Dinos survived Cretaceous asteroid, according to reports in EurekAlert, 28 April 2009, ScienceDaily 30 April 2009 and Palaeontologia Electronica Vol. 12, Issue 1; 3A: 1-146. Dinosaurs are believed to have suddenly become extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago. Rocks younger than this are classified as Tertiary and the transition from Cretaceous to Tertiary rocks is called the K-T boundary. James Fassett has found dinosaur bones in Ojo Alamo Sandstone in New Mexico. These rocks had long been classified as Tertiary on the basis of fossil leaves found in them. Dinosaur bones in Tertiary rocks have usually been explained away as having been exhumed from their original deposit by rivers, then transported and re-deposited. Fassett found 34 Hadrosaur bones that were grouped together – “not literally an articulated skeleton, but the bones are doubtless from a single animal”. If they had been exhumed and reburied by a flowing river they would have been scattered. Fassett also found the fossils had “distinctly different concentrations of rare earth metal elements to the bones in the underlying Cretaceous rocks”. He also studied the leaves and pollen grains buried in the rocks and the magnetic polarity of the rock layer to confirm that the rock is Tertiary and not Cretaceous. He concluded that his studies “independently indicate that they do indeed post-date the extinction”. The EurekAlert article comments: “we already know that flying theropod dinosaurs (more generally referred to as birds) and crocodiles survived, so the possibility of pockets of survivors of other types of dinosaur is not quite as far-fetched as it might sound.”
EurekAlert, ScienceDaily, Palaeontologia Electronica
Editorial Comment: This study reveals the inconsistency of dating rocks by the fossils they contain. Fossil bearing rock beds often contain many fossils, but are often classified on the basis of one type of “index” fossil. Whenever dinosaur bearing rocks are found, they are invariably classified as Cretaceous, Jurassic or Triassic, irrespective of what else is found in the same bed. We need to be reminded that the classification system for rocks originally had nothing to do with time. The names referred to what the rock looked like or where it was first identified. Cretaceous means “chalky”, Jurassic refers to the Jura Mountains in Europe, and Triassic means “three colours”. See more of this in our latest documentary DVD “Darwin on the Rocks” available from all Creation Research Offices and the webshop. It visits the fossil bearing rock beds to show you what most actually contain – evidence of destruction and catastrophic burial of many living things and not slow gradual evolution. (Ref. geological column, geochronology)
Evidence News, 6 May 2009