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The World's Deepest Dinosaur
FiReaNGeL writes to tell us BiologyNews.net is reporting that Norway has uncovered their first set of dinosaur remains. The catch? They found it 2,256 meters below the ocean floor. From the article: "It is merely a coincidence that the remains of the old dinosaur now see the light of day again, or more precisely, parts of the dinosaur. The fossil is in fact just a crushed knucklebone in a drilling core - a long cylinder of rock drilled out from an exploration well at the Snorre offshore field."
Give us the details on the drilling rig!
A crushed knucklebone in a drilling core,
Everybody find the dinosaur!
I wonder what things will be like 200 million years from today, what adanced (or not so advanced) civilization will uncover the golden gate bridge, or statue of liberty. Entire continents submerged under thousands of feet of water and mud? This impetuous yet infinitesimal progression of gradualism really makes catastrophic events like Katrina seem like child's play. There's no greater force than time.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
The question of how dinosaur fossils could be submerged to that depth is pretty interesting. If we assume that it sank in a pit of mud, then we should be able to find other bones alongside it. If the land itself was sublimated by tectonic forces, then we're looking at some pretty fast-moving plates.
If, as is most likely, we just don't know, then we probably shouldn't try to assume supernatural forces are at work. Such beliefs are anti-scientific and hamper research and the progress of science. The ultimate goal of science should be a complete, rigorous explanation of the natural world to the exclusion of supernatural phenomena. If bones at a strange depth perplex us, it is important to find an explanation for the existence of those bones.
About 3 cups vegetable oil
2 (1 1/4-inch-thick) boneless top loin (New York strip) steaks (about 1 lb each)
3 1/8 teaspoons spice rub for beef
1 (1-lb) package frozen french fries
2 large garlic cloves, thinly sliced lengthwise
Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 450F.
Heat 1 inch oil in a 4- to 5-quart heavy pot over high heat until it registers 375F on thermometer.
While oil heats, pat steaks dry, then rub all over with spice rub (and salt if necessary). Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a 12-inch ovenproof heavy skillet over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking, then sear steaks, turning over once with tongs, until well browned, about 5 minutes total. Transfer skillet to oven and roast 10 minutes for medium-rare.
Check oil while searing steaks, and when it registers 375F, begin frying french fries in 2 batches (add fries carefully; they may have ice crystals, which could cause spattering), stirring occasionally, until golden and crisp, 4 to 5 minutes per batch. Transfer fries with a slotted spoon to paper towels to drain and season with salt and pepper while hot. Return oil to 375F between batches.
Turn off heat under pot, then add garlic and fry until pale golden, 30 seconds to 1 minute, and transfer with slotted spoon to paper towels. Toss fries with garlic in a large bowl.
Transfer steak to a cutting board and let stand 5 minutes. Slice steak and serve with fries.
The fossil is in fact just a crushed knucklebone in a drilling core
Quick! someone call CSI!
It puts a whole new spin on the big asteroid that killed the dinosaurs story: Splat!!!
Oh well, what the hell...
. . .the fact they can tell what species it was by just a knucklebone.
I though the worlds deepest dinosaur was cowboy neal
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
Snorre is probably an okay name in Norweigian, but it's the nickname for penis in Swedish. I guess they drill hard out there on the oil field...
Hmm, so the old woman was wrong, the earth is not perched on the back of a turtle, it is dinosaurs all the way down...
Oh well, what the hell...
Reminds me of an old song "Dem Dem Dry Bones" or whatever it was called. However, I can't seem to recall the "knucklebone" stanza, so hopefully the scientists won't mess up the rebuilding. =)
Fighting over religion is like seeing whose imaginary friend is best.
Not you! --
Who would you be without your computer?
Apparently "Planet of the Apes" references get you modded Insightful.
But since the previous poster has not deemed fit to share his email address, God has approved my email address as an alternate waypoint to him.
"The FSM put it there!" comments :)
Reptilicus suddenly pop into my head?
I don't like big words..., does that make me anti-semantic?
I don't understand how this is just a coincidence.
This confirms stuff we already knew about Earth's geographical lay out back then. It could also lead us to thousands of other information we don't know. It may lead us to what happened to the dinosaurs even or to pre-historic humans and more information about them.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
I am going to jump on this self affirming mental masturbation too!
Woah, why do men have nipples?
before all of you jump to conclusions about the subduction of land, remember that dinosaurs were at home in the water too. The bugger died and just floated down to the deep.
So, they were drilling for fossil fuel? Looks like they knuckled down, and found the source. But still, with the odds of finding a fossil like that, so deep, it almost makes me wonder if the drill was intelligently designed...
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
I'll bet he was just a bad swimmer... or bad with directions. "Shore is over here. I'm sure."
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
How can they be so sure that it's a dinosaur bone? Why couldn't in be a bone from some long extinct whale?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The lunar landing sites will still be recognizable in 200 million years. Even the footprints are estimated to survive for a hundred times the age of the Pyramids.
Voyager 2 and Pioneer 10 will outlive the Earth.
Usually the lower beneath the surface a fossil is, the old it, due to the fact that soil is deposited over time. I wonder what the results of a carbon dating would show.
"at the Snorre offshore field."
So more dinosaur remains were found... yawn...
No!!! It cannot be true, for if it was true, it would mean that Skyfather was lying. It cannot be true!!! SKYFATHER, WHY HAVE YOU FORSOOKEN ME?!?!
--Wait, 'forsooken'? That can't be right... Ah!
SKYFATHER!!! WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?!?!
...whales don't have much in the way of "knuckles."
The flood is pretty widely accepted. Every culture dating back to then (and conveniently located in the middle east/N Africa/Mediteranian) has its own flood myths, and the geologic record supports it. There probably was a huge flood that flooded the whole region at one point, but there probably wasn't a drunk with a boat and 2 of every animal.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Wow, if that's the only part of it you read than you are much worse than just a coward. I'm a geologist and a biologist, am I to become a physicist in my spare time? Argue against everything else I said then, if you know anything at all. Go ahead.
(You've also got to consider that rocks don't always progress linearly. Folding - where older rocks are pushed over younger ones - is not that unusual. This means that unless you know the exact nature of the geological strata involved, you can generally know exactly nothing from depth alone.)
Now, there ARE forms of chemical dating which do work over hundreds of millions of years, but they only work under very specific conditions and don't give you an absolute age. A known percentage of cosmic rays contain sufficient energy to convert one isotope into another, or even one element into another. This will tell you how long the rock has been exposed to cosmic rays... provided the rock has not been vertically displaced, has been exposed directly and continuously to such radiation, and has not weathered more than a few tenths of a millimeter for the entire time.
That's a tough set of conditions. You could probably use it to date impact craters on the moon very accurately, where those conditions probably will be met fairly routinely. There are probably a few places on Mars where the wind isn't enough to cause significant erosion. On Earth, there's way too much activity to use the technique EXCEPT possibly to eliminate certain theories - if the total cosmic ray exposure time detected exceeds the expected age of the rock, then the expected age of the rock would have to be wrong.
In this case, however, you couldn't even begin to use such techniques. Fossils form within the ooze that is to become rock, not on the surface, so won't have been exposed to the necessary radiation in the first place. Secondly, as is very likely, the fossilization occurred at some depth, ensuring that none of the ooze will have been chemically altered by this process.
The only way to find out how old the fossil bed is is to do this the old-fashioned way. Go there and look. Literally. Get a drill that can bore a hole wide enough to climb down, drill to the right depth, drop some high explosive down the hole to expose enough rock face, then send an ROV down with a hammer and chisel to go fossil hunting.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Our brand wood and metal civilization would disappear fast for the most part. Wood rots and gets eaten by termites, vanishes. Metals corrode/rust/ gone. Go out to the country (if possible) and look at old overgrown farms. 10 years, completely overgrown, what was mowed front lawn is now got 15 foot baby trees and thick scrub, the walls of the house and rooff will be covered with various vines. 20 years, hard to tell if a structure was there once it has developed a lot of water leaks, it falls apart fast then, once on the ground, two summers tops and no evidence of the wood remains, it is pure compost with leaves over it. 50 years-ruins, you have to dig to find old nails and bottles and stuff, and most of them are in poor shape. I live on a farm with old civil war history (as in the books history). Just from that long ago, a century and a half, it is unrecognizable (from old photos and records correlated with what it looks like now) and any artifacts found are coming from the occassional bulldozer scraping them up from fairly deep, all the easy stuff was picked long long long ago. 100 years and change is enough to grow massive oak tree forests where pastures used to be worked and used daily. Nature is relentless. The county cuts the kudzu along the roadside once a *month* in season here. If it was NOT cut, tar roads would be covered in one year,one summer, easy, I mean easy, completely overgrown deep, then the vine tangles would start to accumulate humus from falling leaves, weed seeds blowing in, etc. A nice little ecosystem going. One summer would be all it took. In around 5 years (guessing, something like this) you would be seeing baby trees growing over those roads. 100 years? Gone, buried, completely.
We have plastics now that would remain, and stuff in deeply compacted landfills, but not as much as the olden cultures where a lot of things were made from stone, stone just lasts better. 10,000 years? I am beginning to doubt you would find much, even plastics break down before then. Heck, my tarps covering some equipment need to be replaced every other year, they just disintegrate in the weather (wind/sun damage, etc). Millions of years?? My guess is you would still find some, a weird odd piece here or there,buried really deep, but not near enough to really reflect the huge accomplishments we have now.
Great, 20,000 leagues under the sea and all I got was this stupid knuckle bone. I bet there's already t-shirts coming...
BOO-YEAH. Let's enjoy some INSIGHTFUL comments.
The Norwegians dug too deep and greedily.
...and placed that knucklebone there about 6500 years ago because he knew in his infinite wisdom and omnipotence that someday we would send an exploratory core driller down in that exact location. I see it all clearly now.
And therefore rigorous science
r dvr122005opn.pdf
"Until science _disproves_ something, that thing should not be discounted as a possibility. That includes God, goblins, and pink dinosaurs under the ocean floor."
The existance of god and the supernatural is not falsifiable, and therefore must be discounted as possibilities when conducting rigorous science.
Check the wiki for more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
See also: proving a negative, division by zero, perpetual motion and the recent Intelligent design trial.
Judge John E. Jones III states the case nicely:
http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/educate/ktzmll
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
The flood myth came to mind when I saw pictures from the 26 December 2004 Tsunami in the Indian Ocean.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This is some deep shit.
First against the wall when the revolution comes
Moral of the story kids: Oil was bad for the dinos and it will be bad for us too.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Megatsunamis have happened every couple hundred years throughout history, this could very well be the cause of the flood. I remember hearing somewhere what happend was some entire cliff somewhere in the mediteranian broke off into the sea and flooded most of mesopotamia.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
In fact it is just one of his Noody Appendages that got compressed under the pressure of the ocean.
I ate your fish.
Nyarlathotep?
Ahtu?
Ahiiieeee! and though you are known by by a hundred hundred names, here on the slashdotted plane your name shall be "Monkey" as only Nyarlathotep is obligated to speak the great deep one's true name.
And lo' it was written:
"There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers - the 'Black Man' of the witch cult, and the 'Nyarlathotep' of the Necronomicon."
You are that messenger... obviously.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Our (human) pyramids are only 6000 years old, and their outer surface is gone - another 100k years, they'll just be piles of rubble
I believe that their nice shiny white outer surface was actually stolen/reused... in the nice shiny white buildings around Cairo. People cant resist shiny stuff... so maybe that actually proves your point that they wont be around for ever, but it wasnt environmental factors that have removed their brilliant coverings...
a ref that says so... i have read it elsewhere too...
The lord put it there to mess with scientists and other assorted satanists.
I think hubris isn't really the issue, since apparently I admitted that I didn't know what the theory of relativity entailed. I also seriously doubt that you or anyone else knows about "all things under the ocean," if you want to talk about hubris. I would also think that being an oil rig driller would require some geological knowledge, and so none of this would be news to you.
I think it is clear that NO ONE was around back then. Does that mean we should stop studying fossils, and stop acquiring evidence as is possible? Should we forget about studying things that we cannot see firsthand, but we can still find data about? Should we stop making experiments to try to replicate the environments that existed back then and from that get ideas on how bones are transported?
Though I am not Norwegian nor was I around 200 mya, I read that Norway was covered by a fluvial system during the time from which they are approximating the age of the bone. Based on my knowledge of fluvial systems to transport and deposit bone (this is the topic of my Master's thesis), I know that it is LIKELY that this is what occurred, and according to a later comment, this is indeed what had happened according to the geologists studying it.
The biased way in which you presented your "data," as well as the ridiculous off-topic remarks about Tom Cruise (WTF?), the Grand Canyon, and the entire field of paleontology tell me that you are taking this personally, that you may have some deep-seated issues with scientists, and that you really know extraordinarily little about how science is done.
While fixing cars is important, some of us must indeed go to college, as a civilization is judged based on the science, art, and philosophy that comes out of it, and not only that but also to make important discoveries regarding these, not to mention medicine. Not all of us can be car-fixers. Not to mention the fact that geologists play an important part in finding oil, a fact I'm sure you are familiar with. I hope you someday get over your problems with scientists. But I won't waste any more time with someone who refers to me as a "fool." Good day to you.
What more proof do we need that the bible is literal truth?
I for one, need none. It's just too bad that Noah only brought his relatives on the boat with him, because now were all inbred cousins.
O'Brian: Captain, ensign Jones won't be joining you on any more away missions....
liqbase
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Thank you for this recipe! It has changed my life.
The flood is pretty widely accepted. Every culture dating back to then (and conveniently located in the middle east/N Africa/Mediteranian) has its own flood myths, and the geologic record supports it. There probably was a huge flood that flooded the whole region at one point, but there probably wasn't a drunk with a boat and 2 of every animal.
The flooding of the Marmara sea and the Babylonian flood circa ~2,200 B.C.E. are fairly well-known, along with a number of other floods in the region. Some of these flood myths, such as the Turkish one, actually recalls the specific flood itself.
There is some evidence, though disputed, of extensive flooding about ten thousand years ago, during the end of the last ice age, that wiped out an extant bronze-age civilization. I don't put a whole lot of stock in it, though it is a nice fancy.
I am a science fantasy fan
"They found it 2,256 meters below the ocean floor." (emphasis mine) I dunno about you, but to my knowledge things that sink in the ocean don't usually sink beyond the bottom. That said, this could be an unbelievably dense knucklebone, in which case you're absolutely correct.
if we manage to exterminate ourselves through nuclear weapons, what life remains has a period of rapid evolutionary improvement due to a lotta dna scrambling going on.. a lot more than would otherwise in a few years.
if we manage to do it with biologicals, well.. we're then the planet is fucked.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
as opposed to, you know, being sons of Adam or daughters of Eve...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I don't think there's any evidence the flood receded is there, I don't recall God saying that. No, before the flood there was no water at all in the oceans until the fountains of the deep gushed forth and filled them in, the flood on what is today still land was no doubt the boiling and frothing of the waters as they gushed forth and settled down.
Obviously the areas now covered by Ocean were once the domain of the angels who spent there time planting "dinosaur" bones and other "evidence" in there ready for day drilling rigs were invented.
I think the scientists have been very hasty in classing this as a platelogicus or whatever they think it is and don't appear to be even considering the possibility it was a large aquatic burrowing mammal easily capable of burrowing through 2KM of mud.
Oh great! Now the poeple who are pushing the theory of abiotic petroleum will push it one step further — abiotic fossils!
I18N == Intergalacticization
true genetic sports develop a lot faster with damaged dna...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
You have to take in to account that fossilization, followed by intact survival and subsequent discovery, makes for an *extremely* rare set of events.
There are a few thousand good-condition dinosaur skeletons now existing in human ownership worldwide. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for about 200M years -- if we assume that they lived on average 10 years and the world supported an average of just 1M individuals at any given time (and it was probably more like 100M), you are looking at 20 trillion individuals during the dinosaur era.
So, even given those conservative figures, our recovery rate so far is less than 1 individual in a billion, probably lower -- apply the same figures to the human population, and you'd have a tiny handful of "freak ape" skeletons found in a couple of sites worldwide. There'd perhaps be a controversy as to whether the remains even represented a species of their own, or a gorilla with hydrocephalus and other defects.
Is this is a new species "mole aquaticus reptilicus dinosaurius" which didn't sink, but actually lived and thrived beneath the deep below ocean floor, obtaining energy from volcanic vents, and sustinance from silicone nodules (with a sprinkling of magnesium). They were able to move thru solid material by digesting it and excreting it directly behind them. They still exist in the Washington DC area and are responsible for many policy decisions...
Busy aligning my non-linear thoughts.
... trying to trick us with fossils into believing the world is older than 10,000 years.
One just simply has to admire the industriousness of Satan in seeking to deceive good Christians. If he had been even a bit lazy he wouldn't have bothered to place dinosaur fossils THAT deep. He certainly knows where we'll be looking.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
The future digs are far more likely find tons of AOL discs - thus naming the current era the "Age of The Free Trial".
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
If you don't think it's possible to get drunk enough to think that you've floating around in a boat with 2 of every animal onboard I'd like to introduce you to a substance known as... Jaggermeister.
A lot of the comments here are as the result of a misquote in the headline. The headline reports that the bone was found below the "ocean" floor, while the article describes it as being the "sea" bed, the North Sea in particular. There is a very significant difference between the two (apart from the depth - oceans are typicially a few km deep, while seas are only a few 100m), namely the way that they formed. The North Sea was once continental crust (upon which this dinosaur lived), but it stretched, sank, and was flooded. Ever since, sediments have been accumulating, and over time these have buried the fossil to its current depth. Ocean floor is formed from spreading ridges, and has never been part of the continent - you would not expect to find a land dinosaur there.
Owl tried to think of something wise to say, but couldn't.
It could have been carried there by a pangaean swallow...
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Before that the Black Sea was a freshwater lake and its North-Eastern shores were very fertile and well inhabited. People living there were serverly dislocated and fled the flood.
Only the descendants of those people who resettled in the Middle East (Noah), Persia (Gilgamesh) and North India (Manu) believe in the quick catastrophic flood, as a divine punishment for sinful mankind. Only Moslem, Christian, Jewish and Hindu religions belive in the Flood being punishment and a complete make over of the universe.
Other Flood legends from the Tamils, Japanese, Chinese, Incas etc talk about gradual Flood as a natural phenomena. World existing before and after in substantially the same way.
BTW all the water in the atmosphere is not enough to cover the world to the depth of four inches.
PS: First time breaking out of Readonly-mode in /. Please be kind to me ;-)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
T-Rex.
>>Our (human) pyramids are only 6000 years old, and their outer surface is gone)
Actually, the reason that the outer surface is gone is not attributable to erosion but rather to human theft.
The Giza Pyramids, built during the Fourth Dynasty, were constructed of stone with polished limestone casings. The limestone blocks were later used to construct buildings in Cairo.
(http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/giza.htm
Quite a shame.
"Our (human) pyramids are only 6000 years old, and their outer surface is gone"
Their outer surfaces are gone... because they were made of a more valuable mineral, and were quarried for other purposes.
Yes. There's no other way this could have happened. The most reasonable explanation is there was a flood so massive that water covered the entire surface earth for a month and ten days.
Then Noah sent a bird off and he returned with an olive branch???? Was it a leaf or a branch? Either way, there'd be none of either because all the trees on the planet would be dead and their leaves would have washed away.
I'm getting off my point, when are you guys gunna stop believing this silly crap? I'm sure there were floods, even big ones, just as there are now. It was especially relevant to the lives of people at the time since most people lived by oceans, lakes, or rivers (and they still do). But the flood myth is silly! Stop injecting it everywhere you crazy fundamentalists!
"I'm not religious, but at the same time I don't get why science always has to have something to prove."
... before the dinosaurs decided to fight back
The leg bone is connected to... the red thing!
The red thing is connected to... my wristwatch!
Uh-oh.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Just in case, just in case...
"This thing does science so hard, you say, 'I've never seen that much science.'" -Sam
n/t
Every dinosaur bone I've ever seen was fossilized, and I've seen quite a few.
Therefore fossilization can't possibly be rare, since it occurs in 100% of the fossil record, as confirmed by 100% of my sample base.
(I'm looking for a job doing science for the Bush administration, in case you were wondering.)
Landfills/garbage dumps.
Especially since prehistoric garbage is what seems to hold the richest finds in most archeological sites today.
Piles of highly refined "nuggets" of all kinds of metals, plastics, glass, organics...
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Right. If there actually is a landing site.
Considering all the things governments have done before, why should we beleive we've ever been to the moon?
Can someone explain how the lines on the hasselblad camera appears BEHIND the astronaut?
Anyway, cool to find dinosaur remains that deep. Maybe the earths crust pushed down so far below.
/tb
Did you find any coins?
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
even if there were 2 of each kind, there would be lots of animals left out.
I'm sorry, but what did you think geologists did? Sit around and make up stories? I think flipping through a couple books titled things like Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, or Historical Geology would help make this a reality to you, or this site from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedimentology. This is really not so difficult to imagine with a little knowledge. Determining depositional environments of ancient places is a huge part of geology. For one thing, erosion might make 200 Ma deposits visible to us. Without erosion and tectonics, we wouldn't be able to see a hell of a lot besides recent deposits. And there's so much more...
If it were just a matter of nature, the Giza pyramids would last longer than that. The outer casing (still found tightly fitted at the top of the Khefre pyramid) erosion rate is estimated at 5mm/kyr, the inner stones at 50mm/kyr. In addition, they're set well back from likely meanders of the Nile over the next few millenia. The Giza pyramids lost their outer surface to Cairo after it's Islamic conquest. Some of today's more wild eyed Islamic radicals in Egypt are all for reducing all evidence of it's pre-Islamic past to dust.
Left to the elements, the Giza pyramids might lose about 15 feet in 100kyrs. Left to people, they might not make it to the next century.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Although this post is a troll, it raises an interesting question Would scientists who discover something that shattered evolution, or any other theory, cover it up or deny it? I've seen a lot of intelligent people who accept the current scientific beliefs as perfect without question.
dino bone hah! that was what was left of Adam and Eve's dog's lunch. These scientists I tell you...rover just dug a hole and buried it like all dogs do.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Sadly, I've seen a lot of intelligent people who think that a few minutes of "common sense examination" of data they see in the popular press is good enough to overturn the deep analysis and primary source data covered in the literature that they never read. Fewer, but still a surprising number, are amazingly quick to appeal to a conspiracy by scientists to make the results from their own field wrong. Their reasons range from the Atheist Agenda to the grant money that, of course, allows all research biologists to live in oppulent splendor.
There may be some subset of scientists who would cover up groundbreaking work, but I would venture to say that they're the subset of scientists who are too stupid to actually do any groundbreaking work in the first place.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
can u imagine in a million years from now, some battle ship will blow up some solid rocky silicate mantle and find skeleton's of us and call it 'primitive life form'....
By the way, considering the depth they found it at, all that DRILLING its a wonder they jus did not end up sculpting another dinosaur all together.
There is nothing permanent except 'Change'- HERACLITUS,6TH CENTURY B.C
While i agree with the 200million year statement, please remember that for the most part the poor 'shape' the pyramids are in is due to man, not nature.
Most of the 'capping' limestone was stolen.. which aside from the immediate damage, helped nature do her work even more to the unprotected areas.
But yes, 6000 years isnt long in the grand scheme of things, and 200million is...
---- Booth was a patriot ----