One of the great privileges of my job is that I get to participate on graduate student committees. Many times this allows me to get up close and personal with data sub-disciplines extend far from those of my particular expertise. You know that I have a fondness for fossils and the stories they tell. So... Continue Reading →
Sudden catastrophic events are not unknown in earth’s history. Large craters are evidence of past cosmic impacts and widespread layers of volcanic ash are a testimony to massive volcanic eruptions. But when did these catastrophes occur and could they have influenced human history? Standard geological models place the largest catastrophic events far in the past. ... Continue Reading →
Everyone is an expert in something but they can’t be an expert in everything. At some point we all have to rely on the expertise of others to guide us through our lives. I am a biologist, however, the vastness of the field of biology leaves me in the position of deferring to the knowledge... Continue Reading →
In Egypt the Nile River Valley conceals a massive canyon that once was as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon in Arizona. We have explored the origins of this lost canyon in the previous posts.  We found that geologists attribute the origins of this massive canyon to the great drying up of the Mediterranean... Continue Reading →
A massive canyon lays hidden below the Nile Valley in Egypt.  In Part II we looked as how this massive canyon was formed. Before we go on to look a bit deeper into this canyon and how it fits into Biblical chronology lets look at the chronological sequence of historical events—according to the consensus of geological experts—that must... Continue Reading →
An eleven-foot snake slithers among a cache of eggs and a sauropod dinosaur hatchling. Before it can grab the hatchling a landslide or windstorm buries the eggs, hatchling and snake. This is the scene preserved in Late Cretaceous deposits in India (Wilson et al. 2010). These same rocks have yielded thousands of sauropod eggs, hatchlings,... Continue Reading →
They say diamonds are forever, but for geologists this saying doesn’t make much sense.  They would agree that diamonds are for a long time—hundreds of millions if not billions of years—but not forever.  Many lines of evidence reveal that one must go deep (more than 150 km) into the mantle of the Earth to find... Continue Reading →
Evidence of the antiquity of the Earth is everywhere we look if we have our eyes open and are pondering what we see.  One such place is central Utah on a typical rocky mountainside above 8000 feet just southwest of Fish Lake. This is where you will find Pando. Pando is the name given to a... Continue Reading →
Evidence that some features of earth's landscape are the product of processes acting over longer periods of time can be found everywhere we look. Some of this evidence, such as that from the Grand Canyon, may be familiar to us but other evidence is far less familiar but tells the same story. For example, high... Continue Reading →
Fossils often provide us with only a fragmentary view of the distant past but sometimes collections of fossils record ancient and seemingly alien worlds in stunning clarity.  In the past decade several notable fossil discoveries have permitted the reconstruction of entire forest ecosystems that existed at various points in time and space in earth history.  Today,... Continue Reading →
Thousands of footprints preserved in a windswept eroded rock surface deep in an isolated desert region of the Arabian peninsula tell the story of an ancient herd of elephants walking across an ancient muddy landscape.  These are possibly the longest continuous set of footprints in the world and have been described in an article in the journal,... Continue Reading →
Animal tracks preserved in stone are found in great abundance in many parts of the geological column.  You might be asking yourself, aren't the chances incredibly small that any individual track made in mud would be preserved over long periods of time? You would be right.  The vast majority of footprints won’t survive the ravages of... Continue Reading →
Young earth creationists greatly underestimate the fossil record when they tell their audiences that there are "billions of dead things buried in rock layers."  The point, that there are huge numbers of fossils, is correct but billions is such an underwhelming number compared to the reality of the fossil record.  The vastness of the fossil record was driven... Continue Reading →
Our perceptions of the age of a subject are frequently based on our common experience with similar subjects. Most people have some ability to guess the age of children with seemingly very little prior information.  We might call this ability to guess age our intuition but this "intuition" is the scientific method working automatically in our minds.  Our... Continue Reading →
Do places on Earth exist where annual records have been stored for tens of thousands of years and can be accessed today? Ice-cores and tree rings can preserve long records of yearly events but some of the best records come from layers of sediment underlying some lakes which,  if formed under the right conditions, can be read like the annual rings of... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 