Unfossilized dinosaur bones
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Contents |
Claim
Creationists claim to have found "unfossilized" dinosaur bones in Alaska. This would invalidate evolutionary scenarios, they say, because it takes millions of years for bones to fossilize.
Source
- Buddy Davis, Mike Liston, and John Whitmore. 1998. The Great Alaskan Dinosaur Adventure: Master Books, Green Forest, Arkansas.
Responses
- None of the "unfossilized" bones have ever been examined by a reputable dinosaur palaeontologist... John Horner or Phil Currie, for example. This fact alone makes the entire claim suspect.
- The creationists involved in this "adventure" were not qualified to make any of the conclusions that were made. Buddy Davis is a model sculptor. George Detwiler is a math teacher. Mike Liston is the owner of an outdoor gear company. Dan Specht is a dentist. John Whitmore has a B.S. in geology, but his M.S. is from the ICR, which is by association useless in fieldwork.
- None of the pictures in their book, which they claim to be "unfossilized," actually appear to be "unfossilized" to the trained eye.
- These creationists readily admit in their book that, at one point in their "adventure," they were fooled by a piece of driftwood, thinking it was a dinosaur bone. A real, scientifically trained eye would not have been fooled as easily as they were.
- These creationists readily admit that they did not concentrate entirely on the Cretaceous Lipscomb Bone Bed, in which they did find completely fossilized duckbill dinosaur bones. They admit to digging through several layers of mud and permafrost, where they found what they called "unfossilized" dinosaur bones. Seeing as how mastodon and mammoth bones are common in permafrost layers, it is safe to assume this is what these creationists actually found, not dinosaur bones. Mastodon and mammoth bones commonly do not show the same level of fossilization that heavily permineralized dinosaur bones do. To the untrained creationist eye, these bones would easily be mistaken for dinosaur bones.
- The claims of these creationists is further suspect because, in their book, which was published in 1998, they claimed that the "unfossilized" dinosaur bones would undergo extensive tests to validate their "unfossilizedness." As to date, 2007, no results have yet to be published.
Fallacies contained in this claim
- Anecdotal Evidence (a single unfossilised dinosaur bone, which may not even be the case, doesn't disprove the fossil record)
