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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 03/19/2009 : 13:31:43
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The perfidy of ICR is astounding. Now they are wrapping some cheap apologetics around a Cretaceous turtle fossil found in the Arctic. Considering the Period this animal lived in, it's really no big deal, but they are too cowardly to even give the Latin name of it so someone like, well, me, for an example, could look it up. How lame is that?
By the bye, it's Aurorachelys, a neat name for a neat animal: Turtle of the Northern Lights.
A fossilized turtle shell, along with a host of lithified tropical plants and animals, has been discovered on Axel Heiberg Island in the High Canadian Arctic.1 This new find presents an enigma to those who believe that present processes are the key to interpreting the past (a view known as uniformitarianism).
Less than 700 miles from the North Pole, the average temperature of Axel Heiberg is about minus 20 degrees Celsius. While some reptiles today live in remote and intermittently cold climates, all indications are that these fossilized plants and animals lived in a warm, tropical climate. Indeed, a champsosaur, a crocodile-like creature that most likely favored warm environments, was found on the same island in 1998.2
The fossils were found in “Cretaceous” rocks, which evolutionary scientists date as being roughly 100 million years old. But the breakup and dispersion of the huge original landmass of Pangaea supposedly occurred around 100 million years prior to that. Therefore, during the time these tropical animals and plants were living, the North American continent must have been physically close to where it is today. But with the days so short and the nights so long at those latitudes, a tropical setting there is practically impossible. So how could a tropical Asian turtle, along with dinosaurs, crocodilians, other turtles, and cycad trees, possibly have lived within the Arctic Circle, let alone have been fossilized there?
Ok goobers, here it is:
The Earth's climate is currently in an "icehouse" phase: the polar ice sheets are not as extensive as they were during ice ages, when the sea level fell by as much as 120 metres, but some ice has remained even between ice ages. Before about 34 million years ago, though, the planet went through a prolonged hothouse phase with no ice at all. Sea level was more than 70 metres higher than today, covering vast swathes of what is now dry land. For instance, an inland ocean divided North America in two. This period lasted from the middle of the Cretaceous era until well into the Eocene - about 100 million to 50 million years ago.
One of the earliest signs that the poles were ice-free and warm 100 million years ago was the discovery at the turn of the 20th century of fossil breadfruit trees from the Cretaceous in Greenland; today such trees are at home in places like Hawaii. Since then, even more extraordinary finds have been made.
The most evocative image of a warm Arctic has emerged from the work of John Tarduno of the University of Rochester, New York. For more than a decade, Tarduno has been hunting for fossils on Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian Arctic, just west of Greenland. The island was already well within the Arctic Circle 90 million years ago.
His team has found bones and even partial skeletons of a crocodile-like creature called a champsosaur from this period. The champsosaur was a fish-eating reptile up to 2.4 metres long that probably looked much like the gharials of India. Because these reptiles would have relied on their environment to stay warm, conditions in the far north must have been far hotter than today. "These fossils speak volumes," says palaeoclimatologist Paul Wilson of the University of Southampton in the UK.
And as for the turtle in question:
A new find in Arctic Canada strongly suggests that animals migrated from Asia to North America not around Alaska, as once thought, but directly across a freshwater sea floating atop the warm, salty Arctic Ocean.
In 2006, John Tarduno, professor of geophysics at the University of Rochester and leader of the Arctic expedition, led an expedition to the Arctic to study paleomagnetism—the Earth's magnetic field in the distant past. Knowing from previous expeditions to the area that the rocks were rich with fossils, Tarduno kept an eye out for them and was rewarded when one of his undergraduate students uncovered the amazingly well preserved shell of a turtle.
Together with collaborator Donald Brinkman of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Canada, they later named the fossil Aurorachelys, or aurora turtle. The turtle strongly resembles a freshwater Mongolian species, which raised obvious questions about how it came to be in the marine waters of the North American Arctic.
Tarduno's paleomagnetic expertise, which allows him to ascertain when points on Earth's crust were at specific locations, allows him to rule out the possibility that millions of years of tectonic activity had brought the fossil from southern climes. The turtle was clearly a native of the area
If ignorance is bliss, then willful ignorance and lying about it must be close to Nirvana. From thence it follows that Young Earth Creationists live in a self-created fantasy, a paradise of total wooness.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 03/19/2009 : 14:17:45 [Permalink]
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These idiots are handing evolutionary scientists a golden opportunity on a silver platter. The opportunity to demonstrate the much more plausible explanation for a polar turtle than the pseudoscience of "flood geology".
ICR should be heartily thanked!
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 03/19/2009 14:19:25 |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 03/19/2009 : 15:51:06 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by HalfMooner
These idiots are handing evolutionary scientists a golden opportunity on a silver platter. The opportunity to demonstrate the much more plausible explanation for a polar turtle than the pseudoscience of "flood geology".
ICR should be heartily thanked!
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Oh, they are; they are! By me!
This one was so easy to yank up the research on that it wasn't as much much fun as I'd hoped for. It took less than an hour, and a little more to point out the path for others to tread.
Unfortunately, the wrong people will tread it -- skeptics and the like, mostely. The ones we want to walk that mile are the on-the-fence folks who want to think about it.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 03/19/2009 : 19:29:25 [Permalink]
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You're the herp guy, Fil, so I'll ask you: Were polar Turtles white?
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 03/19/2009 19:29:44 |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 03/20/2009 : 00:37:31 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by HalfMooner
You're the herp guy, Fil, so I'll ask you: Were polar Turtles white?
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A good question!
It doesn't seem likely because all the white ones would have been easy to see and eaten by Polar Raccoons at a very young age, before their shells had a chance to harden. Oh, wait. Cretaceous. Um.... ok.... next question, please.....
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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Turtle fossil found in arctic, IT WUZ THE FLUD!
