How much life can earth support?

The following came up in the short-term topics thread
and I thought it worth preserving.This exchange was between funky and wehappyfew.

quote:

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Good questions, funky, but I'm concerned that you are not absorbing the answers very well...
funky writes:
Your saying there are a very few fossils because you are assuming your right that the earth is millions of years old.

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Actually, there are quite a large number of fossils in the earth. There are almost a trillion synapsid fossils in the
Karoo Formation in South Africa, for example. A synapsid is a medium sized vertebrate with features of both
mammals and reptiles. They range in size from fox to hippo size. A trillion of any large animal is far more than
the Earth can support - and that's just one obscure group of animals.

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If you add up all the fossils found in the geological column... restore all the coal seams into forests... revive allthe coral reefs, fish, diatoms, clams, dinosaurs and trilobites... you would have a layer of living biomass about 2 miles thick over the entire Earth.

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If this assertion is correct, doesn't that lead to the
conclusion that the earth must be very old.If all that life couldn't exist at one time, then it must have
been spread out over a long time ... and at 2 miles deep it must
have been quite a long time at that!!

Could someone please give me a rundown of the creationist view on the formation of coal. Did God create coal as is, or do creationists accept that coal used to be living organisms?Thanks.Hey Peter - I grew up in Birmingham!------------------
o--greyline--o

Small world eh? Which sounds like a TV presenter's
link back to my opening post

I think I am quoting wehappyfew.

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Actually, there are quite a large number of fossils in the earth. There are almost a trillion synapsid fossils in the Karoo Formation in South Africa, for example.

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I was interested and frankly skeptical about this number.It turns out that the estimate was of about 800 billion vertebrate fossils, made by the famous South African paleontologist Robert Broom, in 1932. This estimate has been cited by creationists as evidence for the flood, with the argument that a flood is required to bring all those fossils together.By far the best and most detailed discussion of Broom's estimate which I have found is by the creationist John Woodmorappe, in an article from CEN Technical Journal, 14 14(2) 2000, on-line at . Woodmorappe notes that the number is consistent with reasonable densitites of 800 individuals per hectare over a region about the size of present day sub-equatorial Africa, and proposes that the flood collected and concentrated the fossils into one region.Woodmorappe gives a substantial extract from page 309 of The Mammal-like Reptiles of South Africa, by Robert Broom (published by HFG Witherby, London, 1932) which shows how this very rough estimate was obtained.Woodmorappe has performed a useful service by tracking down and quoting the estimate. My criticism of his model is that it fails to explain how the flood sorted out synapsids from all the other animals, and managed to leave a huge deposit with billions of Permian and Triassic reptiles unlike anything living today, but not a single modern mammal fossil, or other modern species. The most distinctive feature of the fossil record, first noted back in the eighteenth century long before Darwin, is that fossils species are distinctive of particular strata. Woodmorappe's discussion does not touch upon this crucial feature of the Karoo fossils.I do not know if Broom's estimate still has good standing.Here is an excellent link on the Karoo formation, and the synapsid fossils, for those interested:

The question isn't really about fossil order, or how they may
or may not have come to rest in one specific site or another.It's just about numbers.How many creatures are there on Earth today?What is the likely maximum capability of the environment to
support populations?Take out a hectare of rain forest and how many individuals die?
Not to mention the knock-on effects.If ALL of those creatures found in the fossil record co-existed
on Earth, would there be sufficient resources to support them?How much space would there be for people with complete eco-systems
worth of animal and plant life that do not require people, or
mammals for that matter?If you were a T-rex with those stumpy little arms, and you had the
choice between taking down an apatosaurus (if they co-existed??),
waiting for one to die, or chomping on some-one's cattle
what would you do?

Wow my first post!Greyline you assume creationist just must believe that God just put coal and oil where it is. I believe this not to be so, it is actually quite a simple explaination.I am no geologist or biologist, but to my understanding coal and oil is formed from biomatter that has been left to decompose in the absense of oxygen amd with increased pressure, and so large organic compounds decompose into many smaller organic compounds, such as methane(natural gas) and the many many compound contained in crued oil and coal. Coal i understand is usually made up of forest of woody trees (that is why tree bark is often found in coal seams) and oil is of softer biomatter, such as in swamps(also because of increased pressure).And so to explain the formation of coal and oil, the one single event that destroyed the Earth in Genesis solves this problem. The force of a world wide flood would have covered rainforest, swamps, and many dense areas of biomatter with mud and sediment. Imagine the pressure of all of the water and while being covered in water there is also an absense of oxygen. Thus allowing for the formation of coal and oil very quickly. It makes sense when refering back to the bible also. The garden of Eden was placed somewhere in the Middle East, and where are we getting all our oil from?So i hope that gives some insight into what creationist beleive about coal. I hope what i wrote made sense, it is my first post, but ill be glad to clear anything up.