Speculative Fiction Presented as Science in Triassic Dinosaur Fossils

Although some people try to deny it, we all have our starting points through which we interpret data. This applies to scientists of all types, even though some people believe that scientists are dispassionate and operate only from data. Not hardly!

Petrified Forest National Park / US National Park Service / PD

Evolutionary scientists were fixing to reconstruct a scenario explaining the lack of dinosaur fossils in the Late Triassic, using observations in the Chinle Formation. It was a swell notion. However, the worldview they operated from required many assumptions of evolution and uniformitarianism, and ignored some important facts. When the same information is used from a Genesis Flood standpoint, things make a lot more sense.

Paleontologists have long wondered why dinosaurs are scarce in the Late Triassic rock layers of the presumed tropics of that supposed time. Fossilized dinosaurs appear abundantly in those rock layers in today’s higher latitudes. In fact, though long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs are virtually absent in the Late Triassic’s supposed tropics, fossils of other reptiles and mammals are plentiful. A team of scientists recently sought the answer to this mystery at Ghost Ranch, home of New Mexico’s Chinle Formation, particularly its Petrified Forest Member, which hosts the petrified logs in the nearby Petrified Forest National Park. (Dinosaurs, primarily carnivorous ones, accounted for only 15% of the vertebrate fossils they sampled in the region.

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There at Ghost Ranch researchers analyzed petrified wood and charcoal, carbon and oxygen isotopes in organic debris and carbonate nodules, and the fossilized animals, plants, and pollen grains. By correlating all the data, the authors of the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences believe they have reconstructed a picture of the conditions in the region 205 to 215 million years ago. “Each dataset complements the others, and they all point towards similar conditions,” lead author Jessica Whiteside says. “I think this is one of the major strengths of our study.” By piecing together from the raw data what they deem to be an accurate picture of a drought-ridden, wildfire-ravaged region that was located close to the equator long ago, the authors of the study believe they’ve solved the mystery. But have they?

To get the hard truth and read the entire article in context, click on "Dearth of Dinosaurs in Late Triassic Tropics Not Due to Raging Wildfires".