A Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph of visitors at the Quarry Exhibit Hall near Vernal, Utah. There weren\u2019t so many people there today!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
On our way home this afternoon, we stopped by the fossil quarry at Dinosaur National Monument, not far from Vernal, Utah.\u00a0 Approximately 1,500 dinosaur bones are embedded in a \u201cwall\u201d there in the Quarry Exhibit Hall.\u00a0 Remains of various species are represented, including\u00a0the thirty- to forty-foot-tall Allosaurus, dominant predator of its era; the giant sauropods Apatosaurus,\u00a0Camarasaurus, and Diplodocus; and\u00a0Stegosaurus.\u00a0 (Camarasaurus is the most common dinosaur species found in the park.) .<\/p>\n
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The \u201cwall\u201d is\u00a0a layer of rock \u2014\u00a0\u00a0sandstone\u00a0and\u00a0conglomerate\u00a0\u2014 that was once, 149-150 million years ago during the late Jurassic period, an\u00a0alluvial\u00a0area or river bed belonging to what is now called the\u00a0Morrison Formation. The remains of dinosaurs that died (perhaps during a drought) were carried by the river until they were deposited just slightly north of today\u2019s Jensen, Utah.\u00a0 The sediments laid down by the river and in which the dinosaur remains were entombed were slowly buried and then, under enormous pressure, \u201clithified.\u201d\u00a0 That is, they were turned into solid rock.\u00a0 After that, these rocks were lifted up and tilted to their current angle by the forces that also created the Uinta Mountains.\u00a0 But then erosion stripped the sedimentary layers down and, by good fortune, exposed the layer containing the fossils.\u00a0 In the late nineteenth century, local Jensen farmers began to find huge and very strange bones as they were plowing their fields.\u00a0 By 1909, paleontologists from the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, were working in the quarry site.<\/p>\n
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I can only assume that this was all very disturbing to me.\u00a0 After all, I\u2019ve been told repeatedly by anonymous internet critics who\u2019ve never met me that I\u2019m a young-earth creationist who believes our planet to be only a few thousand years old.\u00a0 So I must have been very bothered by these dinosaur fossils, and to be told that they\u2019re 150 million years old must have been deeply shocking.\u00a0 Of course, I was very likely already reeling from our visit to Rocky Mountain National Park, where the volcanic Never Summer Mountains are claimed to be nearly 30 million years old.\u00a0 And the Never Summers are practically newborns compared to the oldest rocks in the Park, which are dated to between 1.7 billion and 1.8 billion years before the present.<\/p>\n
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One of my critics has recently been claiming that a principal theme of this blog is The Evils of Science.\u00a0 In that light, it should come as no surprise to me or to others that I very likely regard all of these alleged dates as lies told by wicked and satanic \u201cscientists\u201d as part of their war against God.\u00a0 Or something of that sort.\u00a0 There are so many things that one can learn online!<\/p>\n
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\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 On our way home this afternoon, we stopped by the fossil quarry at Dinosaur National Monument, not far from Vernal, Utah.\u00a0 Approximately 1,500 dinosaur bones are embedded in a \u201cwall\u201d there in the Quarry Exhibit Hall.\u00a0 Remains of various species are represented, including\u00a0the thirty- to forty-foot-tall Allosaurus, dominant predator of its era; the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4859,1890,14107,14110,14116,14104,14101,14113,3712,782,14089],"class_list":["post-87038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dinosaur","tag-dinosaurs","tag-fossil","tag-fossils","tag-jensen","tag-monument","tag-national","tag-quarry","tag-rock","tag-utah","tag-vernal"],"yoast_head":"\n
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