Thursday, August 15, 2019

ARCHAEOLOGY: Pre-Flood Penguins?

For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.
Genesis 7:4

"Named Crossvallia waiparensis, the ancient penguin was about 5.2 feet (1.6 m) tall — taller than today’s 4-foot Emperor penguin.
Its leg bones and two ends of the humerus were unearthed by amateur paleontologist Leigh Love at the Waipara Greensand fossil site in 2018.

Dr. Gerald Mayr from the Senckenberg Natural History Museum and colleagues analyzed the bones and concluded they belonged to a previously unknown penguin species.
When the Crossvallia species were alive, New Zealand and Antarctica were very different from today — Antarctica was covered in forest and both had much warmer climates.
The Waipara Greensand is arguably the world’s most significant site for penguin fossils from the Paleocene epoch,” Dr. Mayr said."
SciNews

"The first is that if the pre-Flood world was uniformly warm, this would have allowed warm-climate animals and plants to live at
high latitude. When the Flood came, they were simply buried close to where they lived.

Second, warm-climate flora and fauna could have been transported from low and middle latitudes to high latitudes by currents or by rafting on log mats. Given the powerful currents expected at times during the Flood, log mats could have been transported to polar latitudes in a matter of days. The second explanation is supported by the thick growth rings in many fossil trees found in high latitudes; had the trees grown where found, the axial tilt of the planet would have prevented sufficient sunlight for the development of such thick rings."

High-latitude warm-climate vegetation also has consequences for the location of the Flood/post-Flood boundary. Could such warmth have occurred early in the post-Flood period, if the Eocene strata were deposited soon after the Flood?
Advocates of this position must argue that these plants and animals lived at these same high latitudes after the Flood. Warm sea surface temperatures could produce modest warming on the high-latitude land masses but probably not nearly enough to produce near-tropical temperatures. Winter temperatures well below freezing would still persist over high-latitude land masses due to the low angle of the sun, no matter how warm the ocean temperatures. High and midlatitude warm-climate paleoflora and paleofauna provide strong evidence that the Flood/post-Flood boundary is above the Eocene strata."
CMI