Thursday, November 26, 2020

ARCHAEOLOGY: Those "Ripple Marks"

Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made. Genesis 7:4
 
"More than 60 well-preserved footprints appear to show three
sauropod dinosaurs ‘walking’ in water, using their forelimbs only. Discovered in a limestone quarry in the Glen Rose Formation, Texas, the Coffee Hollow dinosaur tracksite consists of three parallel trackways heading in the same direction.
 
The tracks are shallow—only a few centimetres deep. Amazingly, these dinosaurs left tracks in the mud only with their forefoot (manus, Latin for ‘hand’). They left no trace of any print from their hindfoot (pes, Latin for ‘foot’). The dinosaur prints on the outer two trackways were up to 70 cm wide—25–35% larger than those in the middle. The middle tracks were also particularly faint. 
 
The layer directly above, which also filled the footprints, showed ripple marks. These in turn must have been buried soon after, to cement them in place before they could be erased....the dinosaurs were wading in water up to their shoulders. They used their forefeet to ‘punt’ themselves along, leaving the shallow impressions in the mud as their forefeet just touched the bottom. Indeed, a number of previous studies have highlighted that “the location of the center of buoyancy relative to the center of mass in certain sauropods … would cause the hindquarters of a wading dinosaur to lift off the bottom while the forefeet were still pushing against the substrate. Such a punting sauropod might then be able to glide with its body supported by the water … this might also result in shallowly impressed manus prints.” In other words, the sauropod body plan would force them to do handstands in deep enough water as they tried to move forward
 
The trackways fit well with the dinosaurs pulling themselves through
the waters of the Noahic Flood some 4,500 years ago while trying to find dry land. The smaller sauropod in the middle was struggling to keep its head above the deep water and get a foothold. This explains why its prints were fainter. Shortly after leaving their forefoot impressions, these were covered quickly by another layer of sediment, preserving the sauropods’ watery interaction. Another layer soon followed."
CMI