Fossil Religious Wars
Posted on July 26, 2014 by Louis Hissink
Oh dear, it seems the high priests of the Darwinian Uniformist religion have received a bit of a setback from the discovery of some soft tissue on a triceratops fossil excavated from a fossil dig in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, USA, according to CBS Los Angeles. The scientist, one Mark Armitage, who discovered it was subsequently fired from his job, apparently because he interpreted this discovery to support his creationist views of a young earth, and that this was therefore blasphemy.
DB, I wonder what time it really is?
Posted on July 26, 2014 by Louis Hissink
Oh dear, it seems the high priests of the Darwinian Uniformist religion have received a bit of a setback from the discovery of some soft tissue on a triceratops fossil excavated from a fossil dig in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, USA, according to CBS Los Angeles. The scientist, one Mark Armitage, who discovered it was subsequently fired from his job, apparently because he interpreted this discovery to support his creationist views of a young earth, and that this was therefore blasphemy.
Upon examination of the horn under a high-powered microscope back at CSUN, Dacus says Armitage was “fascinated” to find soft tissue on the sample – a discovery Bacus said stunned members of the school’s biology department and even some students “because it indicates that dinosaurs roamed the earth only thousands of years in the past rather than going extinct 60 million years ago.”
and
“Since some creationists, like [Armitage], believe that the triceratops bones are only 4,000 years old at most, [Armitage's] work vindicated his view that these dinosaurs roamed the planet relatively recently,”according to the complaint (PDF) filed July 22 in Los Angeles Superior Court.
An ad hoc explanation for this “anomaly’ can be found in the articles concluding remark,
The discovery is the latest in several recent – and controversial – soft tissue finds by archaeologists: researchers last November claimed the controversial discovery of purported 68-million-year-old soft tissue from the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex can be explained by iron in the dinosaur’s body, which they say preserved the tissue before it could decay.
Of course this isn’t the first time that an extinct animal fossil yielded “soft” tissue since Charles Darwin did so as he reported in his Journal of his voyage on the Beagle, when a fossil was discovered in a river bank deposit in South America with soft tissue still adhering to it. And then there are those anomalous pictographs of triceratops in Amerindian art, or on old South American artefacts, those carvings that cause so much angst in the ranks of the liberal creationists, aka the geological uniformitarians, or Lyellians, implying that our ancestors were living at the same time as the extinct triceratops or dinosaurs. Whatever.
DB, I wonder what time it really is?