Does anyone know anything about this new find?<<
I was in New Orleans last week and saw Baugh on the program at 6:30 one
morning. On that program he did not mention the humans.
However, through a means I will not divulge (but legal and ethical) I have
obtained two teeth from one of Baugh's skeletons. I have also seen photos of
the excavations they are doing. I have had the teeth analyzed by a dental
school prof and by a couple of fossil experts at my company. The conclusion
is that the teeth are not contemporaneous with the Cretaceous strata in which
they are embedded. One of the teeth I have looks like a baby front tooth,
the other is an adult molar. I do not believe these are from the same
individual. The baby tooth is quite green but the adult tooth only has a
patina of green.
The reasoning is as follows:
1. The photos clearly show that the material in which the fossil humans are
located is discolored in comparison to the Cretaceous sandstone. The bones
were in roughly circular shaped holes in the sandstone. The discoloration
roughly fills the circular area. I told Don Patten that the discoloration
would indicate that the material was different in the holes. (Patten is a
local creationist leader who claims to be a geologist but won't tell you
where he got his geology degrees (and doesn't know what a listric fault is).
He told me he did get his Ph.D. in geological education from a school in
Australia which only required him to write a paper and not be there in
person. He told me it was a real degree) He tried to tell me that the
discoloration was due to the flesh decaying. That phenomenon is rarely found
in sandstones, in fact, fossils are rarely found in sandstone for two
reasons: 1. sand acts as an abrasive and wears away whatever stays in it
very long (assuming the sand is mobile). and 2. sands usually represent a
highly oxydizing environment and oxygen destroys fossils and any evidence of
their body such as darkening. While fossils occur in sandstones, if you want
to find fossils without lots and lots of work, the last place you look is in
a sandstone. Shales and limestones are much better.
2. The dental prof told me that yes they are human teeth, but they are still
dentin (I always frustrate him by saying 'bone') and thus unfossilized. The
older the geological rock the less likely it is to find unfossilized organic
remains. Andrew MacRae may want to correct me on this, but as I understand
it, It is extremely rare to find unfossilized material from Cretaceous rocks.
I know of only one.
3. The fossil experts at the company were impressed by the total lack of
attached rock matrix (as was I). When you remove a fossil from a rock, it
usually requires months of work to separate the fossil from the rock. These
things have no matrix on them. Pictures I saw of the human femur showed no
matrix and Patten told me that he had removed that particular femur only 15
minutes before the picture was taken. The lack of matrix means that the
sandstone, which was hard had not hardened around the bodies. This further
supports the possibility that these are later burials in the rock and that
the bodies were not deposited with the Cretaceous sandstone. My guys at
the company noted that the malchite replacement was superficial only. And
given the above observations do not think the teeth are Cretaceous in age.
Given the above facts, I would be very careful of using this particular piece
of evidence to support anything.
glenn