>Because down below you will say that only the back foot prints were found on
>some of the tracks. I was anticipating that response.
? Sorry, you lost me on this one?
>Art, there is a disconnect here that I don't understand. The marine iguanas
>of the Galapagos live on a tranquil tropical island and venture into the
>water for food. According to those who hold to a global flood, the coconino
>was a deposit which occurred in the middle of a raging, turbulent global
>flood, in which all airbreathing life save those on the ark was
>extinquished. 5000 feet or so of sedimentary rock had already been deposited
>prior to the depositoin of the Coconino. These lizards, spiders, scorpions
>etc. had no tropical island to which they could flee during this time period
>if it was all deposited during the flood. As you know, there are no islands
>against which the Coconino and other sediments thin.
Sorry, I was not thinking in terms of a hypothetical scenario, just the
data in hand.
>Could the Coconino lizards have walked under water? Maybe, but they had
>already had 6 months or so of swimming in the global flood. Where did these
>lizards rest? Where did they eat during that previous six months?
You are assuming they were lizards. As I pointed out last time that is
tautological. You can't argue they were lizards because they were walking
on sand dunes, then argue they were sand dunes because they had lizards
walking around on them. These were amphibians from the get-go, and as I
pointed out, at least for modern amphibia, there is nothing unusual about
having them walk around on the bottom. And as for swimming around for six
months, where does this come from? We are dealing with the depositional
environment of a sedimentary deposit. After we have resolved something
about that we can begin to consider where the animals might have come from.
You are putting the cart before the horse, I think.
>I have always admired those contortionists one sees at the circus. :-)
>However, tracks that disappear can be explained by lack of preservation of
>the fossil tracks. Apatosaurs sometimes only show front tracks, they were
>not walking on their front legs, their back legs didn't carry the weight of
>the forelegs. There are lots of reasons that only front or back might be
>preserved. And the fact that we see lizards today with feet pointing uphill
>yet moving transversely.
Ok, I realize you haven't seen the tracks, and I know you have different
mental impressions of what you think the tracks look like, but let me try
again. You cannot use lack of preservation when a trackway disappears and
reappears a couple of feet higher up on the same slope with no disturbance
of the intervening area ( of course, you must know all these arguments have
already been tried). The particular trackway I have in mind (there are
several exmples I have seen), angles from lower left to upper right across
a foreset slope (all the time with the claw imprints directly uphill). The
trackway abruptly stops, then resumes at the same angle a foot or so higher
up. Oh, I know, there are people like Lochley who stay up all night trying
to think up elaborate scenarios for how this could occur in dry sand dunes.
But then Occam's Razor begins to cut....
>There are several observations I don't think Brand's hypothesis fits.
>Spiders and scorpion tracks (especially the tracks consistent with high
>temperatures), wind ripples, and rain-drop impressions. How do you get rain
>drop impressions underwater?
Glenn (with obvious irritation in my voice), you know better than that.
You can't use derived data as evidence for the premise. They were
scorpions because they were sand dunes. If the investigatores had even made
a modicum of effort to try other organisms [as Brand and Tang have done
(Geology 19:1201-1204, and Tang's thesis on invertebrate trackways), they
would have seen all kinds of other possibilities, but their minds were
closed by the assumption of desert.
I have never seen "rain drop" impressions, but I have seen lots of worm
burrows that looked superficially (especially if you think they were desert
dunes) like rain drop impressions. You must realize those conclusions were
not backed up by experiments on dry sand. Try dropping some rain drops on
a foreset dry sand slope sometime and see what results....
Art
http://chadwicka.swau.edu