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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."
Fast-moving plates?
2256 meters after 200,000,000 years gives a sinking speed of *11 microns per year*.
2256 meters after 200,000,000 years gives a sinking speed of *11 microns per year*.
From this page, it says that the Snorre field is located approx 140km west of the coast. The ocean depth is at around 300-300m, but the reservoir is some 2500m down. It also says that the reservoir differs from most of the other fields in the North Sea in that the rock consists of fossil riverbeds from a time (triassic period) when the North Sea was dry land containing big rivers.
I'm guessing it doesn't really matter how much it has moved, since things were probably very different then anyways.
Whales have extremely dense bones, and they also didn't evolve until about 30 ma. Judging from the approximate age of the bone (oil drillers know all this stuff), as well as any diagnostic features, it would be easy to designate it as a Plateosaurus, which is an extremely common dinosaur in western Europe, and is from the Late Triassic (about 200 ma). Even if crushed, a Plateosaurus is the most parsimonious explanation. As I said in another comment, the prosauropods were going from bipedal to quadrupedal and, correct me if I'm wrong prosauropod people, I bet the "knucklebones" were unique, and perhaps easy to ID. I also bet that this bone was washed out to the ocean from a river, as Norway was covered in rivers during this time. You're assuming much less once you actually have a bit of background on the time period and the region.
...and without evidence to the contrary they should establish that as a scientific theory?
That's not what Flimzy said at all. Read the post.
Until science _disproves_ something, that thing should not be discounted as a possibility. That includes God, goblins, and pink dinosaurs under the ocean floor.
Having said that, that doesn't mean we need to _assume_ these things exist, either.
Waiting on evidence before making a decision is hardly unscientific. The whole idea that something should not be regarded as possibly real until it can be scientifically observed flies in the face of scientific advancement. By this thinking, atoms only became real quite recently, and creationism was true until Darwin made his observations (or at least, evolution hadn't happened until the observations were made, at which point it became true).
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On the other hand much could and likely will survive. We have dinosaur's footprints, eggs, skin and poo which has survived. We have the banks of an ancient river at Dinosaur National Monument and we have the Burgess Shales in Canada. We have the gigatons of Banded Iron Formations world wide as evidence of bacteria which has survived hundreds of millions if not billions of years. Steel, concrete, titanium and aluminum constructs will survive for hundreds of millions of years in some way, shape or form.
Likely many machine parts, plastics, and larger artifacts will survive. The Pyramids, Statute of Liberty and Golden Gate are bad examples. The Pyramids are made of a softer stone, and the Statue of Liberty and Golden Gate are in corrosive environments. How about the granite in buildings, the great concrete dams of the world, titanium and steel blades of gas turbines, biomedical implants will all be here, baring the Sun going nova ahead of time.
OR a sedimentary deposit rate of 11 microns per year.
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...
A bandwagon comment about modding appears to get you Funny again.
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