Excellent example! Now, how does something petrify?
This from geology.com:
"It forms when plant material is buried by sediment and protected from decay due to oxygen and organisms..." Yep, that fits what you said, and I agree with that.
It continues:
"Then,
groundwater rich in dissolved solids flows through the sediment, replacing the original plant material with
silica,
calcite,
pyrite, or another inorganic material such as
opal."
That fits what I said, but not what you said. In other words, cactus doesn't just get buried by an avalanche of sand and petrify. It needs water to FLOW through it. In other words, there has to be an unusual event to preserve cactus. It has to be buried deeper than the surface level where it died in order for the water to reach it, or the water level has to rise to something not usually seen in the desert...and stay there for some extended period of time. That's not what happens in a desert (that's why it's a desert).
Your argument isn't with me, then, but with Oxford, since they used "abundant". And your point has crumbled.
I'm not sure what you mean by "It's all done to geochemical location". Can you explain?
Right, and sometime soft parts of the body remaining long enough to fossilize. That would fit well with your "few hours or months" comment.
You know, like blood cells, collagen, DNA, etc. I think you're saying that after 10,000 years or so, all of that would be replaced by minerals, right? So you would agree with
@Bradskii on this:
You would agree that we should not find any actual remains for things that have been dead and fossilized for over a million years, since such remains are not able to withstand decay that long?
No, I'm saying there's overwhelming evidence that fossils are buried under silt/sediment and water because that's how the large majority of fossils form
Do you like iced tea? I like mine sweetened with honey or sugar. Sometimes I start with hot, unsweetened tea and pour it over a little honey in the bottom of the glass. Then I throw in some ice. If I forget to stir, I get cold unsweetened tea until I get down near the bottom of the cup, where I will be drinking warm, exceedingly sweet tea. But from what you just told me, a cataclysmic amount amount water (it would be compared to the amount of honey and ice) would mix up my tea just fine.
Now, let's say that before I poured the hot water in and added ice, I poured in a bunch of sand (not to drink, but for experiment's sake). What will happen? I pour in the cataclysmic amount of water and voila! everything's all mixed up, right? Wrong. I would have a layer of honey that's starts to dissolve/melt, a layer of wet sand, a bunch of warm water with some sand swirling in it, and a layer of cold water and ice. It doesn't all mix up like you said, unless I stir it, vigorously. It's unlikely that anyone was stirring during the flood, it was the action of the water only, which would first cause landslides to bury animals that were nearer to bodies of water, which would later be topped by more layers that were washed down from higher ground as the higher ground areas became less stable.
Only if they were living together in the first place, or were very close together. Like swampy area animals might be buried with sea animals...unless you stir everything up on purpose.
Imagine that the rain hit all areas of the land at the same time (one possible scenario) and drowned animals were washed downstream at the same rate. If lions, tigers and bears lived in higher ground areas and dinosaurs lived in lower ground areas, then the dinosaurs would be buried lower than the lions, tigers, bears. This is a simplistic way to think of it, and it certainly doesn't cover all of the possible explanations. I'm just saying there are ways to explain different types of animal being buried in different layers.
An assumption based on what? That the times are determined by the layers they are found in. It's a circular argument.
All water-dwelling creatures. Fancy that.
Agreed, that's why there are more parts to the argument. Remember that we are taking those one at a time.
These are bad drawings of real animals that weren't always viewed completely--not to mention the tendency to cartoon-ize the things we draw. I presented you with a good drawing/sculpture of a supposedly fanciful animal that happened to look very, very similar to what we believe, after much digging of fossils, piecing skeletons together, and attempting to draw animals from those skeletons. There are others.
You mean like the writer of Beowulf, who talked of dragons? Or of stories like St George and the Dragon? I guess we do.
Dragons are a recurring theme. "Dinosaur" is a relatively new word. I'm not sure an allosaur or similar would be as cool as, say, a T-Rex.
I'm not suggesting that dinosaurs were commonplace. But they are mentioned in the bible (Behemoth and possibly Leviathan are both in Job, mentioned in a way that suggests Job could actually go and look at them, along with flying serpents in Num 21:6).
The first Egyptian dynasty started about 3000 BC. Assuming the date is correct (chronologies are often revised), it easily fits in the range I provided, even allowing for a few hundred years for people to get to Egypt after the Tower of Babel incident (but it shouldn't take more than a few months for families to move from Mesopotamia to Egypt). The flood would definitely impede construction, so it would have occurred before those things were constructed, especially since they were constructed out of materials, limestone primarily, laid down during the flood.
