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FOSSILS FIT FLOOD MODEL

Fossils are amazing specimens that reveal an extraordinary occurrence from the past. This article focuses on a fossil pit in Germany which is full of exquisitely preserved animals.

Secrets of the Messel Pit, a Fossil Graveyard

News to Know

by Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell

January 4, 2014

The Messel Pit preserves animals suddenly and catastrophically buried in the wake of the global Flood.
The travel section of the January issue of Smithsonian Magazine features a fine photo gallery of specimens from Germany’s famous fossil graveyard, the Messel Pit. The photos are accompanied by an ode of gratitude proclaiming the “debt humans owe to animals that died out 48 million years ago.” And what is it exactly that we are supposed to be grateful for, according to the Smithsonian’s writer? For the “evolutionary secrets” preserved in this fossil graveyard.

This three-foot-long rodent (Ailuravus macrurus) from the Messel Pit looks like a squirrel. Evolutionists believe it convergently evolved the same features as a squirrel but consider it outside the squirrel lineage. Image: Berthold Steinhilber, Smithsonian Magazine

Like other turtles fossilized in the Messel Pit, this pair of turtles resembles modern turtles. Also like other turtles in the fossil graveyard, they appear to have been suddenly buried while in the process of reproducing after their kind. Image: Jonathan Blair Corbis, Smithsonian Magazine

The vibrant colors of this stag beetle fossil from the Messel Pit are still visible, its preservation likely associated with a sudden burial. Image: Berthold Steinhilber, Smithsonian Magazine

This species of ant, Titanomyrma giganteum, from the Messel Pit fossil graveyard was as big as a hummingbird. Read more about such megafauna in “Why Were the Animals So Big?” Image: Berthold Steinhilber, Smithsonian Magazine

This cockroach grew about two inches long. A wide variety of insects is well-preserved in the Messel Pit, though cockroaches are among the less common ones. Image: Berthold Steinhilber, Smithsonian Magazine

Animals Through Biblical Glasses

By contrast, we rounded out our News to Know year on the 31st with our own photo-essay “Life Lessons Illustrated in the Animal Kingdom” recalling many of 2013’s favorite animal stories. We reviewed what evolutionary biologists claimed about them and what they could teach us about God’s wonderful designs. Thus it seems fitting now to take a look into the Messel Pit to see what evolutionary secrets it is supposed to reveal, what some of the marvelous animals there can show us, and what we should see as we peer into the pit through “biblical glasses”—in other words, how God’s Word can help us understand what we see.

Messel And Mammalian Success

The Messel Pit in central Germany is a 200-foot-deep gouge through a forest. Located at an old strip mine from which oil shale (shale impregnated with oil) was once mined, the big ditch almost became a garbage dump, but paleontologists lobbied for its preservation and since 1995 it has been a protected UNESCO World Heritage site. The Messel Pit is a fossil graveyard in which a wide variety of animals and plants are exquisitely preserved. Classified as Eocene rock, evolutionists believe the fossils there are the remains of animals buried around 48 million years ago and thus provide insight into the progress of mammalian evolution following dinosaur extinction.
Evolutionists believe that mammalian evolution started at the same time as dinosaur evolution but only took off with great success when dinosaurs became extinct and vacated many ecological niches. This is how they explain the appearance of a wide variety of mammals in the fossil record in the layers above those containing dinosaurs. Such is the case with the Messel Pit. Because they think the animals in the pit—believed to have once been a deep, steep-sided lake—died during this mammalian heyday, they believe the fossils in the Messel Pit reveal the secrets of mammalian evolutionary success.

Sudden Death

Why are so many animals—45 mammalian species as well as reptiles, fish, insects, 43 species of birds, and a few amphibians—preserved in Messel Pit? Many of the animals are preserved intact with fur, colored feathers, or dinner in their stomachs, and nine pairs of turtles are preserved mating. How did their very activities get frozen in time? What caused so many animals to suddenly die? Evolutionary paleontologists propose that toxins or carbon dioxide bubbled up through the lake and ended their lives. The lack-of-oxygen hypothesis is called into question, however, by the presence in the Messel Pit of water-beetle larvae that can only survive in highly oxygenated water.¹ For that matter, even the idea that the Messel Pit was a lake is questionable given the relative scarcity of mosquitoes and other water-dependent insects, the rarity of amphibians among the fossils (only one salamander and three species of toads or frogs), and the absence of fossil tadpoles.²
In any case, according to evolutionists, something killed animals visiting a deep lake quite suddenly, they fell in and sank, and then over centuries each was gradually covered by fine clay—with 250 years required to form each inch of sediment—and eventually fossilized. And why didn’t these dead animals simply decompose or get scavenged on the lake bottom? Evolutionists propose that there wasn’t much oxygen at the deep lake’s bottom and that there was therefore shortage of scavengers and bacteria down there.

Moderns And Megas But No Transitions

Some of the animals in the Messel Pit are extinct, and others are pretty much like those we have today. Some, like pygmy horses, are small species of familiar animal kinds. Others are examples of now-extinct gigantic species—megafauna—such as a giant cockroach and a giant ant. There is an extinct three-foot-long squirrel-like mammal called Ailuravus macrurus—hailed by evolutionists as an example of convergent evolution because it looks like a big squirrel but doesn’t fit into the evolutionary lineage proposed for squirrel. (You can learn more about megafauna in “Why Were the Animals So Big?”) There are also modern-appearing hedgehogs and mice, frogs and turtles in Messel Pit. There are bats with the same impressive specializations as today’s bats. And there is “Ida,” a controversial furry lemur-like primate that some evolutionists claim is a missing link in human evolutionary history. Nothing about this lemur-like primate, of course, indicates it was anything but an extinct lemur-like creature. (You can read more about Ida at “Ida (Darwinius masillae): the Missing Link at Last?”)
As we have explained many times, sharing a few similarities with other organisms does not demonstrate an animal is a transitional form. Common designs and similarities can never demonstrate evolutionary relationships. While evolutionary paleontologists sort through the Messel Pit labeling many extinct and modern-appearing organisms, large and small, what they actually have found is that some animals are highly developed just like their modern counterparts and others are highly developed but extinct. Those findings do not demonstrate anything evolving into anything.

Time Capsule

Evolutionary paleontologist Ken Rose comments, “Everyone in vertebrate paleontology knows Messel. There’s really no place in the world that compares. A great deal of what we know from that time period is from there.” But what time does it tell us about? Given that the animals in it are so wonderfully preserved, we must attribute their preservation to a sudden catastrophic burial.
The Messel Pit is a fossil graveyard. The exquisite preservation of the animals in the Messel Pit is consistent with rapid catastrophic burial, not centuries of gradual burial allowing for distortion and decomposition. The global Flood of Noah’s day, around 4,300 years ago, is recorded in biblical history in the book of Genesis (chapters 6–9), confirmed by Jesus Christ Himself in Matthew 24:38–39, and attested to by a large portion of the fossil record in general as well as fossil graveyards around the world. The Flood itself and post-Flood catastrophes swept away and sorted countless animals and plants and buried them in water-borne sediment. Some were buried en masse, creating fossil graveyards.
Layers in the fossil record reveal the order of burial, not the order of evolving life. There are fossil graveyards found at many different levels in the geologic column around the world. This particular fossil graveyard, in Eocene rock, is fairly high in the geologic column—high enough that many creationist geologists believe it represents a group of animals suddenly and catastrophically buried amid the unstable conditions in the aftermath of the global Flood. Read more about fossil graveyards in “The World’s a Graveyard.”

Biodiversity Is Biblical

So what's wrong with the idea that mammals diversified to fill the niches left by extinct dinosaurs? After all, animals fill niches vacated by other animals in ecosystems all the time. After the Flood, the animals preserved on Noah’s Ark were released to replenish the earth, but some eventually became extinct, just as animals today become endangered and go extinct. (Learn more about this in “How Did Dinosaurs Die?”) Doubtless various animals did move into ecological gaps left as dinosaurs and other now-extinct animals began diminishing in the centuries after the Flood. The natural processes of speciation and variation within the existing created kinds of animals would have resulted in animals that filled those niches.
The problem with the scenario extolled in the Smithsonian’s article is the evolutionary spin it puts on the pit. The notion that increasingly complex animals evolved over millions of years is conjecture imposed on the fossil record. Such a process is unsupported by biological observations. The Messel Pit fossils don't demonstrate upward evolution or transitional forms. They attest to the existence of many diverse, well-developed, fully functional animals that populated a portion of the post-Flood world.
By peering into the Messel Pit through the lens of biblical history, we can see it as a record of a diverse group of animals, including some now extinct, replenishing the earth but cut short by catastrophe and sudden burial. We do owe a lot of our knowledge of these species to the Messel Pit, but the fossils do not track the evolution of mammals or of anything else.
Article from Answers in Genesis

Merry Christmas!

The promise of the Father to send the Son came to Adam and Eve in the garden after they sinned and began to die. Our redeemer came 2,000 years ago. Born to die...
 Genesis 3:15, And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
Galatians 3:13, Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.
1Co 15:22,  For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

To see this Christmas display, visit the 1st floor rotunda in the state capitol in Madison, WI.

Have Evolutionists Answered the Questions Surrounding Preservation of Dinosaur Soft Tissue?

The discoverer of soft tissue in dinosaur bone now has a new explanation for its preservation – but does it really answer the obvious question? According to Live Science, Mary Schweitzer’s “controversial T. rex soft tissue find” has been “finally explained.” The answer is: iron. The iron in hemoglobin acts like a formaldehyde, preserving the delicate proteins and stretchy blood vessels. But does it really preserve it for up to 145 million years? A press release from North Carolina State describes the hypothesis coming from theory and from experiment. In theory, iron atoms must be guarded against in cells because of their reactive potential. After death, though, reactive iron becomes a guardian of preservation, because it forms cross-links with proteins, preventing them from decay. (This process also makes soft tissue hard to detect, Schweitzer says.) The experimental part involved soaking recently-killed ostrich bone in water and in blood. The water-soaked bone decayed into a goopy mess in less than a week. Because of iron in hemoglobin, the blood-soaked soft tissues remained “recognizable” for two years at room temperature, retaining their basic structure. The press release is tentative, saying iron “may be the key” to preservation, “may play a role” in preserving ancient tissues, and, in Schweitzer’s words, “may be both the mechanism for preservation and the reason why we’ve had problems finding and analyzing proteins that are preserved.” The article does not deny the authenticity of the soft tissue, but only tries to offer an explanation for the unexpected preservation. Stephanie Pappas in the Live Science article gave some emphasis to the “controversial” nature of the “seemingly impossible” soft-tissue claim. “The find was also controversial, because scientists had thought proteins that make up soft tissue should degrade in less than 1 million years in the best of conditions,” she wrote, but then acknowledged that, despite alternate theories, the 2005 claim and subsequent soft tissue finds in even older dinosaur bones (145.5 million evolutionary years) proved real. Schweitzer noted that scientists often don’t see what they don’t expect to see: “The problem is, for 300 years, we thought, ‘Well, the organics are all gone, so why should we look for something that’s not going to be there?’ and nobody looks,” she said. The obvious question, though, was how soft, pliable tissue could survive for millions of years.… The new explanation may be welcome news for evolutionists. Pappas writes, “Dinosaurs’ iron-rich blood, combined with a good environment for fossilization, may explain the amazing existence of soft tissue from the Cretaceous (a period that lasted from about 65.5 million to 145.5 million years ago) and even earlier.” Armed with better techniques, Schweitzer’s team is going to go hunting for more dinosaur soft tissue next summer. Hold your hadrosaurs; this does not solve the evolutionists’ problem. For one thing, Schweitzer and, independently, Mark Armitage, found osteocytes (bone cells) in their samples, not just blood vessels. The osteocytes retain their original structure, including their delicate dendrites. For another, two years of preservation is .000001% of 145 million years. On what basis can they justify extrapolating such exquisite preservation that far, when the ostrich bone was “recognizable,” indicating some degradation had occurred? Nobody on earth has “experienced” 65 million years, let alone a few thousand (provided that written records can substitute for personal experience). The evolutionists are assuming the long ages, not demonstrating them. In spite of this strong evidence against millions of years, they are hanging onto that belief like a baby gripping its pacifier. The articles betray a subtext of desperation. Pappas described the soft-tissue claims as “amazing” and “seemingly impossible.” They seem relieved that this iron hypothesis “may” provide an answer. Yet other admissions in the articles support the creationist Flood interpretation. “The bones of these various specimens are articulated, not scattered, suggesting they were buried quickly,” Pappas noted. “They’re also buried in sandstone.…” Try to imagine circumstances in which a T. rex strutting across a desert suddenly became completely buried, such that burrowing creatures were unable to reach it and disarticulate it. There aren’t too many options available. Even so, up till the surprising discovery by Schweitzer, “scientists had thought proteins that make up soft tissue should degrade in less than 1 million years in the best of conditions.” They weren’t looking for it; they were shocked when they saw it with their own eyes. For years they have been scrambling to answer the “obvious question” – how soft, pliable tissue could survive for millions of years.” Have they ever considered the obvious answer? It can’t, and it didn’t. The evolutionists show no shame for their falsified long ages. Instead, they boast as if they will find soft tissue millions of years older! They are like the delusional man in a joke who claimed he was dead. His doctor attempted to prove him wrong, asking, “Do dead men bleed?” The man replied, “No, dead men do not bleed.” The doctor proceeded to prick him with a needle, showing blood oozing from the man’s arm. “Well, I’ll be darned! Dead men do bleed!” Like the delusional man, evolutionists will never give up their belief in millions of years, even when the facts bleed otherwise right in front of their eyes. We welcome more exploration by the Schweitzer team and anyone else with access to fossils and the equipment to analyze it. Let the data that “nobody looks” for come to the surface. - See more at: http://crev.info/2013/11/dinosaur-soft-tissue-explained/

Resources for Kids

Families love the displays and solid Biblical and scientific information we display. Often we are asked for resources for children that point to creation, the Bible, and help kids gain a solid foundation for scientific truth. Answers in Genesis has some great free resources online as well as many items for purchase. Check it out:  http://www.answersingenesis.org/kids
The link below is a sample of what you will find there:
Video on marvels of the Pacific Golden Plover

More Evidence for Biblical Flood: Mass Dinosaur Grave

The article will give you an idea of what happened during the global catastrophe of the Biblical Flood. While this article assumes long ages, if you read with discernment it is evident that the dinosaurs and sediment that buried them were part of Noah's Flood. Read on...

Somewhere south of Newcastle, amid the wide-open prairie and rolling hills, rests a mass grave. A femur here. A tooth there. A tip of a tail barely poking through the ground somewhere else.
The cause of death is unknown. It could have been a lightning strike, disease or an attack by a band of marauding T. rexes.
The victims: At least four U-Haul-sized, plant-eating triceratopses.
Paleontologists worked for two months this summer and found 250 bones. Only 950 more to go.
On a hot day in mid-August, one paleontologist held up a pterygoid for inspection. A pterygoid is a portion of a triceratops palette in its skull. It's roughly the size of a loaf of bread, and had never previously been found complete and alone.
Some portions measure only a single millimeter thick. Removing it from the earth was a painstaking task. The ground was hard and the bone weak.
"There are maybe 10 people in the world who care about this bone," said Matt Larson, a paleontologist for the Black Hills Institute of Geologic Research.
"And four are here."
What it represents is entirely different. That pterygoid could belong to the most complete triceratops skeleton ever found — something many more people care about.
The institute's research team is unearthing what is, at minimum, four triceratops skeletons. Scientists believe the collection could be the key to answering how one of the prehistoric world's unique vegetarians lived and died.

Experts always thought the triceratops was a loner. Skeletons were never found grouped together like some other horned dinosaurs, said Peter Larson, founder of the Black Hills institute.
Remains were most often limited to a skull in one place or a femur in another. They must have lived alone, because they all seemed to die alone.
This new find, hidden beneath layers of sand, silt and lignite, could tell a very different story of the life of the world's best-known three-horned dinosaur....

On one of the last days of the dig, the paleontologists exposed two frills, the iconic shields behind the triceratopses' heads, a few ribs, the pterygoid and a tooth.
Each solid-looking bone is actually fractured into thousands of tiny pieces from the compression of tons of earth. The scientists clean them with small knives and paintbrushes and squeeze glue into the cracks. Then they cover the entire bone with another type of glue, flip it over and do the same to the other side.
Some bones are so intertwined the team takes them out in large blocks....
When they started digging in early May, it looked like they had three triceratopses: two adults and one youth.

They just kept finding bones, including another two femurs. The site now has at least three adults and one juvenile — a gangly teenager, all legs and no real body size.
"We have this big mass of bones we just can't separate," Larson said.
Darnell, the rancher, doesn't care as much where the skeletons end up, as long as they're someplace public where people can see them.
"And then maybe we will have some answers," he said.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/08/26/more-dinosaur-fossils-found-in-ne-wyoming-mass-grave/?intcmp=features#ixzz2dB23GyHq

If it is answers to the mass graveyard containing these and countless other plants and animals worldwide, I suggest he look in Genesis.

Research reveals once again the marvel of creation

  original article from ICR.org

Amazing Design in the Chemistry of Pregnancy

by Brian Thomas, M.S. *

The onset of pregnancy presents an apparent contradiction. Ovulating and initially pregnant mothers experience an increase in progesterone. On the one hand, this hormone signals the immune system to back down and lay low. That's critical, because otherwise her body would fight and kill sperm cells as though they were unwelcome invaders, and she would never become pregnant.
But on the other hand, progesterone reduces cholesterol levels in her body. Too much progesterone would doom a developing baby, who requires cholesterol. Why would one action both promote and prevent a single outcome? Two University of California evolutionary biologists believe they have decoded the answer.
Publishing in the June 2013 issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, the authors first noted that many infections, caused by both viruses and bacteria, either depend on or are enhanced by cholesterol-containing "lipid rafts" embedded on cell membranes.¹ The invaders link to the lipids, using them as doors to access and infect cells, causing disease.
Normally, a woman's immune system provides plenty of protection from such potential pathogens, ...

* Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.

Article posted on August 12, 2013.

A glimpse of 2013, so far...

Will we soon know the color of dinosaur skin?

http://creation.com/hadrosaur-skin

Hadrosaur skin found

Flickr/CLS Research Office (CC BY-SA 2.0)

University of Regina researcher Mauricio Barbi holds a hadrosaur skin sample that he and his colleagues hope will still contain melanosomes, the cellular organelles that contain pigments that control skin colour. “If we are able to observe the melanosomes and their shape, it will be the first time pigments have been identified in the skin of a dinosaur,” he said. “We have no real idea [yet] what the skin looks like. Is it green, blue, orange …”¹

by David Catchpoole

Published: 23 July 2013 (GMT+10)

Such is the power of the dinosaurs-died-out-millions-of-years-ago paradigm, that it not only limits what scientists expect to find, but also bizarrely affects how they view ‘unexpected’ evidence when they do find it.
The discovery of hadrosaur (duck-billed dinosaur) skin near Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada, is a classic example. University of Regina researcher Mauricio Barbi recounts: “As we excavated the fossil, I thought we were looking at a skin impression. Then I noticed a piece came off and I realized this is not ordinary—this is real skin. Everyone involved with the excavation was incredibly excited ….”²
Their excitement is understandable. Everybody is taught that dinosaurs became extinct millions of years ago yet here is a piece of real skin. No wonder they didn’t expect to find it, and initially thought it must have been only a skin impression. The basic question arising from the discovery ought now to have been, “Why is it that we’ve been taught these fossils are millions of years old, when here quite plainly is evidence to the contrary?”
Instead, Mauricio Barbi and colleagues are trying to answer their question: “how the fossil remained intact for around 70 million years.”
They plan to use the Canadian Light Source (CLS) synchrotron to look at melanosomes—the cellular organelles that contain pigments that control the colour of an animal’s skin.

Mauricio Barbi and colleagues are trying to answer their question: ‘how the fossil remained intact for around 70 million years.’

“If we are able to observe the melanosomes and their shape, it will be the first time pigments have been identified in the skin of a dinosaur,” said Barbi. That will determine if the hadrosaur skin was green or grey like most dinosaurs are currently portrayed, or a completely different colour.
CLS scientist Tim May is also amazed: “It is astonishing that we can get information like this from such an old sample.”
And Barbi further mused: “What’s not clear is what happened to this dinosaur and how it died. There is something special about this fossil and the area where it was found, and I am going to find out what it is.”³
If only these researchers could look at the world’s geological and fossil evidence through the biblical framework of a 6,000-years-ago Creation and 4,500-years-ago Flood timeline, they would be way less incredulous.

 

Dino skin “glossy and black, unlike anything I 

had ever seen in the field before”

Flickr/CLS Research Office (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The photo at left shows part of the hadrosaur skin sample found in a
remote area of northwestern Alberta known as the Wapiti formation.
It was found by paleontologist Philip Bell, who trawls the dry riverbeds
there every summer, looking to see if the spring runoff has exposed
any fossils. Sure enough, in June 2012 he and his team came upon a
cliff that had collapsed, revealing dinosaur remains.“I first picked up
a bit with skin impressions, and I thought, great, there should be more
in there,” he said. “We immediately changed our approach to make
sure everything was kept in pristine condition. Soon, we hit upon a
section of skin that was glossy and black, unlike anything I had ever
seen in the field before. We looked at it closely, and realized that it
had a three-dimensional structure.”⁴ Now, does Dr Bell consider
that the standard textbook slow-and-gradual processes were at
work to preserve this skin so exquisitely? Despite believing in
millions-of-years and evolution, he says: “Obviously skin is
something that decays rapidly, so the fossilization must have been
incredibly fast.” For some enlightening material on how such
fast fossilization could occur, Dr Bell would do well to read our
articles Deluge disaster and
Dinosaur herd buried in Noah’s Flood in Inner Mongolia.

Related Articles

• Dino protein denial
• DNA and bone cells found in dinosaur bone
• Radiocarbon in dino bones

References

1. Kretzel, L., Scientists use U of S synchrotron to study dinosaur skin, Saskatoon News—News Talk 650 CKOM, www.ckom.com, 29 April 2013. Return to text.
2. Scientists study rare dinosaur skin fossil to determine skin colour for first time, phys.org, 29 April 2013. Return to text.
3. Foley, J., What color were dinosaurs? Test of ancient skin sample will reveal final answer, Nature World News, natureworldnews.com, 29 April 2013. Return to text.
4. In the skin of a … hadrosaur?, Scientific Canadian, http://tylerirving.ca/?p=1101, 6 May 2013. Return to text.