like this exist in the geological record (in effect, buried hills or mountains), they are not common, and the vast majority of fossils are found not near buried slopes but in deposits that are very, very level for many, many miles.
I don't know where you are getting this idea. What I proposed was that some animals would have been WASHED FROM higher places to their final resting places. So they would be found at the bottom of the higher places which could be quite some distance away, AND this was not a scenario meant to cover all scenarios or at least it shouldn't be extended that far. It started with the dinosaur monument, which it certainly seems to fit quite well, and it probably fits other beds of bunched-up animals.
It's possible most of the land animals were carried to their final burial places as the waters of the flood receded. Certainly there must have been heavy erosion at that point as well as during the flood, now caused by runoff from still-soaked hillsides and tidal pull as well while the tides were still coming up that high, with hills breaking up and huge mudslides occurring from the saturation. I think it must have been tidal action that accounts for the layering effect. If different sediments are laid down one on top of another by rivers, then something similar must have been going on in the flood.
Erosion, tidal currents, run off and mudslides would cause randomization, not sorting, of dead creatures.
The sorting would have occurred before the moving. But your point is taken.
Yes and I've accepted this overall appearance of fossil ordering and in fact don't doubt that it is the case overall, but only overall, shown in many fragments of the Geo Column but far from all. Above I've given my reasons why I doubt now that it really demonstrates the hard and fast rule we are told it does. It's merely a conceptualization that involves mentally filling in supposed gaps in the strata found in different parts of the world, gaps that a floodist doesn't consider to be gaps, but just one of the many ways things fell out in the catastrophe.
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The early geologists who concluded there had never been a global flood began by searching for evidence of the flood. They originally believed precisely as you believe now, that the flood was a real event, and they searched diligently for evidence of the flood.
They were obviously not looking at what modern creationists are looking at if they could actually overlook the evidence that modern creationists are looking at which is the most obvious on the planet. They simply did not register the implications of the geological column for the flood. They were overly impressed with the apparent fossil ordering and didn't consider the fact that the fossils had to have been quickly buried in wet sediments that were relatively quickly compressed to stone by weight accumulating on top of them, in order to preserve and fossilize them, that horizontal layers don't build up on land over huge distances (the idea they built up under water came later) and so on. I don't know how they could have looked "diligently" and overlooked these evidences of the flood. They were looking for some idea they had in their minds that really would not have been evidence of the Flood even if they'd found it. They didn't have a knowledge of population genetics to suggest to them that the pre-Flood creatures would have been drastically different from modern creatures, their enormous variety reduced to a severe bottleneck with the ark. They may have considered themselves Christians too, but they weren't taking the Bible as written or they wouodn't have so readily accepted an idea of long periods of time between the layers.
If the evidence, especially a couple hundred years ago, were really so fragmentary, why would they eventually conclude that the flood had never happened and the earth contained a record of great antiquity?
I'm sure they had collected a fair amount of evidence but I don't know how much it would have taken to lead them to their conclusion.
By the very nature of the geological forces which shape our planet, it would be very unlikely for the entire geologic column to exist at very many places.
Yes I would assume so. And of course I'm repeating myself as usual , but what I find hard to understand is how, given the very nature of the geological forces which shape our planet, any given layer survived intact at all anywhere over the supposed millions of years allotted to the formation of each, let alone a stack of them as seen in the Grand Canyon and surrounding terrain. (Seems to me the original geologists wouldn't have immediately thought of those layers as having been formed under water or they couldn't have dismissed them as evidence for the Flood).
Many places on land are areas of net erosion, not deposition, and so will not be represented. Many regions of the world have changed repeatedly from being mountains to plains to submergence under water. While a region is mountainous or upland it will erode. (This is why the fossil record contains very little of life from upland and mountainous areas, which by the way is another contradiction to the flood model, since presumably creatures who lived on mountains, as opposed to lowland creatures who would have had to flee upland, would be most likely to be preserved rather than least likely as is the actual case.)
But evidence FOR the flood is in the strata themselves so visible in many mountains, and the mountains had to have been formed as a result of the flood or certainly afterward and didn't exist before, according to the small depth the Bible says was required to cover all the mountains on earth at the time. And I've understood that marine fossils are found in some mountain areas, fitting the idea that the mountains were mostly formed from the lowest strata.
But the world is a big place, and so just by chance there are some parts of the world where huge portions of the full geologic column exist, and I see above that there are a couple posts enumerating them for you. The geologic column is not a chimera of geological imagination.
But the timetable based on it, and the fossil ordering may yet prove to be a false mental construct nevertheless.
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