Episode Transcript
Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Just recently I had the opportunity to travel to Queensland in the northern state in Australia. You. So, of course, at this present time, with the COVID virus spreading, there's been a lot of travel restrictions.
But there was a moment when we were allowed to travel from New South Wales up to Queensland. And so we took that opportunity to enjoy the warmer climate. And one of the things we wanted to look at was and visit were the different dinosaur museums that are located in Queensland.
And quite a lot of quite large dinosaurs have been found in north Queensland. About the time that we travelled up, it was reported in the literature that a very large pterodactyl had been found. This giant flying reptile had the remains syndicated, had a wingspan of about seven metres, which was huge, and its sort of head was about a metre long, or maybe even a little bit longer, looking at the picture of the palaeontologist holding the model of the skeleton that was found.
And so I was quite fascinated to go and visit different areas in Queensland. There's a big museum not far from Winton, another one at Richmond, another one at Hughenden. And when we were at the museum, I think it was the one near Winton, they had a really good display there and they also showed a little film and a documentary on finding some of the remains.
And it was very exciting to actually go in and touch the, I guess it's the femur or thigh bone of one of those giant plant eating dinosaurs that grow about 30 metres long. It used to wade around, we believe, in the marshes.
And this bone had been preserved. The actual bone was there on display. They just coated it with a protective layer so as people touched it, it didn't damage the bone.
But it was very exciting to actually touch a real fossilised bone as opposed to a model of one, and to see it in the real. And it was huge. But it was quite interesting as they showed a film in one of the museums. And I can't remember quite clearly whether it was the Winton one or not. But of how a number of these fossils were found by a farmer and he was on his property and he was simply walking along over the paddock and he saw this rock, what appeared to be a rock, sticking up out of the ground. And when he went over, he thought, oh, it's an unusual shape for a rock. And it was actually the end of a thigh bone of one of these giant dinosaur creatures.
And as I thought about this and looked at was in a rich black soil, plain area so in an area that they believe some time ago, maybe 1000 years or a little more ago or some time ago. Anyway, of course, the dates get very confused with the sort of secular dating system that they used. It was an inland lake, and of course it's no longer a lake there, but there's the plain and the soil is there.
And so the theory is, of course, that the dinosaur died in the lake and became fossilised. Now, normally, of course, as these creatures would die, as creatures die in lakes, they get eaten by other animals. So the fact that this was preserved and is preserved, maybe it was because the bones were so big and they remained and then they became buried.
But I know fossilisation can occur fairly rapidly. I may have mentioned it before that when I was doing postgraduate studies at the University of Tasmania, a friend was doing his doctorate in the area of geochemistry of an old mining site in New Zealand, and he had found a partly fossilised prospector's shovel handle or pick handle. And so part of the handle was still timber and part of the handle had been fossilised to stone.
And so he decided to have the wooden part, carbon 14, dated. And I know we got the result back of it was 6600 years old. And I remember as we discussed this between ourselves and we looked at the report from the dis, I think, Department of Industry and Science in New Zealand.
I think they did the analysis. And we know how can this European fossil shovel be that old? And so we know that fossilisation can take place quite rapidly. And one of the things that interested me was the location that a number of these remains have been found.
They're quite close to. Well, they're on the surface of where there was this lake and other areas are found in mudstones not far away. And the fact that these fossils, as I said, are in this surface material, in soil, on the surface, to me, and we know that it was only thousands of years ago that the area was a lake in that area.
There seems to be evidence that way. This again, just reinforced to me the overwhelming evidence that we have that these remains are quite recent, just the setting. And in many places it astounds me that these remains are near the surface.
We're finding them. Another classic example, of course, would be the specimens of whales, whole pod of whales. I forget how many were in the actual pod.
It was maybe half a dozen or ten whale skeletons have been found on the tops of mountains in Peru. And they're on the surface. I've seen photos of them, though.
They're exposed, the bones are exposed so these mountains have been lifted up. I mean, obviously, whales don't go up in the top of mountains, so the seas and the mountain activity have been lifted up. And to me, this is just powerful evidence that we've had these massive disturbances on the earth very recently, and these remains have been preserved.
They're near the surface and massive. Of course, catastrophic conditions have killed these animals and then perhaps been buried in the shallow lakes and so forth, and we have the remains there. But that was something that just really stood out to me, that a number of these finds, the remains were quite close to the surface or not that far down, and especially finding the remains in soil.
And we know, of course, that there are indigenous stories that have been preserved of animals that certainly fit a dinosaur description. There's an article that sometimes you see portrayed on different creationist websites where an indigenous man was asked to describe a bunyip. And a bunyip, of course, is a name for a big scary creature that lived in the past in Australia.
And the artist who drew the picture, and it was published in Australian newspaper back in the 1840s, if I recall correctly, so quite before Darwin's theory and so forth. And the description very closely fits that of the duck billed dinosaur that we know today. I can't remember the technical name for it, but these are just examples that cooperate with the Bible account of descriptions of giant dragon like animals and dinosaur type animals that are mentioned in some of the books of the Bible.
I think one of the other interesting things that has come out very recently in support of this, of course, is the finding of vast amounts of soft tissue in dinosaurs. In fact, a couple of researchers at the Institute for Creation Research, and you can google that, ICR Institute for Creation Research, and they have a lot of good articles on their place. But Dr. Brian Thomas and a colleague, Brian Enhart, have been doing a review of peer reviewed journal articles on surviving soft tissue biological materials, including DNA. They can be accessed again on the ICR Institute for Creation Research Science. And back in July 2021, there were 116 peer reviewed research papers now reporting soft tissue and biological molecules, long chain biomolecules that have been preserved in rocks that are conventionally dated as millions of years old and often tens of millions of years old, maybe over 100 million years old in the case of some dinosaurs.
In fact, 58 of those research papers involve dinosaur remains, and tissue that's been found includes DNA fragments. And of course, these biomolecules are quite fragile, really, being long chain molecules. And for them to be preserved for millions of years is just it would seem thermodynamically impossible.
And I know studies have been done that even with collagen, under ideal conditions, the structure wouldn't remain for more than 100,000 years under ideal conditions. But one of the recent ones that has been found was a report that they actually found nerve tissue. And this was in a report that was published in microscopy today, back in March 2021.
So only a few months ago. And a microscopy today is a Cambridge University press journal, and it was a report of peripheral nerves that were found in bones of a triceratops. And, of course, these are those large three horn dinosaurs that have sort of a big bony plate behind the head.
And the nerve tissues were found in the round bony projection on the skull that actually connects with the spinal column. And there's connective tissues around the nerve fibres, which are in a network of protein, collagen fibres. And so they actually found the nerve fibre sheath and nerve fibre fragments within the sheath, within the bone.
And so again, we're just accumulating evidence all the time that these remains that we're finding are not millions of years old. I think the evidence is just overwhelming. They're only thousands of years old.
And this again, fits in with the biblical account, with the biblical account of the flood. I remember seeing on television some researchers from the University of London that were excavating the fossilised remains of a giant marine lizard. And it was conventionally dated during the cretaceous period, which ended about 60, 70 million years ago, according to secular dating.
But these remains were on an island in the very northern part of Norway and quite up near the North Pole there. And so there was actually only about a week during the whole year where the scientists could actually get onto the island where the weather conditions were good enough for them to work there and the ice was thin enough and so forth. And they had an excavator and they were on the island digging down.
And this skeleton there was preserved under the ice, and of course, it had been fossilised to a degree. But as I said, this mineralization can occur very rapidly, as we saw from this prospector's handle that had been mineralized in less than 100 years at the gold deposits. They were worked in the late 1980s, and my colleague was doing his research back in the early 1970s. Sorry, the mining was done back in the late 1880s. And so that was a clear example to me of how this fossilisation can occur on just a slightly buried tool just in the ground there, timber tool. So, again, it seems to me that the fossilisation of these bones can occur very quickly and even near the surface of the earth.
It's interesting, with the University of London marine reptile that was found, they again found soft tissue in the remains there. And those remains were carbon 14 dated and came back at 25,000 years, not the 60 million years. Now, it's very interesting that that result was not reported in the abstract.
Those results were just reported as data, as findings in the results section. And of course, I guess they were able to publish the paper because they said, well, maybe there was some contamination of the sample, maybe there was some other bacteria, modern bacteria there that influenced the date. But again, there was a paper published or at one of the big geological survey conferences that was held, I think, from memory.
It was held in Malaysia, probably around about 2012, 2013, in which a paper was presented by some European scientists that had actually radiocarbon data. Carbon 14 dated about a dozen dinosaur remains from around the world. And in all of them, they found carbon 14.
And all the dates came back with this range, 20 to 30,000 years. And as I've explained before, many times when we look at the carbon 14 dating, we need to understand that carbon 14 dating is a really, really powerful tool that is supporting young ages for all these things, as opposed to the long ages from the mineral. Radioactive dating.
So when we date the rocks with fossils, they don't usually have radioactive or sufficient quantities of radioactive minerals in them. So we generally date the lava flows above and below those sections, or we compare the fossils from similar layers and elsewhere, and those layers have been dated above and below by radiometric dating. And so when we use these dating scales, whether it's potassium argon, rubidium, caesium, sumerium, neodynium, lead, lead, uranium lead or uranium uranium as well, all those systems have very, very long half lifes, and consequently, we get millions of years when we date those rocks.
But one of the very important characteristics that I think is a very important clue that we have major problems with that type of radiometric dating is that just about all the examples that I've seen, if we have the same rock, depending on the system we're using, if it's potassium argon or sumerium neodynium, we will get different results for the same rock in terms of ages, millions, sometimes tens of millions apart, sometimes even hundreds of millions of years apart. And so I think those results that we're getting, really, we have so much evidence, they're not reliable, they're not the true result. The carbon 14 dating results are much more likely to be an accurate result.
And we know from the carbon 14 level, we have carbon 14 in the atmosphere that carbon 14 because plants eat food that contains carbon. I mean, animals eat plants that have the carbon 14 in them already in it from the carbon dioxide they've taken in from the atmosphere. And of course, once it's in the animal, it's no longer at equilibrium.
And so when the animal dies, the carbon 14 that is there is there, but it's slowly decaying away. About every 5700 years, half of it decays away. So the fact that we find measurable carbon 14 in these samples means that at the most, they must be less than 100,000 years old, because after that amount of time, theoretically there'd be no detectable carbon 14 left.
And so the fact that we find the carbon 14 in these fossil remains confirms the young ages that we're finding with the soft tissue. And again, of course, we say, well, if you have dates of 30 or 40,000 years or 25,000 years for these, it's still a lot older than the Bible dates, isn't it? Because we know from the Bible chronology that the earth and creation was perhaps even not quite 6000 years ago. And this, again, to many people, seems too young.
But we need to understand that the way carbon 14 dating works is that we can't really use the current level of carbon 14 in the atmosphere because it varies. It varies on the cosmic ray flux, it varies on the amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere. And a lot of carbon dioxide is generated by volcanoes and other activities, bushfires, all these sort of things.
So it varies quite a bit. But as well as the cosmic ray flux, which actually is the source of the carbon 14, the cosmic rays hit produce high energy. Cosmic rays are high energy protons, and these charge particles, they collide with other atoms and emit high energy neutrons, which collide with the nitrogen nucleus, knocking out a proton and changing that nitrogen nucleus into a carbon, a heavy carbon, a carbon 14, which is unstable, but it now has the chemical properties of carbon and combines with oxygen.
It becomes the carbon dioxide that's taken up by plants. But we know that the cosmic rays hitting the earth depends on the strength of the earth's magnetic field. And that has been changing significantly.
And if it was higher in the past, and that's the evidence, because we know over the past 150 years, it's been decaying exponentially and we've decayed about 10% in that time of the field. Prior to that, the higher magnetic field is going to repel the cosmic murays, which means there's going to be low initial carbon 14, which gives us an accentuated much older age on that, because the original carbon 14 levels would have been much lower. So on the basis of interpretation, that automatically gives us long ages.
And so when we try to correct for this and we can't correct for it exactly, but we can do estimates. And when we do estimates and correct for these sort of changes in the levels as predicted by the change in the earth's magnetic fields, and we know also in the past there were much higher levels of plant material that are currently all the main coal seams and this sort of thing. The planet Earth was a lot warmer and lusher than it is today.
Again, when we take these considerations in, it seems that a reasonable estimate brings those ages back down to within the biblical timeline. And the same with the pushing up of mountains. I know this is another thing that I've noticed as I've travelled to different parts of the world and we look at the mountains, and often when I'm flying in an aeroplane, I look at this and I can see these really steep mountains and you can see the erosion that has occurred and the material that has been eroded away.
And in many cases, what I'm impressed is these mountaintops aren't all that rounded. They're not smoothed out and we're not surrounded by deep valleys filled with sediments. They're very sharp, the edges are sharp.
The mountain material that's crumbled away as a result of landslide or glacier action, these sort of things is polled at the bottom. It's not that much. And in my view, just as we look at this, it doesn't fit the tens and hundreds of millions of years that is claimed by the radiometric dating.
And it's fascinating, of course, and I think I've mentioned before that when geographers look at the amount of material that is actually being carried away off the continents at the present time, the continents would erode away at the current rate in less than 10 million years. And yet we know rainfall was much higher in the past, so it would have been much shorter than that, but the continents hadn't eroded away. They're there, they're sitting there, they've got all these fossils in them.
And so from everywhere we're looking, my view is, and especially as I said, I was impressed after going away and looking at these fossil remains in the different displays. And there was police saw remains there. I think that was at Richmond's.
Wow. It was really spectacular. A giant one had been so well preserved.
I think the skeleton, the actual real skeleton, was sent to Harvard University. And of course, they only had a model there. But these remains that are being found so close to the surface and so forth and in such detail, and they're finding so many of them now in Australia.
When I put this all together with the soft tissue, with the carbon 14 dating, with the apparent freshness of these remains, to me it all fits the biblical scenario, that these are very recent, that we had this global catastrophic flood only thousands years ago, four and a half thousand years ago. And it's interesting that secular geologists admit there were five or six global extinction events by water. They just spaced them out apart because they've got, as I said, that radiometric dating.
But as I said, if we look at those radiometric dating results and the fact that we get this huge spread of results when we look at it, I think those ages are meaningless. The carbon 14 dating fits better. And when we look at the carbon 14 dating, that shrinks it all down to a very short time frame.
And I think what the geologists are looking at, they're just looking at the one total global extinction event, a massive event of the worldwide flood that was described in the Bible. I think the evidence is overwhelming for it. Well, I think if we have so much evidence for the flood, we have so much evidence that the Bible account is true.
And of course, the Bible account gives us the account for salvation through Jesus Christ as well. It's such an important book, the Bible. Well, you've been listening to Faith and Science.
If you want to re listen to this programme, remember you can just Google 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the radio listen button and look up
Faith and Science.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day. You, you've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
