DINOSAUR DISCUSSION 3
Where did the dinosaurs come from?
Did dinosaurs ever exist?
Are dinosaur fossils simply fabrications or constructions?
Audience: Anyone
This discussion is not limited to Young Earth Christians.
Extinction Conundrum
The current general view for the extinction of the dinosaurs is that a meteor struck the earth about 66 million years ago. The destruction this caused supposedly brought about the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs and about 75% of all species on Earth perished.[1]
The Chicxulub crater (IPA: [tʃikʃuˈlub]) is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. ... It was formed when a large asteroid, about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in diameter, struck the Earth. The date of the impact coincides precisely with the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (commonly known as the "K–Pg boundary"), slightly more than 66 million years ago, and a widely accepted theory is that worldwide climate disruption from the event was the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction in which 75% of plant and animal species on Earth became extinct, including all non-avian dinosaurs.[1]
Luis Alvarez and his son Walter Alvarez, discovered that sedimentary layers found all over the world at the K-Pg* (Cretaceous–Paleogene) boundary contained a concentration of iridium hundreds of times greater than normal. Being rare in the Earth's crust but common in meteorites led them to believe that an asteroid struck the earth at the time of the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary.[2]
*previously referred as the K-T boundary.
The discovery of the crater settled the complaint of many: OK, if a meteor did it, then where is the crater?
First ridiculed, the majority of evolutionists have accepted the Alvarez hypothesis that it was a meteor that struck the earth which led to the demise of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. The competing theory is that it was volcanic activity that led to their demise.[3]
In the March 5, 2010 edition of the journal Science, an international panel of 41 experts in geology, paleontology and other related fields, after an exhaustive review of the data, declared an end to a 30 year controversy over what triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs – an asteroid or volcanoes. The panel ruled in favor of the asteroid, a theory first put forth in 1980 by one of Berkeley Lab’s greatest scientists, the late Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez, and his son Walter, a geologist with UC Berkeley.
“We conclude that the Chicxulub impact was the ultimate cause for the mass extinctions of the dinosaurs,” Schulte told the media.[3]
However there is still a small number who have not accepted the theory for various reasons, the main one being that the destruction would have caused the complete extinction of many species still alive today.[4]
Birds, tortoises, and mammals live on land and breathe air: the evidence from the K-T boundary shows that they survived the K-T boundary event. Therefore they and the air they breathed weren't set on broil for several hours. To put it simply, these scenarios did not happen.
How did birds survive while dinosaurs did not? … Even a sudden storm or a slightly severe winter can cause high mortality among bird populations. Yet an impact scenario, according to its enthusiasts, includes "a nightmare of environmental disasters, including storms, tsunamis, cold and darkness, greenhouse warming, acid rains and global fires." There must be some explanation for the survival of birds, turtles, and crocodiles through any catastrophe of this scale, or else the catastrophe models are wrong.
some extreme impact scenarios postulate extensive acid rain bathing the earth for a long time after the impact. However, the survival of amphibians shows that this is simply a fantasy (Weil 1984). Amphibians breathe through their porous skins and are sensitive to slight changes in the acidity of their watery habitat. Even now, the slightly more acidic conditions of lakes and ponds due to human-induced acid rain are causing frogs and salamanders to die out rapidly. If the entire earth had been subjected to a huge acid bath, there simply would not be a frog or salamander alive on the earth today.[4]
And just how did they come to these conclusions? Just what were the dinosaurs up against?[5]
Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. … When Earth's crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, ...
Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; … The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain ...
Then acid rain, formed from the nitrous oxide and sulfates clogging the atmosphere, began to hammer down on the surface, killing plants and animals and even dissolving rocks. This rain would have been as corrosive as battery acid ...
A new study led by Yale University confirms a long-held theory about the last great mass extinction event in history and how it affected Earth’s oceans.
ocean water suddenly became more acidic (Henehan, M.J. and 13 others 2019. Rapid ocean acidification and protracted Earth system recovery followed the end-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact.
The effects of the sulphuric acid on the climate was so severe that the computer simulations found it would have taken at least 30 years for the global climate to recover.[5]
So that's it? Game over? Not quite. To their credit it does appear that the evolutionists took this on board and decided to do something about it. One of the first quotes I read about the destructive power of the meteor looked like:
The Chicxulub impactor had an estimated diameter of 11-81 kilometers (6.8-50.3 mi), and delivered an estimated energy of 21-921 billion Hiroshima A-bombs[6]
However, checking the wikipedia quote in June 2022, I found this had been replaced by:
The impactor's velocity was estimated at 20 kilometers per second. The kinetic energy of the impact was estimated at 100 teratons of TNT, more than 4.5 billion times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.[7]
Then in March 2023 I found
The impactor's velocity was estimated at 20 kilometers per second (12 mi/s). The kinetic energy of the impact was estimated at 72 teratonnes of TNT (300 ZJ).[8]
This translates to approximately 4.8 billion Hiroshima A bombs. And though these last two are not too dissimilar, the following is not. In April I found the following quote:
The collision would have released the same energy as 100,000,000 megatonnes of TNT (4.2×1023 J), over a billion times the energy of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[9]
Just over a billion is much less than 4.8 billion. And these are all far below the estimates given by the two guys from Mexico, “21-921 billion Hiroshima A-bombs”
So why the drop? Well considering what the discordant few were complaining about, if the original quotes were true, there was no way the birds could have survived the conflagration caused by the meteor impact. But by making it smaller, perhaps they could just squeeze them through, along with tortoises, mammals, turtles, crocodiles, frogs and salamanders.
The stakes are high! And just how can we make some decision about all this? Thankfully I found an online calculator* that could give the impact energy given some data about the meteor. I didn't have the actual size of the meteor or it's actual velocity but we can use the size of the crater, angle of impact [assumed to be 60 degrees], and density.
* Asteroid Impact Crater Calculator.[10]
The size of the crater can be determined as approximately 170 km wide.[10a] The meteor has been determined to be a carbonaceous chondrite:
careful consideration of the geochemical evidence strongly favors a CM or CR carbonaceous chondrite, and rules out a cometary impactor.[11]
And on a page about meteorite densities I found the following:
All densities are measured in grams per cubic centimetre. (g/cm3)
Carbonaceous Chondrites:
CI 2.11
CM 2.12 (± 0.26)
CR 3.1
http://meteorites.com.au/odds&ends/density.html
I used some velocities from the document by the two guys from Mexico:
Steel (1998) obtained an estimation of the range of velocities for bodies that cross Earth's orbit. For asteroids the interval is between 12.6 km s-1 and 40.7 km s-1. This result is based on measurements of the velocities of the asteroids that cross Earth's orbit.
Assessments of the energy, mass and size of the Chicxulub Impactor
Hector Javier Durand-Manterola and Guadalupe Cordero-Tercero
So with two densities and two velocities I obtained 4 results. Interestingly with the differing velocities and densities the result was still the same in all cases, 138 billion Hiroshima A bombs.[12]
And it fits nicely in the range given by them: “21-921 billion Hiroshima A-bombs”
So we can ignore all the small values being currently pushed by the evolutionists. It was not just over one billion, but more correctly closer to 138 billion. Sure I may not have gotten it completely right, but it is right in the ball park and most likely closer than what is currently being pushed.
And just what does all this mean?
The discordant few need to be heard:
Birds, tortoises, and mammals live on land and breathe air: … To put it simply, these scenarios did not happen.
How did birds survive while dinosaurs did not? … There must be some explanation for the survival of birds, turtles, and crocodiles through any catastrophe of this scale, or else the catastrophe models are wrong.
the survival of amphibians shows that this is simply a fantasy … If the entire earth had been subjected to a huge acid bath, there simply would not be a frog or salamander alive on the earth today.[4]
Given the supposed destructive power of the meteor impact, birds, tortoises, mammals, turtles, crocodiles, frogs and salamanders, and no doubt many other susceptible species should all be gone. But we still have these species with us today. This is an impossible situation. If this meteor impacted the planet 66 million years ago that's what we would have.
The only conclusion that can be drawn is that NO meteor impacted this planet 66 million years ago. But there is so much evidence from the rocks supporting the theory. Iridium found in the K-Pg boundary layers around the world. The 170 km wide crater found supporting the impact dating to 66 Ma and the exact time of the extinction of the dinosaurs. Fossils with tektites ingested telling us these creatures died at the time of the meteor impact. Destruction found in the rock layers close to the impact site. And so on.
So what's going on?
One evolutionist claimed that the survival of amphibians shows that it all must be a fantasy.
That's a pretty good analysis.
But if the Alvarez Hypothesis is nothing but a fantasy, then so is all of the evidence supporting it.
Unfortunately that includes:
1. The fossils supporting it;
2. The rock layers supporting it;
and
3. The 170 km wide 20 km deep crater in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico.
And if all these things are just a fantasy, just what does that mean?
It means this...
1. The fossils can no longer be considered to be a reliable record of the past life on this planet!
2. The rock layers can no longer be considered to be a reliable record of the past of this planet!
and
3. The 170 km wide 20 km deep crater in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico can no longer be considered to be a reliable record of a meteor impact that supposedly happened 66 million years ago!
If these fossils are no longer a reliable record then the dinosaur fossils are in question. All of them.
None of these dinosaurs ever existed as living breathing creatures at any time in the past. They came into existence when this world came into existence, fully formed as the paleontologists have found them, as fossils, not fossil remains, but fully constructed waiting for them to be dug up and shown to the world.
And this brings us to the big question...
Where did all of this junk come from?
It would appear that someone or something added many thousands of feet of rock layers to this planet with all of this stuff built into them when this world came into existence.
An act of creation at this level would require the ability of a deity and this takes this right out of the realm of evolutionary science.
But not Christianity.
Just who or what would or could do this?
As a Christian I have no problem with that question. None whatsoever.
But I think the evolutionists are in a real lot of trouble.
REFERENCES
1.
The Chicxulub crater (IPA: [tʃikʃuˈlub]) is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is offshore near the communities of Chicxulub Puerto and Chicxulub Pueblo, after which the crater is named. It was formed when a large asteroid, about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in diameter, struck the Earth. The date of the impact coincides precisely with the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (commonly known as the "K–Pg boundary"), slightly more than 66 million years ago, and a widely accepted theory is that worldwide climate disruption from the event was the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction in which 75% of plant and animal species on Earth became extinct, including all non-avian dinosaurs.
The crater is estimated to be 150 kilometers (93 miles) in diameter and 20 kilometers (12 miles) in depth, well into the continental crust of the region of about 10–30 kilometers (6.2–18.6 miles) in depth.
The crater was discovered by Antonio Camargo and Glen Penfield, geophysicists who had been looking for petroleum in the Yucatán Peninsula during the late 1970s. Penfield was initially unable to obtain evidence that the geological feature was a crater and gave up his search. Later, through contact with Alan R. Hildebrand in 1990, Penfield obtained samples that suggested it was an impact feature. Evidence for the impact origin of the crater includes shocked quartz, a gravity anomaly, and tektites in surrounding areas.
http://web.archive.org/web/20220105113846/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
2.
In 1980, a team of researchers led by Nobel prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez, his son, geologist Walter Alvarez, and chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Vaughn Michel discovered that sedimentary layers found all over the world at the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary, formerly called Cretaceous–Tertiary or K–T boundary) contain a concentration of iridium hundreds of times greater than normal. Iridium is extremely rare in the Earth's crust because it is very dense and has the affinity for iron that characterizes the siderophile elements (see Goldschmidt classification), and therefore most of it sank into the Earth's core while the earth was still molten. The Alvarez team suggested that an asteroid struck the earth at the time of the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary.
http://web.archive.org/web/20201108005220/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvarez_hypothesis
3.
"A lot of people have speculated that volcanoes mattered to K-Pg, and we're saying, 'no, they didn't," said Pincelli Hull, an assistant professor of geology and geophysics at Yale and lead author of the study, which published Thursday in Science.
"What our study does is take 40 years of research and adds a bunch of new research. It combines this in the most quantitative tests you can do and it really doesn't look like it (was the volcanoes)."
They found that at least 50% or more of the major outgassing from the Deccan Traps occurred well before the asteroid impact, and only the impact coincided with the mass extinction event.
"Volcanic activity in the late Cretaceous [period] caused a gradual global warming event of about two degrees, but not mass extinction," said Henehan
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/16/world/dinosaur-extinction-volcanoes-asteroid-scn/index.html
In the March 5, 2010 edition of the journal Science, an international panel of 41 experts in geology, paleontology and other related fields, after an exhaustive review of the data, declared an end to a 30 year controversy over what triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs – an asteroid or volcanoes. The panel ruled in favor of the asteroid, a theory first put forth in 1980 by one of Berkeley Lab’s greatest scientists, the late Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez, and his son Walter, a geologist with UC Berkeley.
“We conclude that the Chicxulub impact was the ultimate cause for the mass extinctions of the dinosaurs,” Schulte told the media.
https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2010/03/09/alvarez-theory-on-dinosaur/
Since the impact hypothesis for the demise of the dinosaurs was first proposed more than 30 years ago, many scientists have come to believe the meteor caused the mass extinction and wiped out the dinosaurs
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110712211016.htm
4.
What do we do with these impact scenarios? Naturally, we compare them with the evidence from the geological record. Birds, tortoises, and mammals live on land and breathe air: the evidence from the K-T boundary shows that they survived the K-T boundary event. Therefore they and the air they breathed weren't set on broil for several hours. To put it simply, these scenarios did not happen.
History of Life, Richard Cowen, 2000, p.290.
https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/events/cowen2b.html
The survival of birds is the strangest of all the K-T boundary events, if we are to accept the catastrophic scenarios. Smaller dinosaurs overlapped with larger birds in size and in ecological roles as terrestrial bipeds. How did birds survive while dinosaurs did not? Birds seek food in the open, by sight; they are small and warm-blooded, with high metabolic rates and small energy stores. Even a sudden storm or a slightly severe winter can cause high mortality among bird populations. Yet an impact scenario, according to its enthusiasts, includes "a nightmare of environmental disasters, including storms, tsunamis, cold and darkness, greenhouse warming, acid rains and global fires." There must be some explanation for the survival of birds, turtles, and crocodiles through any catastrophe of this scale, or else the catastrophe models are wrong.
History of Life, Richard Cowen, 2000, p.295.
https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/events/cowen3b.html
The theory is now widely accepted by the scientific community. Some critics, including paleontologist Robert Bakker, argue that such an impact would have killed frogs as well as dinosaurs, yet the frogs survived the extinction event.
http://web.archive.org/web/20211228051109/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
there was no extinction in the insects, a group that should have been the most sensitive to a global catastrophe predicted by the impact advocates. ... Nor do the birds show much extinction, even though they too should have been vulnerable (Chiappe 1995). ...
some extreme impact scenarios postulate extensive acid rain bathing the earth for a long time after the impact. However, the survival of amphibians shows that this is simply a fantasy (Weil 1984). Amphibians breathe through their porous skins and are sensitive to slight changes in the acidity of their watery habitat. Even now, the slightly more acidic conditions of lakes and ponds due to human-induced acid rain are causing frogs and salamanders to die out rapidly. If the entire earth had been subjected to a huge acid bath, there simply would not be a frog or salamander alive on the earth today. p.38.
After the Dinosaurs, Donald R. Prothero, 2006.
5.
Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth's crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, ...
Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died
Then acid rain, formed from the nitrous oxide and sulfates clogging the atmosphere, began to hammer down on the surface, killing plants and animals and even dissolving rocks. This rain would have been as corrosive as battery acid and its most devastating effect would have been to destroy the shells of small marine organisms. p.165.
Flying Dinosaurs: How fearsome reptiles became birds, John Pickrell, 2014.
A new study led by Yale University confirms a long-held theory about the last great mass extinction event in history and how it affected Earth’s oceans.
The researchers say it is the first direct evidence that the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago coincided with a sharp drop in the pH levels of the oceans — which indicates a rise in ocean acidity.
“The ocean acidification we observe could easily have been the trigger for mass extinction in the marine realm,” said senior author Pincelli Hull, assistant professor of geology and geophysics at Yale.
https://news.yale.edu/2019/10/21/mystery-solved-ocean-acidity-last-mass-extinction
A study of boron isotopes in the tests of foraminifera that lived deep in the oceans and near their surface just after the K-Pg boundary event has revealed that ocean water suddenly became more acidic (Henehan, M.J. and 13 others 2019. Rapid ocean acidification and protracted Earth system recovery followed the end-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Online; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1905989116).
https://earthlogs.org/2019/10/25/what-followed-the-k-pg-extinction-event/
The effects of the sulphuric acid on the climate was so severe that the computer simulations found it would have taken at least 30 years for the global climate to recover.
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/dinosaurs-extinction-simulation
6.
The Chicxulub impactor had an estimated diameter of 11-81 kilometers (6.8-50.3 mi), and delivered an estimated energy of 21-921 billion Hiroshima A-bombs (between 1.3x1024 and 5.8x1025 joules, or 1.3-58 yottajoules). For comparison, this is ~100 million times the energy released by the Tsar Bomba, a thermonuclear device ("H-bomb") that remains the most powerful human-made explosive ever detonated, which released 210 petajoules (2.1x1017 joules, or 50 megatons TNT).
http://web.archive.org/web/20211228051109/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
we concluded that the most probable impactor was a fast asteroid or a long-period comet with energy between 1.3x1024 J and 5.8x1025 J, mass between 1.0x1015 kg and 4.6x1017 kg, and diameter between 10.6 km and 80.9 km.
Assessments of the energy, mass and size of the Chicxulub Impactor
Hector Javier Durand-Manterola and Guadalupe Cordero-Tercero
Departamento de Ciencias Espaciales, Instituto de Geofísica, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México
https://arxiv.org/abs/1403.6391
Suggested dates to 2014 and have a reference dated 2013.
7.
The impactor's velocity was estimated at 20 kilometers per second. The kinetic energy of the impact was estimated at 100 teratons of TNT, more than 4.5 billion times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
http://web.archive.org/web/20220616030918/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
8.
The impactor's velocity was estimated at 20 kilometers per second (12 mi/s). The kinetic energy of the impact was estimated at 72 teratonnes of TNT (300 ZJ).
http://web.archive.org/web/20230308222229/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
9.
The collision would have released the same energy as 100,000,000 megatonnes of TNT (4.2×1023 J), over a billion times the energy of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
http://web.archive.org/web/20230315003850/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvarez_hypothesis
10.
Asteroid Impact Crater Calculator
http://convertalot.com/asteroid_impact_calculator.html
This JavaScript program (by Stephen R. Schmitt) calculates the effects of the impact of an object hitting the earth. It was adapted from a BASIC program from the Astronomical Computing column of Sky & Telescope, November 1996.
10a.
CHICXULUB CRATER SIZE AND STRUCTURE AS REVEALED BY HORIZONTAL BOUGUER GRAVITY GRADIENTS AND CENOTE DISTRIBUTION; A.R. Hildebrand, et at.
The size of the Chicxulub crater, Yucatan, Mexico is currently in dispute with diameter estimates ranging from 170km upwards of 300 km ...
No concentric gradient features were found at distances >85 km radius. ...
The cenotes' distribution does not reveal any concentric structure at radii >85 km; ...
This terrace width satisfies the relationship defined by lunar craters for a crater of 170 km diameter
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc1995/pdf/1302.pdf
Note: This document gives a footnote on each page stating "Lunar and Planetary Institute Provided by the NASA Astrophysics Data System" which does suggest this document carries a reasonable amount of weight on this topic. That said, I am going to use their suggested crater diameter value of 170 km.
11.
careful consideration of the geochemical evidence strongly favors a CM or CR carbonaceous chondrite, and rules out a cometary impactor.
the impactor must be a CM or CR chondrite, and this makes asteroids plausible
Desch et al.
"The Chicxulub impactor: comet or asteroid?"
12.
The Chicxulub Impactor
Supposed dino killer 66 Ma
A CM or CR carbonaceous chondrite asteroid having an estimated diameter of 18.64 - 46.23 kilometers (11.6 - 28.7 mi), travelling between 12.6 - 40.7 km/sec, 45,360 - 146,520 km/hr, and delivering an estimated energy of 138 billion Hiroshima A-bombs (approximately 8.71×10^24 Joules).
http://www.greatesthoax.info/short/chicxulub-impactor.shtml
Stephen Buckley
E-mail: chodesh [at] duck.com
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