In detail:1) How do Fossils Superpose?, 2) Searching for the Cretaceous Fauna (with appendix on Karoo, Beaufort), 3) What I think I have refuted, 4) Glenn Morton caught abusing words other people were taught as very small children
In debate or otherwise on Assorted Retorts: 1) ... on How Fossils Matter , 2) ... on Steno and Lifespan and Fossil Finds, 3) Geological Column NOT Palaeontolical [Censored by CMI-Creation-Station? Or just by the Library I am in?], 4) Same Debate Uncensored, One Step Further, 5) Continuing debate with Howard F on Geology / Palaeontology, 6) Howard F tries twice again ... , 7) Is Howard F getting tired? Because up to now, he has failed., 8) Resuming Debate with Howard F
On Correspondence blog: Contacting Karoo about superposition of layers and fossils
- Howard F
- You make a mistake that you have made many times. Average depositional rates do not apply to thin intervals. In is not valid to divide down as you did: this was shown to be invalid by Sadler in the 1980's. Geologists today (and for the past 50 years at least) do not claim every cm is deposited slowly. Just that average depositional rates are slow. No geologists today thinks a tree was buried over millions of years, so please stop claiming this is a current concept. Modern concepts are that the sedimentary record is a mix of rapidly-deposited layers, and slowly-deposited layers. For example, the vast majority of fossils are poorly-preserved through slow burial.
You also grossly oversimplify the fossil record. Let's just look at reef-forming organisms. In the Cambrian only archaeocyathids (extinct). The rest of the Paleozoic has reefs built by tabulate corals, stromatoporoids, and even algae. None of the Paleozoic reefs contain the modern scleractinian corals. In the Mesozoic, rudists (extinct) were common reef builders, and today reefs are built without any of those organisms. How can a single world-wide flood explain even one fossil reef (and there are thousands) let alone the succession of fossil reef-forming species.
Here is another example: The succession of land animals. In the late Paleozoic are Pelycosaurs, but no dinosaurs and no mammals. In the Mesozoic are dinosaurs, but never any pelycosaurs, and never mixed with ungulate mammals. In younger layers are ungulate mammals. This order is never violated, and none of these groups are ever mixed. No where in the world are elephants mixed with dinosaurs. And even within the Mesozoic, there is a succession of dinosaurs that is about the same all over the world. How can you explain this? Why are there never any horse, antelope, elephant, goat, moose, rhinoceros, deer, cow, sheep, lama, etc. buried with dinosaurs or pelycosaurs? Not even a foot print?
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- +Howard F "The succession of land animals. In the late Paleozoic are Pelycosaurs, but no dinosaurs and no mammals. In the Mesozoic are dinosaurs, but never any pelycosaurs, and never mixed with ungulate mammals. In younger layers are ungulate mammals. This order is never violated, and none of these groups are ever mixed. No where in the world are elephants mixed with dinosaurs."
Is there ANYWHERE where they are one on top of other?
http://assortedretorts.blogspot.fr/2015/04/on-how-fossils-matter.html
http://assortedretorts.blogspot.fr/2015/04/on-steno-and-lifespan-and-fossil-finds.html
+Howard F "No geologists today thinks a tree was buried over millions of years, so please stop claiming this is a current concept. Modern concepts are that the sedimentary record is a mix of rapidly-deposited layers, and slowly-deposited layers. For example, the vast majority of fossils are poorly-preserved through slow burial."
THEN :
- a) even slow burial is consistent with Flood Geology (which has some complementary ideas about reasons for poor preservations too);
- b) poorly preserved material means poorly documented species, even genera. Look at three specimens of this one:
http://palaeocritti.blogspot.fr/2013/12/uberabatitan-ribeiroi.html
- c) above all, if layers CAN be rapidly deposed, how come you "know" the layers add up to millions or even billions of years?
Also, alternatives to Flood with rapid deposition are sometimes very much less realistic:
http://assortedretorts.blogspot.fr/2015/01/on-arguing-biblical-inerrancy-from.html
- Howard F
- +Hans-Georg Lundahl I don't see any reference to pelycosaurs stratigraphically above dinosaurs or ungulates mixed with or below dinosaurs in these sites. Seriously, this is a major problem for YEC's.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- +Howard F, I was not asking on pelycosaurs stratigraphically below (I guess you meant) dinosaurs. I was asking about the LOCALLY below. What exact place on earth?
Give a reference from this site:
http://www.palaeocritti.com
It is evolutionist, so not biassed against you.
I have been through a few countries on it, and nowhere found palaeozoic landfauna under mesozoic, nor mesozoic under cenozoic.
- Howard F
- +Hans-Georg Lundahl That web site does not have all the information, but of course there are many hundreds of places all over the world where rocks with Pelycosaurs are below rocks with dinosaurs.
Here is a reference to a geological map of North America.
http://gallery.usgs.gov/images/06_25_2010/hlc5FRq11Y_06_25_2010/large/gmna_150dpi_standard.jpg
Pelycosaurs are found only in Paleozoic rocks, and dino's in Mesozoic rocks. There is a line that separates them and anywhere there is an outcrop along that line would be an example you are looking for.
The same goes for the KT (Cretaceous, abbreviated as K, Tertiary) boundary which separates dino's from ungulates. Here is a nice example of that boundary.
In this one, the KT boundary is second from last image:
https://landingaday.wordpress.com/2012/01/
I worked in Kansas for a long time where Pelycosaurs are found in the east in the Pennsylvanian, and Dinos are in the west in the Cretaceous. Although there are many miles in between, the layers with the Pelycosaurs dip to the west and are a few thousand feet below the Cretaceous rocks with Dinos. So of course there is no one outcrop that shows them all, but the stratigraphic order is without doubt. Here is a map and cross section to illustrate this.
http://www.kgs.ku.edu/Publications/Bulletins/257/03_hist.html
The stratigraphic order is based on such observations, not on assumptions. In the Kansas example, there are many tens of thousands of petroleum wells that confirm the geologic cross section.
And there are, without exaggeration, hundreds of examples of other outcrops with Pelycosaurs below Dinos, and ungulates above dinos. Of course anywhere you find dino fossils in the ground and a dead deer or horse on the surface is another example. You may think this is a trivial example, but try to find the reverse: a fossil horse in the rock and dead dino on the surface.
Can you find a single example of pelycosarus - dinosaurs - ungulates out of order? If there were any such example it would be big news.
I am using pelycosarus - dinosaurs - ungulates as an example only. There are many other examples of fossils that are only found in order, and never in the reverse. YECs seem to sidestep this data.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- "That web site does not have all the information"
More than you show, anyway.
"I worked in Kansas for a long time where Pelycosaurs are found in the east in the Pennsylvanian, and Dinos are in the west in the Cretaceous"
Exactly. Which means that Pennsylvanian and Cretaceous FAUNA may have been biotopes living in different places.
That is just exactly one MORE example of confusing stratographic overlay of rocks with a local overlay of fossils. You just said yourself that Pelycosaurs and Dinos were in DIFFERENT places. Thank you.
Ianthasaurus is a pelycosaur:
http://www.palaeocritti.com/by-group/eupelycosauria/ianthasaurus
"Upper Pennsylvanian (Missourian) Stanton Formation, near Garnett, Kansas"
http://www.palaeocritti.com/by-group/pterosauria/pteranodon
"Upper part of Niobrara Formation (Late Cretaceous, Santonian) , Smoky Hill Chalk, Western Kansas, US."
I suspect Smoky Hill Chalk is NOT in Garnett or nearby.
You did NOT find a Pteranodon when digging five feet deep into a presumedly very eroded place, and then dig ten feet deeper after removing it, to find the Ianthasaurus just below it.
You found (or whoever else did) a Pteranodon five feet under the ground in a presumedly very eroded place with Cretaceous layers on or near top, and elsewhere you dug four feet into the ground in a presumedly even more eroded place with Pennsylvanian layers on or near top.
I don't believe the erosion story of it, I believe certain layers presumed to have been above Creteaceous in one place and Pennsylvanian in other place never existed at all there. And I also believe the Ianthasaurus lived in a Pennsylvanian biotope during the time when the Flood struck in what is now a place near Garnett, while the Pteranodon lived in a biotope or landed in a Cretaceous biotope during the time when the Flood struck in what is now a place with Smoky Hill Chalk in Western Kansas.
+Howard F I think I got censored here. [Censorship, if such, removed.]
I had however answered your main point. To two subsidiary ones, where you try to defend it:
"And there are, without exaggeration, hundreds of examples of other outcrops with Pelycosaurs below Dinos, and ungulates above dinos."
Where so?
Document one case from:
http://www.palaeocritti.com
OR from any other palaeological publication of your chosing.
I have investigated it for months.
So, the example is somehow NOT on palaeocritti. Remarcable, but not impossible. Where is it documented?
"There are hundreds of" is not a documentation.
"I worked in Kansas for a long time where Pelycosaurs are found in the east in the Pennsylvanian, and Dinos are in the west in the Cretaceous. Although there are many miles in between, the layers with the Pelycosaurs dip to the west and are a few thousand feet below the Cretaceous rocks with Dinos."
That can be arranged by my scenario. Both layers are from flood, they are not strictly coextensive and they covered different biotopes.
If one layer had covered two biotopes of different "age" types, you would simply have analysed it as not same layer but two different ones of same type.
How many layers labelled "shale" are there in North Dakota? Shale is one type, if all of it were from Flood it could be one or two layers. BUT is then reanalysed as many different ones because containing different faunas. Or because above or below such as contain faunas assigned to "specific periods".
+Howard F I seem to have been censored again [censorship removed], thankfully I saved the comment this time.
Your reference to blog and K/T boundary includes:
"Anyway, in this photo by geology professor John Isbell (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), the KT boundary is marked by the black coal unit that’s visible across the middle of the outcrop"
Picture, black coal line visible.
"Very cool. Dinosaur fossils below; no dinosaur fossils above."
I believe him. What he does NOT say is that there WERE any ungulate fossils above it.
+Howard F As to third link, here are a few words that should make you pause:
"It was recognized in the mid-1800s that rocks of Permian age occurred in Kansas, based on the fossils they contained; however, they were considered as part of the Carboniferous (Mudge, 1866, p. 5) and consisted mostly of massive magnesian limestones and calcareous and arenaceous shales (Mudge, 1866, p. 10). Permian rocks, as then understood, were included in the Carboniferous of the first geologic map of Kansas (Mudge, 1875) and the 1878 colored version (Mudge, 1878). However, this complete sequence of the Kansas Permian was not treated in publications until the mid-1890s (Haworth, 1895a; Prosser, 1895, 1897). As pointed out by Merriam (1963), the red-bed sequence in Kansas, now considered to be Leonardian and Guadalupian, received considerable attention during this time and into the next century. It was important, and thus necessary, to determine whether the red-bed sequences in Kansas were Permian or part of the Mesozoic. Thus, much discussion focused on the age of these beds and they were, at different times, considered Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Triassic, as well as Permian. Such divergent views were based on lithologic similarities and to some extent on the age significance of fossil plants and vertebrates. Hay (1893), one of those early workers on the red beds of Kansas, suggested that they belong to the Permian, based on lithological similarities to the red beds in Texas from which Cope (1888, 1894) had described Permian vertebrates (Prosser, 1897, p. 80). Cragin (1896), in a detailed description of the Kansas red beds, also considered them to be Permian. "
In other words, Permian red beds in Kansas are Permian, not because of Permian fauna in Kansas, but because of Permian fauna in Texas where similar red beds occurred.
So, what proof is there against scenario: red beds were both deposited in Flood, from same or similar source of material, and in Texas but not Kansas covered a Permian type biotope?
[Eliminated a code which I had not put there, some admin played a prank.]
- Howard F
- +Hans-Georg Lundahl You said: Which means that Pennsylvanian and Cretaceous FAUNA may have been biotopes living in different places.
No, sorry, The problem with this is that the layers with pelycosaurs are a thousand feet below the layers with dinos. They can be tracked in the subsurface with thousands of petroleum wells. They cannot be the same age. I am using vertebrates as examples, but the same argument works even better with microfossils which can be found in cuttings from oil wells. For example conodonts (Paleozoic) are always below coccoliths (Mesozoic and younger) and these occur directly on top of each other in the same area.
There is no place in the world where a single layer contains dinosaurs in one area and pelycosaurs in another. Pleycosaurs, dinosaurs, and ungulates are found in every continent anywhere there are rocks of that particular age. And the age can be determined independently using microfossils and by tracking beds. If these were ecological zonations, then occasionally you should find the order reversed, but we never do.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- "the layers with pelycosaurs are a thousand feet below the layers with dinos"
- 1) You dug that deep or only bored that deep?
- 2) I suppose if you didn't dig that deep, you really mean sth a bit different, like (reconstructing what I think you mean):
* The layers with pelycosaurs in East Kansas are in West Kansas a thousand feet below the layers with dinos there.
If this reconstruction is correct, this means that Pelycosaurs have NOT been found locally below Dinos. Which was my point.
Different layers during the flood may have been the ones covering different biotopes in different places.
If it is not, tell where exactly a Pelycosaur of any kind has been found locally below a Dino.
Not stratigraphically below, that would be my reconstruction, but locally below.
"There is no place in the world where a single layer contains dinosaurs in one area and pelycosaurs in another."
Oh, I believe you. In a sense.
BECAUSE, if one and same sandstone layer had covered both a pelycosaur in one place and a dinosaur in one other place, they would have been diagnosed as different layers.
Tracing rock type is not that easy and unequivocal that you have no wiggling room for that.
"And the age can be determined independently using microfossils and by tracking beds."
Tracking beds, just answered. Microfossils would probably have some wiggling room by means of different layer positions giving different diagnosis for exact same preserved fossil form in different parts of the world.
"If these were ecological zonations, then occasionally you should find the order reversed, but we never do."
My argument is of same order of probative force if verified, and much better verified than yours seems to be.
If these were time zones, with sediments building up over millions of years, with sediments lowered by millions of years of erosion, somewhere on the globe, you would find trilobites locally under pelycosaurs, these locally under dinos and pterodactyls, these locally under extinct ungulates and smilodons and mammooths, these locally under fauna we can recognise. At least two or three of these locally in same place.
As far as I have seen, we do not. And asking me to take "stratigraphically" instead of strictly locally as a sufficient substitute is bait and switch.
One supplementary observation:
"For example conodonts (Paleozoic) are always below coccoliths (Mesozoic and younger) and these occur directly on top of each other in the same area."
THAT is beyond what I have been doing, but here we might be dealing with shell fish getting layered due to form or size. During Flood.
I meant to be commenting on "succession of land animals" (and slightly perhaps sea vertebrates too) only.
And one more:
Red Hills Kansas (with red beds "from Permian") : The Red Hills is the name of a physiographic region located mostly in Clark, Comanche and Barber counties in southern and central Kansas.
Ianthasaurus find Kansas (a pelycosaur, thus "Permian fauna"), Garnett : Garnett is a city in and the county seat of Anderson County, Kansas, United States.
And on map, Garnett in Anderson county is midway NS and very far E. So the two "indications of Permian" do not match as to locality.
Wikipedia : Red Hills (Kansas) · Garnett, Kansas
