Fossils

By Matys Weiser                                                                             B-H    
Before I became more aware about the surrounding world at the age of ten, I was a part of the scout movement.
Summer vacation were spent in faraway sleep camp on the dunes of the Baltic sea. One of the scouts activities were tracking. Sometime in the middle of the night, our superiors woke us up, divided it to two groups with the task of one group to run away leaving marks on the path, and the second group had to fine those marks and try to catch the first group.
One time I was part of the second group. We began to follow the marks in the shape of an arrow pointing the direction where the first group ran away. Sometimes the marks were drawn in the dust of the path, and sometimes they were formed from three sticks or long cones.
There was no scientific calculation or any type or any deep analysis. Instantly we knew that certain configurations on the path were not random, someone put them in that shape there.
Today I live in a forest environment and, especially in the winter I can see every morning who visited my backyard, was it deer, fox or even a coyote? Marks on the snow are clear. The fact that some animal left them, again, doesn’t require thought, it is instantly known. What animal made the mark must be compared with data in our memory about animals and their footprints.
That was some philosophy, and now we will track animals which were walking or running the grounds some 4400 years ago – the dinosaurs.
Each page of this website starts with the picture of big animals leaving their footprints in the soft ground which was covered by another layer of sediment and solidified.

​First set of pictures were made in famous Paloxy river in Texas.
Following picture, taken by author, shows footprint of large mammal, perhaps cat. As per evolutionary dogma, mammals of this size did not exist at the time of dinosaurs.
There is well known controversy from the same area about human footprints marked along dinosaur footprints. B-H we will come back to this topic in one of the future essays.

​See more.

Dinosaur tracks - Warner Valley Utah

Dinosaur tracks - Denver Colorado
​Below - water ripples at the same location.

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Dinosaur tracks - Arches - Utah

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Without a doubt, those marks were made by some animals, some larger than any animals known in our time. Some of the other footprints were made by animals the size of a chicken.
Those footprints as well as many other Trace fossils are found almost everywhere on planet Earth.
Dinosaur footprints are found predominantly in sandstones but some, including in video documentation above, are made in limestone. Some of the dinosaur footprints were found also in Navajo sandstone which should be a surprise, because the evolutionary geologist claim that this formation is made of desert sand which would be difficult to provide food for those large animals. Also, to leave footprints in the desert sand is well…impossible. But as usually, in cases like this, the solution was found, that in those particular places where dinosaurs walked, the sand was wet.
The mechanism of leaving the footprint is precisely that – the surface on which the animal walked on must be wet. One of the explanations of how they were preserved, Is that after the footprints were made, the ground dried and another sediment covered the ground filling the cavities. Later, that rock eroded exposing original footprints in the hard rock. It is easy however to accept the idea, that the same as in the case of laminated water ripples which we posted pictures of them in the previous essay, the same happened with dinosaurs and other animals footprints – they happened in a wet environment and were covered by another layer of wet mud or sand. And because the lower layer has had different content of silica, usually richer, the two layers did not mix, preserving the footprints underground.
Until now we wrote about Ichnofossils or in plane language – Trace fossils, in the next part of the essay we will be occupied with fossils themselves.
Some more contemporary ichnofossils are showed in following slideshow. Those are imprints of decayed organic material trapped in travertine formation in Fossil Creek Arizona.

How did the once live organisms become fossils?
One particular type of fossilization – Permineralization, left most of the fossils found today in museums and visitor centers in National and other parks. We will quote Wikipedia as it explains the process in the most simple and comprehensive way, we encourage the reader to go to the full article – Fossils.
“Permineralization is a process of fossilization that occurs when an organism is buried. The
empty spaces within an organism (spaces filled with liquid or gas during life) become filled with mineral-rich groundwater. Minerals precipitate from the groundwater, occupying the empty spaces. This process can occur in very small spaces, such as within the cell wall of a plant cell.
Small scale permineralization can produce very detailed fossils. For permineralization to occur,
the organism must become covered by sediment soon after death, otherwise decay
commences. The degree to which the remains are decayed when covered determines the later
details of the fossil. Some fossils consist only of skeletal remains or teeth; other fossils contain traces of skin, feathers or even soft tissues.”
As we can see and can foresee, this type of fossilization can happen only in wet environments
and only when an organism is insulted from bacterial and other forms of decay.
We cannot observe or even imitate the process of fossilization in a laboratory, although it happens in some form in rich in minerals waters of geysers.

We will present some examples of the once living organisms fossilized in the mud waves of
the Mabul and then look closer to two particular examples where certain facts are, or were, omitted from the textbooks of geology, paleontology or paleobiology.
In 2007 prof. Mary Schweitzer, published her discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur bone. She was
contested by her colleges from the academic world, for it is impossible for collagen, red blood cells and almost 20 other discovered types of soft tissue, to survive 65.000.000 years, encased in a fossilized T Rex bone. Here is quotation from Wikipedia:
“Schweitzer was the first researcher to identify and isolate soft tissues from an ancient fossil bone. The soft tissues are collagen, a connective protein. Amino acid sequencing of several samples have shown matches with the known collagens of chickens, frogs, newts and other animals. Schweitzer has also isolated organic compounds and antigenic structures in sauropod egg shells. With respect to the significance of her work, Kevin Padian, Curator of Paleontology, University of California Museum of Paleontology, has stated – ‘Chemicals that might degrade in a laboratory over a short period need not do so in a protected natural chemical environment…it’s time to readjust our thinking.’
Schweitzer previously announced similar discoveries in 1993. Since then, the claim of discovering soft tissues in an ancient fossil has been disputed by some molecular biologists.
Later research by Kaye et al. published in PLoS ONE  (30 July 2008) challenged the claims that the material found is the soft tissue of a Tyrannosaurus. A more recent study (October 2010) published in PLoS ONE contradicts the conclusion of Kaye and supports Schweitzer’s original
conclusion. Evidence for the extraction of short segments of ancient DNA from dinosaur fossils
has been reported on two separate occasions. The extraction of protein, soft tissue, remnant
cells and organelle-like structures from dinosaur fossils has been confirmed.”
So much Wikipedia.
What is fascinating about this case however, that the dogma was protected for much longer that a few years, a little bit more than decade ago. The first reports about biological material came in 1966 and then reports of such discoveries were made over seventy times by scientists from all over the world from material from various countries and locations. Here are the early samples:
Dinosaur bone collagen vessels - Cretaceous, Campanian Gobi Desert, Mongolia 1966
Megalosaurus egg shell protein - Jurassic, Bathonian Rognacian Fm., S. France 1968
Sauropod limb hydroxyproline - Jurassic, Kimmeridgian Morrison Fm., CO 1968
Dinosaur proteins and polysaccharides - Cretaceous, Maastrichtian 1974.
The argument can be made, that there is no conspiracy to hide this information from the public if so many publications informed such discoveries. But those publications are circulated only among small amounts of specialist, and never leaked to popular scientific magazines or were discussed in the broader public. Until Mary Schweitzer proved the case of biological material in the fossils, those discoveries were dismissed as going against the generally approved dogma.
Today that controversy does not exist anymore for facts cannot be denied, however, to keep
with the official dogma of the evolutionary process and calendar, new solutions have been invented.
To explain it in simple terms – even if it is impossible for soft tissue to survive that long of period in time, it did survive, and it must be the increased content of iron which somehow preserved the biological material in the fossilized bone.
As in case of any other religion, if one dogma is exposed to be false, a new dogma is invented.
We mentioned previously the rock formation named Navajo sandstone in the context of Dinosaur footprints.

Bone fossils in Dinosaur National Museum
Notice - no complete skeleton preserved at this site.
Animals were torn apart and clustered together in the patch of floating in mud biological material.

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We mentioned previously the rock formation named Navajo sandstone in the context of Dinosaur footprints.
Now we will focus on this type of stone once again, and once again we will quote from
Wikipedia:
“The (Navajo) sandstone was deposited in an arid erg on the Western portion of the
Supercontinent Pangaea. This region was affected by annual monsoons that came about each winter when cooler winds and wind reversal occurred.”
Monsoons would perhaps explain the footprints as the sand got wet, but it still was a desert
where availability of any kind of food would be at least problematic.
In my hikes in the deserts of the West I have walked in the mountains, formed with eroded
Navajo sandstone.
Here is what we found.

On the first three pictures we can see a fossil in the shape of a shell, and it must be agreed that when the same shell is encased in the limestone, the fossil looks different. Here, the shell was mixed with the sand without a large content of lime but rather in quartz grains cemented by the silica, and the contours of this fossil are not so clear.

​Those second set of pictures shows a different type of shell.

From the third set of pictures, it would be hard to prove that we are seeing leaves of sea grass but I hope to prove my point with the following photographic documentation.

​This picture shows a plank or piece of wood embedded in the stone, and the question comes once more – how it got to the desert without the rest of its environment and where did it come from. For Navajo sandstone covers 102,300 sq miles and is 2300 feet thick in some places.
Below some other unidentified fossils in the same found in the same area. 

​The following pictures show fossils of Kelp, oceanic growth commonly found on the beaches of western US.

This is how Kelp looks on the Californian beach.

We would gladly accept an explanation, what terrestrial plant growing on the desert or anywhere else, looks exactly like Kelp.
Otherwise we hope that all the books, brochures, displays and other forms of information will change the description of origins of Navajo sandstone form arid to wet.
It must be noted that Navajo sandstone and Wingate sandstone, are only two of formations claimed to form in a dry environment. The few other formations are officially controversial.
Below, a few pictures of Navajo sandstone, where pictures of marine fossils were taken.

​More about Navajo sandstone in following essay.