The TRVE history of the Flood...

But where have I said they have to move hundreds of miles? I don't think I've had a clear idea of how far inland the tide had to come, just a "long" way, and that its length would depend on how high the sea had risen, reaching father with each rise in sea level. That's what I said in what I was quoted as saying. Maybe somewhere I speculated on hundreds of miles? If so, consider this a correction. Even at a hundred miles an hour, the fact that high tides are twelve hours apart means animals would have time to run across the mudflat left behind -- during the time the water is at low tide or approaching or leaving it. But I don't want to argue for hundreds of miles anyway. How many miles I don't know, if miles at all. Soon as the water leaves I'd make a run for it myself; I figure so would an animal given the choice of swimming or running.For tracks to be preserved the mudflat would have to dry to some extent. If high tide is out for twelve hours (?) [either at low tide or coming or going between] wouldn't that be time enough?I suppose the water would have to be gentler than edge imagines me claiming, to preserve a dinosaur nest (?) but dinosaur nests did get buried in mud/wet sediment, did they not? That's how they were preserved. And all of them are found in the Jurassic-Cretaceous layers. Somehow they got covered by water full of sediments which preserved them by encasing them and burying them in those sediments. In other words this fits a Flood scenario even if human imagination fails at finding a really convincing description of how it could have happened.I have to keep coming back to this basic fact that being buried in mud describes all the fossils and that fits the Flood and can only be rationalized with unlikely tales to make it fit the Geological Time Scale scenarios.All this speculation is necessary I suppose, but in the end it IS all speculation based on bits and pieces of knowledge from here or there, and even the most reasonable guesses will never tell us what the Flood was really like, we'll always miss something. But focusing on the big picture, the strata, the former sediments/mud of which the strata are formed, their layering in stacks of different kinds of sediment with no evidence of the kind of surface effects that would occur from spending any time at the surface of the earth, the abundance of fossilized dead things buried in that mud, all fit the Flood and not the Geo Time Scale.

Yes, it couldn't. That's the problem with the forty-hour flood. The translation the guy with the Number Name used says the flood "prevailed" forty days, but when I looked up the KJV it just says it was on the earth forty days. You have to read the whole passage very carefully to see that in one verse it sounds like it happened and that's that, but when you read further you see it's describing a much more protracted time period. That's how I saw the Flood as rising over five months. And I'm going back to that even though it still needs some sorting out. If it rained for forty days and nights and the Flood got STARTED in those forty days (the waters kept increasing it says after that so that's not fudging anything) then there's room for the rain stopping after the first forty days. Stopping long enough for the tracks and trace fossils to be preserved. It's all guessing ringo. What keeps me going on it is just that 1) I know the Flood happened; and 2) there's no other reasonable interpretation of all that layered sediment with fossils in it than the Flood. The specifics are necessarily speculative.

Militate against which hypothesis?Fossilized forests are forests the Flood overtook and buried in wet sediments. What's wrong with that hypothesis? Maybe my last few posts have answered some, I hope.

OK. I have no idea what "a generalized craton" could refer to. The craton is that hard rock foundation of the continent that covers about all of Canada and most of the US to the east. I can't visualize where it fits on the chart, I can't visualize the transgressions and have no idea how they were arrived at, I can't visualize the "erosion" stuff, I simply cannot make ANY sense of that chart.Supposedly it describes six shallow sea transgressions that laid down the sediments of the associated time periods. That's about all I know about it. And from that I added up the depth of the strata associated with each and came to that conclusion that altogether the transgressions had to amount to the level of Noah's Flood. Subsidence of the land has not been shown to answer this so I still think that. Sorry about that. I'm glad it now seems to be straightened out. At least that much anyway.

Sorry, that's all incomprehensible to me. I get some of it but not much. OK but a link would have made it easier. {There is an easy way to link to an in-thread message: Message 613 See "peek."Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Okapi. Yes. However like all scientific questions this may have to be revised if contradictory information comes to light.Samotherium? I don't know.Edited by CRR, : added reply about Samotherium?

The famous petrified forest in Yellowstone Park has up to 27 layers and a total vertical height of ~1000m.The Mt St Helen's catastrophe gives some insight into how petrified forests could have formed during Noah's Flood.See this article which the following extract is from. The Yellowstone petrified forests - creation.com"An earthquake, Richter magnitude 5.1, caused a landslide that dumped half a cubic kilometer (one-eighth of a cubic mile) of debris into the nearby Spirit Lake. This caused waves up to 260 meters (860 feet) high, which gathered a million logs into the lake, forming a floating log mat (see photo on p. 21 of the magazine). Most of them lacked branches, bark and an extensive root system.Since roots are designed to absorb water, the remains of the roots on the floating logs soaked up water from the lake. This caused the root end to sink, and the log tipped up to float in an upright position (see photo on p. 21 of the magazine). When a log soaked up even more water, it sank and landed on the lake bottom. Debris from the floating log mat and a continuing influx of sediment from the land (in the aftermath of the catastrophe) buried the logs, still in an upright position. Trees that sank later would be buried higher up, that is on a higher level, although they grew at the same time. This was confirmed by sonar and scuba research by a team led by Drs Steve Austin and Harold Coffin.8,9 By 1985, there were about 15,000 upright logs on the bottom."

And yet the sediment is volcanic rather than lacustrine or marine. Full text of "Petrified Forests of Yellowstone"That kind of spoils your ridiculous ad hoc hypothesis.

Not likely.For a number of reasons.First of all, the Yellowstone trees were buried by volcanic ash, not lake sediments. The comparison is invalid.Do you want more?ETA: Ah! I see that Dr. A beat me to this. Nice. Edited by edge, : No reason given.

CRR, See "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." Message 120.Some questions for this thread:

1. did the extinct species of this clade become extinct before or after the flood,
2. how can you tell?
3. if before then doesn't this show that not all original species were preserved?
4. or did they speciate from the ark species and then die out rapidly right afterward? ... which seems wasteful

How does creation explain this waste? Evolution does.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : .

Unless I missed it somehow, what edge said about petrified forests wasn't specific enough to identify the kind of situation you're talking about, the layered petrified trees. I'd seen a presentation on the Spirit Lake trees and how they got into their upright positions in layers. It does seem like a reasonable model for the Yellowstone trees as well, after seeing the diagram and reading the descriptions.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Edge, Doc,
The linked article discusses whether the petrified forest at Yellowstone was repeatedly buried by volcanic ash. I'll leave it at that.Edited by CRR, : No reason given.

I know my view is only tangentially in tune with most creationist thinking but I've spent a lot of time thinking about it so I'm willing to be at odds with creationists if necessary. First I don't give the environment the weight in variation/microevolution that many do, which is really natural selection. It has to occur sometimes but it seems to me most variation occurs as the simple result of reproductive isolation of a portion of a population. Natural selection brings about change by doing this too but it's a more costly method.As animals came off the ark they'd have gone in different directions, built up their populations, and fairly soon those of one Species or Kind would break up into smaller populations, and as those populations continued to migrate and get geographically isolated they would develop/microevolve into new varieties or races. This happens because of having their own set of gene frequencies among them compared with the other populations of the same Species. Each small population that split off would eventually by inbreeding develop a completely new type of the animal, race, variety, species, subspecies, whatever the right term is.This assumes greater genetic diversity on the Ark than exists in most/all species now, to allow such a great degree of diversifcation, and I believe that was the case and was due to a higher level of heterozygosity among them, which is a reflection of higher genetic diversity -- more alleles per gene at least, perhaps more genes as well.As population splits occur and new populations become isolated from the others, the genetic diversity is less in each new group because new phenotypes emerge based on specific alleles, leaving behind other alleles for other traits and types. The others stay in the overall Species, in other races and subspecies but are lost to a particular population. So tigers have the genetic material for tigers and don't have the relevant genetic material for bobcats or leopards, which have their own group genome or genetic makeup, etc. Each group has decreased genetic diversity in relation to the whole Species of Cat, while over time in reproductive isolation inbreeding produces a characteristic phenotype.But you say this: ...which is the reverse of what I would say. Reduced genetic diversity is one of the most likely ways a population would get to the point of speciation, which is the loss of ability to breed with other populations. Over time of course after many different species or subspecies have developed within the Kind there would be less evolution going on because of the reduced genetic diversity. In other words even if current populations split up into smaller isolated populations there probably wouldn't be a lot of differences between them. I could be wrong, maybe we could get two distinctly different species of lion or wildebeest, depends completely on the genetic diversity still available for selection (using that word in its broadest sense as what happens when populations do split. If twenty people got isolated on an island with twenty cats, even if all different races and types, in a few hundred years of inbreeding they'd be a recognizable race unto themselves, both humans and cats. The new breed of cat would become highly prized around the world, the people would get rich from breeding them and move off their island and lose their special characteristics but anyway. More likely all the inbreeding would start bringing out genetic diseases, but oh well.But I digress. Again I don't think ecology has much to do with variation or speciation, I think it's all about reduced genetic diversity due to a long history of population splits since the Ark. All the high genetic diversity on the Ark produced a huge variety of species or races, but since each new species forms because of a loss of genetic diversity, eventually the possibilities for new variation/evolution/speciation reach an end point. Always the best example of this condition is the cheetah with its extremely high number of fixed loci making them near-clones of one another. Presumably they got to that point through a bottleneck, but that's what a series of population splits would end up with too. Unfortunately this involves an increase in genetic diseases, making the condition undesirable; that's why old-fashioned selective breeding to produce more and more exotic breeds had to give way to the more modern methods of including cross breeding even at the cost of losing a pure breed. Again I'd say it's all a function of genetic diversity. If a species still has high genetic diversity (basically a high percentage of heterozygosity) then you can continue to get new varieties and species.I haven't read your link yet but "speedy species" in my view is always the case wherever you have population splits and reproductive isolation. In a large homogeneous population that doesn't split, say a population of a million wildebeests that always herd together then you won't get much change. But if some split off and get isolated they will become a new species or subspecies. Where there are such population splits it takes very little time to produce new species if the genetic diversity is still available. Inbreeding within an isolated population will produce a new species within whatever time it takes to mix together the gene frequencies of the group. The smaller the population the speedier it will be, but even a much larger group will change into a recognizable type in far far less than a million years, a couple hundred perhaps for a large population of herd animals. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The Samotherium is an extinct short necked giraffe. Honanotherium, Helladotherium, and Sivatherium are extinct long necked giraffes. There's an article here about them.There could have been up to seven pairs of giraffes on the ark because they are clean animals. However the variation in the giraffe family is no greater than in the cat family which I have previously mentioned. The dogs also have greater variability than the giraffes and they are supposed to have all derived from wolves.It's reasonable to conclude that after the flood there was a period of rapid speciation but that not all of those species have survived to the present day. It's also likely that some kinds have completely perished. Wasteful? No, it's just allowing adaptation to the changing post flood conditions.

What would be the drivers of such rapid speciation ?(Bear in mind that "rapid" is an immense understatement - you're talking many orders of magnitude quicker than can be determined today. Your drivers need to be extremely significant, and no longer present today).