Basic and Remedial Fossil Identification

FaithIn response to message 72 you state In post # 69 I replied to post # 68 Hopefully you can respond by providing a visual description of how you think the deposition occured physically and what we should expect to find as a result and why. I know you are rather piled on so hopefully this time my post will catch your notice.

That grass can run uphill faster than dinosaurs or ferns? Or tread water longer?

Please, no one respond to the off-topic portions of this post, which is most of it. --AdminThis is a reasonable request - however, if you go back to my first appearances on the site, low so many months ago, you'll see that my very first run in with you Faith ended very badly.You were asking for help visualizing sedamentary rock formation. Particularly, why we'd see some water fossils in one layer, then land fossils, then water fossils again. (or something like that).I gave you a visual scenario about how layers may be laid down over time, how the environment where those layers may change. Etc.Your response was simply that it was all a hypethetical scenario, and therefore you discard it out of hand.The fact that a year later you are still asking for help visuallizing something smacks me as being disingenuous.Why should be bother going through the trouble of explaining something to you (again) only to have you simply discard it because it doesn't fit into your world view?Edited by Admin, : Add off-topic warning.

Faith: look over this old thread - it has Bill Birkeland explaining stuff. He does geology for a living, and writes clearly besides.
EvC Forum: El Capitan Limestone Reef FormationThe thread is only two pages long, and addresses a particular area of Permian deposition pretty well.

Well what would a floodist say? This seems to me to be spot on topic. Why are fossils found in certain layers and not others?
I for one would like to hear the floodist explanation for why fossil ferns are first found in the Middle Devonian layers http://www.7cs.com/fossils/fern.htm (nowhere near the lowest layer, with all of the Precambrian and half of the Paleozoic layers below)
but fossil grasses are not found until the late Cretaceous in dinosaur coprolites. Just a moment...
http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/timescale/timescale.htmlThere are many rock layers in between the first ferns and the first grasses and neither ferns nor grasses are present in the very lowest layers. Ferns and grasses can't "run away" from a flood so why aren't they found together in the lowest layers? Please give me the floodist explanation as presumably there were no sediment layers before the Flood (no rain).

This thread got away from me, I think because there are too many topics bound up in it, and I'm really hoping to slow it down while I get my thoughts organized. There are at least half a dozen directions I could see taking it in, and I don't want to get swamped.Your question is pretty much in the direction I've been leaning however. I've been studying up on the Geologic Time Scale over the weekend, really trying to learn the thing for a change instead of just using it for a reference, as I've realized that I can't expect you all to think in the direction I'm thinking in. "Devonian" means nothing to me. I have to look it up. So now I'm trying to put the names to the layers so I can visualize it all.There is no problem in explaining ferns in that a floodist thinks about the whole column in terms of the order of when various forms of life would most likely have been caught in the flood. This has to do with natural habitat as well as mobility. So that it makes sense that the lowest layers would all be marine and all be creatures with the least ability to escape death in the catastrophe. Land creatures have more ability than marine creatures but those with least mobility will be killed next up the ladder. So no problem with ferns which show up in the lowest land layers.Grasses not appearing until higher up must have something to do either with habitat which might not be all that knowable, or with how they were moved by the flood water. I haven't got that high in the time table yet. I'm trying to digest the contents and explanations for each of the strata / periods as I go up the stack, and there's a lot of material to cover, and of course, being a floodist, I have to doublethink every piece of information and track down answers to questions it all raises in my mind as I read.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

While you are thinking about it be sure to consider the spores of grasses and ferns as well. They play a significant part in the story.Also, related to marine creatures, please also consider that any YEC or Floodist explanation must also show why different forms of marine critters are found in different layers and why they would be affected by what happened on the surface of the water.Why are there no fish at the lowest levels, and why do the various types and forms of all marine critters sort by their body structure and species? Why is Osteolepis panderi found in one layer and Priscacara liops in another?

---

Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Sure nuff, jar, I intend to think about all of that. Nice of you to do a snow job with the official terms so I can't think about it yet though. The usual science-minded disdain for the nonscientist I suppose.As for the surface of the water, the flood was hardly limited to the surface, but would certainly have killed most sea life by the breaking up of the "fountains of the deep," which also involved undersea volcanic action, plus of course the mere fact of the erosion of inconceivable quantities of sediments from the land mass.But thanks for the post. I'll get back to you when I have it all sorted out.

Pollen, you mean, for grasses. You really do need to think about this one, Faith.

They don't have common names, Faith. The "official terms" are all there is. This ain't the "salmon kind" we have here...

First, unless you can show some evidence of the undersea volcanic action, I don't see where that even comes into the equation or model.The important point in your paragraph though is "but would certainly have killed most sea life..."Your model needs to show how this was selective.Why did all the trilobites get killed before other critters? Why were certain forms of trilobites killed before other forms?Faith you don't want to get into the details, but unfortunately that is the evidence. There was no snow job involved. The FACT is that the fossils are sorted, and they are not sorted by weight, by density, by shape, by size, by volume but rather by type. Certain critters are found at certain levels.I know you are faced with a difficult task and one that no one, scientist or layperson has ever been able to accomplish. Take your time, look at the evidence. No one here realy expects you to present a consistant model for the flood. It simply cannot be done. But if you truly look at the evidence you will certainly realize that it just plain never happened.

---

Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Yup, I stand corrected, Pollen for grass.Similarly why was there a period when the only trees were conifers?Edited by jar, : add reference to conifers

---

Aslan is not a Tame Lion

No the ferns do not show up in the lowest land layers. They don't even show up in the lowest layers that contain land plants and land animals. Note that I said "Middle Devonian". By the BEGINNING of the Devonian there were already non vascular plants and arthropods living on land. That is about 100 million years worth of layers. Are you telling me that a fern plant which has true roots and is anchored in the soil is going to be more likely to be picked up and moved by flood waters than slow moving arthropods and primitive non vascular plants without roots?

The first ferns on the chart I've been studying occur in the very first strata where land creatures show up. If you have other ferns in mind I'll get to them. But what's the big problem? One wouldn't expect perfect correspondence between location and where something ended up in a huge flood. The flood took things where it found them. So some ferns'habitat was at a higher level. Or the flood waters simply carried them longer and farther. It's really not a big problem.

You cannot go by the chart divisions. The chart division represents a period of time - or if you like, a group of layers. The "Devonian" covers almost 40 million years and many individual layers of rock. Exactly. But the problem for the floodists is that there IS perfect correspondence between flora and fauna species and where they ended up. It is a huge problem. On the one hand the floodists are claiming enormous turbulence caused by "opening the waters of the deep," volcanic activity, and rapid continental movement (some anyway). On the other hand, there is no mixing of the fossils but rather perfect deposition by taxon with the most "primitive" types in the lower layers and the most "advanced" types in the upper layers in EVERY case world wide, except in the few instances where layers got shoved around - an in those cases there is still no mixing - each layer contains its distinctive group of species. And in the cases where the layers have been shoved around there is plenty of geoligical evidence as to what occured. Edited by deerbreh, : Corrected age span of the Devonian