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Ancient DNA
PyroX_Pro writes "An interesting read over at the BBC says that 400,000 year old DNA has been found. The DNA has been broken into tiny pieces, so there is little chance of bringing any of the species back from the dead.
"Soil frozen into the ice has also yielded fragments of DNA of large prehistoric animals, including the woolly mammoth, reindeer and musk ox"
"Cloning is in our view impossible at this stage. You'd need the whole DNA and you would have to constuct a primitive cell to put the DNA in," added Mr Gilbert. "
Sure he says that now, but they may find a way to splice it with other DNA, and then, well you all saw the movies..."
Then later there's running and screaming.
Everyone knows that you can find some at the North Pole.
On an interesting side note, reindeer is one of the few words that doesn't follow the "I before E except after C"
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Anyone else notice the terrible lack of punctuation in this article?
They didn't even dig out that DNA properly, yet they already have cloned beasts in mind...
The one thing Jurassic Park never explained was how they made the dinosaur eggs. Putting the DNA in the egg would be simple compaired with that.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Haven't you ever heard that song by Loverboy? Pig and elephant DNA just won't splice.
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there are several German and German rooted words and names on that list, which is kind of a cheat since German is consistent in that regard. One of the few grammatical rules that I loved when learning German is that when any word is pronounced with a long "i" sound, it is always spelled with an "ei" and when any word is pronounced with a long "e" sound, it is always spelled with an "ie". Since my mind was already overflowing with things such as trying to remember which of 3 genders a given noun was (rarely intuitively obvious) and the 4*3 matrix that one has to know to remember which gender dependant form of the word "the" (der, die, das, dem, den ...) to use, the solid ie/ei rule came as a great relief.
...then, of course, it's a professional sport.
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The fossil from Hell... er, Creek, Montana. Big silence on this one ever since, which is possibly significant in itself because definite indications of contamination would have to have been published somewhere.
Preserving something as frail as an organic macrostructure over as much as 1% of that timespan is of course well beyond impossible, so the fact that it appears to have happened should be telling us something important about our leading assumptions.
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Surprisingly little geology is entirely reliant on a precise (or even vague) age for the Earth. All that matters for a great many things is the order in which things happened, not the time they took to get that way.
For the remaining few, circumstances there are some substantial hints in the field (e.g. paraconformities, massive undisturbed polystratic fossils, rapid paleomagnetic reversals, awesome flood erosion) and in the lab (e.g. conflicting interpretations for dates, rates, ratios and embedment scenarios) that there are great and appropriately cavernous gaps in our understanding of geology.
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This unfortunate stream of reasoning goes as follows:
All that you really know is that a certain stratum contains well-preserved organic material. Nobody was there scratching off days on a calendar or even a cave wall (-: and to scratch 65Ma worth of days you'd need one motherous huge cavern, some serious scaffolding, and a good supply of nice hard scratchy rocks :-). A heck of a lot of initial assumptions are simply guesses, and dating contradictions are far more common than agreements. A manifestation of this can be found in the constantly spreading "ranges" of marker fossils like Ammonites.
Observations of decaying organic matter suggest that 100ka is really pushing your luck WRT finding the veriest scrap of intact flesh. This is but one measuring-rod which suggests that Velikovskian catastrophes are more a feature of our planet's past than many people have hoped (for another, look at the biggest feature on Mars).
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"Surprisingly little geology is entirely reliant on a precise (or even vague) age for the Earth. All that matters for a great many things is the order in which things happened, not the time they took to get that way."
Oh how wrong you are. The basic concepts of geology (rock types, relationships, etc) do not necessarily depend on the age of the earth. However, in most research done on real world applications, the exact date of an event is very important. As they say, timing is everything. This is why most people doing research in igneous rocks always obtain radiometric and/or paleomagnetic age dates. People doing research on sedimentary rocks always have very good biostratigraphic control. The reason this is important is so that correlation to events of a known age is possible. For example, say I have a lead-zinc mineralization event that I'm trying to find a cause for. Well ok...one of the most important things to do is get an estimate on the date of mineralization, and then see if there are any local or regional tectonic and/or magmatic events of known ages that may have had an effect.
"For the remaining few, circumstances there are some substantial hints in the field (e.g. paraconformities, massive undisturbed polystratic fossils, rapid paleomagnetic reversals, awesome flood erosion) and in the lab (e.g. conflicting interpretations for dates, rates, ratios and embedment scenarios) that there are great and appropriately cavernous gaps in our understanding of geology."
"Hint" 1: Paraconformities are just an unconformity of parallel strata...I don't see what the "problem" is with these.
"Hint" 2: What polystratic fossils are you talking about? Just because the style of deposition changes doesn't mean all new critters have to start living there.
"Hint" 3: The earth's magnetic field does reverse from time to time. It is recorded in parallel bands to the mid oceanic ridges of known ages...oh wait, can't argue that since you don't think the earth is that old anyway.
"Hint" 4: What flood erosion do you speak of? The best example I can think of is ancient Lake Bonneville, of which the Great Salt Lake is the last remaining bit. You can still see the wave cut terraces out in Utah and Nevada. Again, the age of this has been well documented.
As for your "problems" with lab geology, 99% of the time when age dates do not match up so well, there is a very good reason why. For example, a fluid flow or low grade metamorphic event may reset one isotopic system, but not another. Also, weathered rocks will have their isotopic systems screwed up compared to unaltered rocks (this violates the most important assumption of maintaining a closed system anyway). If *careful* sampling is done, the dates almost *always* agree. When I say careful, I mean things like selecting completely unaltered samples, or abrading zircon grains to remove the possibly altered outer layers to get at the surely unaltered core.
Anyway...in conclusion, I really don't think there are really too many "great and appropriately cavernous gaps in our understanding of geology" at all that can't be explained by good fundamental science.
Project Steve
AFAICT, they're actual platelets, with genuine organic material in them, not fossil (ie not mineral-replaced objects or outlines). The dude in charge of the lab that discovered them (a student saw them under a microscope) has bent over backwards to find a suitable reptilian source of contamination, without success. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. (-:
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I assert that the dates don't need to be correct to do this, just consistent. Unfortunately, IRL you get very little of either. (-:
For example, if two strata are correctly identified as "Carboniferous", it doesn't really matter for purposes of comparison whether they're umpty squillion years old or were laid down during Olmec times.
No, a paraconformity is where you would expect to see a conformity, but there isn't one. The word has also come to mean "a difficult-to-detect unconformity".
Everything from little shells a few inches across striking through tens of millions of years' worth of strata to large trees striking through tens of meters of strata, neither with any evidence of having been intruded (e.g. incongruous turbulence in the strata above or below).
Unfortunately for that idea, there are several more plausible explanations for those magnetic bands. Again, the ages of the ridges are assumed, and then correlated. If you do your history, you'll notice that the claimed ages have been completely revised a number of times, and I expect they're a long way from finished doing that yet.
The field reversals I actually had in mind were paleomagnetic signatures in large areas of cooling lava that show either huge rock units or the poles rotating dramatically on a scale of minutes to hours.
Bretz's "Spokane Floods" would be one example, but even today meltwater in far northern Canada can eat away ranges on riverbanks at a rate of meters an hour.
Yes, including many that you've not cited here. One has to wonder, if there are so many ways of explaining anomalies, how one decides whether a reading is anomalous or not. How would you decide?
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