By Chris Parker & s8int.com, Copyright 2009

We thought that it might be fun and or interesting to compile a list of the science stories of 2009 that were most compatible with Special Creation; or which moved the scientific ball in that direction. Another basis for selecting these top 12 science stories for Creationists might be the illumination a story might shed on the myth of macro-evolution.

But first, a digression. I grew up reading science fiction stories. In my teen years I read science fiction almost exclusively. As a genre however, I’d say the themes of science fiction literature are at odds with the Bible more than any other. Its typically very humanist in its adoption of science and man as its heroes. Man can achieve through science, technology, grit, determination and that “special quality” that we alone possess says science fiction.

For non believers, there is something comforting in believing that though we are special, we are but one of thousands if not millions of alien species out there. These are “people” we can fight or form alliances with–but that we don’t have to bow down to. Even famous Atheist Dawkins, admitted that he could accept aliens as our creator–just not God.

Since the Bible places man at the “center of the universe”, the existence of aliens also refute the Bible and possibly the story of special creation in Genesis. The themes of science fiction typically conflict with those of the Bible.

I went to see Avatar last week and I enjoyed–the special effects. Mature Christians on a daily basis screen out news, information and media that conflict with their core beliefs. That’s why many of them don’t think its a big deal to see any movie regardless of theme. (For instance, they may take their kids to see a warlock hero movie knowing that according to Revelation; “those who practice magic arts” will be excluded from God’s Holy City” Rev 22.) How many Atheist parents do you suppose took their kids to see “The Ten Commandments” or “The Passion”?

I”ve had a few mature Christians tell me that they don’t need apologetics because their faith is strong. My question is; what about your young son or daughter or your grandson? Don’t they realize that many of them aren’t able to screen out the constant evolution/Atheist dogma that news and media put out there? Many of them find that when they reach college that they haven’t been prepared to deal with the scientific and philosophical challenges coming their way. There; because I said so or years of shrugs may not carry the day.

What I know about James Cameron, who directed Avatar is that he also was the Executive Producer behind the documentary:”The Lost Tomb of Jesus” which purported to have found the bones of Jesus Christ in a family tomb. They also suggested that He had a son with Mary Magdeline. In Avatar, he puts forth a “Mother Earth” Goddess and promotes the standard SciFi notion that consciousness can be stored on a computer.

Thankfully, secular scientists kicked dirt on his Jesus tomb and his “evidence” and like the first story on our List it has been given a wide berth.

Of course, such a list as this is totally and completely subjective. Here are our top 12 Science Stories of 2009 for Creationists/Believers.

1)The Fossil; Ida and the Explosive Pace of Evolution-ary Debunking

It was only about 7 months ago when “Science” came out with a multi-pronged, hard-hitting and extremely hyped story about a “missing link” about which it was said “This Changes Everything!”. They were referring of course to a tiny fossil that they had cleverly named “Ida” (for marketing purposes).

Ida was the subject of a simultaneous release of a book, a TV special and a scientific paper announcing its discovery. It would be impossible to overstate the hype associated with the fossil.

“This will be the one pictured in the textbooks for the next hundred years,” said Dr Jørn Hurum, the paleontologist from Oslo University’s Natural History Museum who assembled the scientific team to study the fossil.”

Curiously, it was other evolutionists rather than Creationists who were most critical of both the hype machine and the science surrounding Ida. An independent scientific review failed to uphold the initial claims about Ida and by October 2009, the headlines were like this one in Discover Magazine; “Much-Hyped Primate Fossil “Ida” Probably Isn’t Our Ancestor …”

Time Magazine, Scientific American, NewScientist and a host of other Science media failed to list “This changes Everything, Ida” in their Top 10 Science Stories of 2009—not even as a debacle.

Ida was replaced at the top of Time’s list by Ardi, actually discovered in 1992 and claimed to be our oldest ancestor. Scientific American placed Ardi at #3 without even a mention of that game changer; Ida.

Signs are not so good for Ardi either however. The same skepticism that confronted the scientific claims made about Ida are now being directed towards Ardi. In an article in the November 2009 edition of Scientific American entitled “How Humanlike Was “Ardi”?, -Ardi proponents continued to claim that Ardi was a human ancestor who walked upright, however, other experts begged to differ: from the article; “But many others in the field propose that some of these statements may be overblown. In fact, Jungers (a professor at Stony Brook) says, “I think some of the things they said might have been for effect.”

The fossil Ida debacle was an important story for believers in 2009 because it was the most forceful and coordinated attempt ever by the evolutionary cabal to push their “science” down our throats and within seven months it was overthrown so effectively that even the evolutionists are busy trying to forget it.

2) There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Simple’ Organism

Mycoplasma pneumoniae, has only 1/5 the number of genes as E Coli the single celled bacterium which is the most frequently studied.

“What may be the most thorough study ever of a single organism has produced a beta code for life’s essential subroutines, and shown that even the simplest creatures are more complex than scientists suspected.

The analysis combined information about gene regulation, protein production and cell structure in Mycoplasma pneumoniae, one of the simplest self-sustaining microbes.” Wired Magazine.

In evolutionary theory, single cells were supposed to have arisen by chance and this simple life would lead to more complex life through a process of evolution. The problem for evolutionists/materialists is; even the simplest single cells are incredibly complex. How could such complex cells assemble themselves spontaneously? Obviously, they could not have.

3) Octopus Fossils, Allegedly 95 Million Years Old? Who Gets the Surprise-Evolutionists or Bible Believers?

Whenever one hears about ants or bees or spiders or wasps etc. being found in amber, which are supposedly millions of years old, take note; they are clearly recognizable as; ants, bees, spiders or wasps, no matter how old science claims that they are.

Each of these discoveries are brought to the public in isolation; but the consistent pattern in the discovery of “millions of years old” fossils or of preserved creatures is that they have not changed. Even minute changes that science might point to as showing “evolution” over time can be accounted for by the genetic variation inherent in species.

So the question is; when is this supposed “evolution” occurring?

Recently, scientists discovered octopus fossils which were supposedly 95 million years old from the Cretaceous. If you’re an evolutionist, you were surprised by what was found; they were “virtually identical” to “modern” octopi. If you are a Bible believer, this is exactly what you expected.

Ironically, the San Francisco Examiner placed this story at Number 3 on their own list of 2009 science stories because of the rareness of the discovery itself;

“What is truly astonishing to the scientists is how similar these ancient creatures are to their modern-day counterparts. Dirk Fuchs, lead author on the study stated, “These things are 95 million years old, yet one of the fossils is almost indistinguishable from living species.” [EurekAlert]

Far and away, the best head in the sand, evolution quote of all however comes from Science Daily;

“This [lack of evolution] provides important evolutionary information.”

He who has an ear let him hear! Matt 11:15

4) Authenticated Human Footprint Overlaid by Dinosaur Print Found on Limestone Block

A Cretaceous Limestone block contains a human footprint overlaid with a dinosaur print.

“In early July, 2000 Alvis Delk, assisted by James Bishop (both of Stephenville, Texas), was working in the Cretaceous limestone on the McFall property at the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas and discovered a pristine human footprint intruded by a dinosaur footprint.

This discovery was made in the vicinity of McFall I and II Sites where the Creation Evidence Museum team has excavated since the Spring of 1982. The eleven-inch human footprint matches seven other such footprints of the same dimensions in the “Sir George Series”, named in honor of His Excellency Governor General Ratu Sir George Cacobau of Fiji.

Scientific Verification of Footprint Authenticity: The fossil was transported to a professional laboratory where 800 X-rays were performed in a CT Scan procedure. Laboratory technicians verified compression and distribution features clearly seen in both prints, human and dinosaur. This removes any possibility that the prints were carved or altered.” … CREATION EVIDENCE MUSEUM…..
s8intcom source:

5) Everything You Know About Natural Selection Is Wrong
From: CreationEvolutionHeadlines.com

“Oct 16, 2009 — It’s called “a fresh theoretical framework” but it undermines the popular conception of natural selection. It’s called a “dense and deep work on the foundations of evolutionary biology” but it criticizes as simplistic and false the ideas of Richard Dawkins, one of the most outspoken proponents of natural selection as “the greatest show on earth.”

It produces a new scheme for how natural selection works, but raises more questions than it answers. What is it? It’s a new book by Harvard philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford, 2009), reviewed mostly positively by Jay Odenbaugh in Science.

Odenbaugh is in the philosophy department of Lewis and Clark College, Oregon. Get ready to jettison your “classical” concepts of fitness, selection and reproductive success. Unload your simplistic ideas of gene selection, individual selection and group selection. Prepare to see Richard Dawkins demoted from his status as a leading spokesman for modern Darwinism. In his first paragraph, Odenbaugh clears the deck to get ready for the “fresh” ideas of Godfrey-Smith:

“Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection is a dense and deep work on the foundations of evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biologists tell us that evolution by natural selection occurs when a few ingredients are present—specifically, when there is variation with respect to a trait, those variants differ in the numbers of offspring produced, and this variation is heritable to some degree.

Unfortunately, as Godfrey-Smith argues, this recipe is far too simple, and even more complicated versions such as the replicator approach offered by Richard Dawkins suffer serious flaws.

This “classical recipe,” for example, ignores the fact that for some organisms numbers of offspring don’t necessarily determine reproductive success (“fitness”) whereas rates of population growth, age structure, or variation in expected numbers of offspring do.

Likewise, natural selection and patterns of heredity can “cancel” each other out, leaving no evolutionary change. The concept of Dawkins’s replicators—those entities that interact with like entities and of which copies are made—presupposes that there can be no reproduction without replication, which is false when we have continuously varying traits evolving by natural selection.

Thus, our standard models for understanding what evolution by natural selection is are just too simple. “” Jay Odenbaugh in Science

Source: David Coppedge’s Creation-Evolution Headlines

6) A Third of Dinosaur Species Never Existed?

“That’s because young dinosaurs didn’t look like Mini-Me versions of their parents, according to new analyses by paleontologists Mark Goodwin, University of California, Berkeley, and Jack Horner, of Montana State University.

Instead, like birds and some other living animals, the juveniles went through dramatic physical changes during adulthood.

This means many fossils of young dinosaurs, including T. rex relatives, have been misidentified as unique species, the researchers argue. “ National Geographic News, Oct. 9, 2009

This combined with the news that scientists had overestimated the size of dinosaurs by as much as 50% (Dinosaurs Shed a Few Tons in Science Makeover)shows that certain scientists need to show a little more humility whilst pontificating about the “paleontological past” and—fewer dinosaurs needed for Noah’s Ark!

7) Dinosaur Proteins, Cells and Blood Vessels Recovered from Bracyhlophosaurus

Two years ago, when paleontologist Mary Schweitzer claimed to have obtained blood cells and collagen protein from the thigh bones of a fossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex, she got nothing but grief.
Paleontologists didn’t want to hear that living tissue had been found on a creature they claimed had lived and died more than 65 million years ago. They have in large measure refused to believe or accept that she had found living tissue.

Creationists on the other hand, were happy to accept that she had found living tissue, but rightly pointed out that it was a strong indication that this dinosaur had lived much more recently than science claimed. In fact, Christians rather expected that living tissue might be found on dinosaur remains.

This of course upset the evolutionists even more and did little for her credibility with her fellow paleontologists.

“Last year, one group reinterpreted the so-called soft tissues as nothing more than bacterial biofilms, “cities” of bacteria not unlike the plaque on your teeth or slime on moist rocks. ”

If Schweitzer keeps this up she might end up like Virginia Steen-McIntyre, who also gave them what they didn’t want. That’s because Schweitzer has done it again. This time she claims to have found living tissue in the bones of a dinosaur more than 80,000,000 years old.

We say, as long as we’re dealing with evolutionary “monopoly years”, why not living tissue a billion years old? And we say along with her fellow paleontologists; there’s no way that living tissue could survive that long in fossilized remains”…
Source:

#8) “So We Make Up Stories” About Human Evolution

“Dr. Richard Lewontin is the Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Harvard University Press describes him as one of their “most brilliant evolutionary biologists.” A Harvard professor since 1973, he has impeccable academic credentials, and has gained worldwide notoriety for authoring several books, including The Triple Helix, The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, and Biology as Ideology.

During the week of February 14-18, Dr. Lewontin was invited to speak at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting held in Boston, Massachusetts. Michale Balter, writing for Science magazine, reported briefly on Lewontin’s comments that caused quite a stir in the evolutionary community.

Balter titled his article “How Human Intelligence Evolved—Is It Science or ‘Paleofantasy’?” (2008). In the first paragraph, Balter quipped that Lewontin really “knows how to grab an audience’s attention.”

What did Lewontin say that was so noteworthy and attention-grabbing? Lewontin “led off a session titled ‘The Mind of a Toolmaker’ by announcing that scientists know next to nothing about how humans got so smart.

‘We are missing the fossil record of human cognition,’ Lewontin said at the meeting. ‘So we make up stories’” (Balter, 2008, emp. added). While Balter spent the rest of his article scrambling to show that Lewontin’s conclusions are not recognized by all in the scientific community, Lewontin’s devastating blow to evolution’s long-cherished scenario of human development could not be papered over so easily”… by Kyle Butt, M.A. Apologetic’s Press

9) The Copernican Gambit

In this cosmic game of chess, which has been going on at least from the time of the scientific revolution, there have been moves and countermoves on the part of Theists and Materialists with respect to the origin of the universe.

We live in a universe fine tuned for life. This knowledge grudgingly comes from science, not from believers, even though it is what we would expect. Science is stuck on its side of the chessboard throwing out weird defenses like dark matter and dark energy which are needed to make big bang work.

This dark matter and energy which supposedly accounts for 95% of matter and energy can’t be seen, tested or measured. This kind of thing, along with superstring theory, which also can’t be falsified or tested, is making it difficult for the well read Materialist to be intellectually fulfilled.

“But now, scientists “Blake Temple and Joel Smoller, mathematicians at the University of California and the University of Michigan, believe they have come up with a whole new set of calculations that allow for all the sums to add up without the need for this controversial substance.” ..Telegraph.co.uk

At the last moment, a new strategy; the Copernican Gambit; (our name) a possible way to fix the big bang theory and to free materialists from the pressure of defending a theory that only accounts for 4% to 5% of observations. Can materialistic creation be saved?

‘The new research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, is likely to be equally controversial as the work it purports to challenge especially as it relies on our galaxy being at the centre of the Universe”…. Telegraph.co.uk

The Copernican principle is the presumption that there is nothing special about our place in space and time; neither us humans nor our planet. That principle moved earth and man out of the center of the universe (as Genesis seems to place us) and makes the earth just another lonely planet circling a star. This theory would relieve science of the need to invent and sustain its mystical darks but would place earth and man squarely back into the center of the universe.

“Just when we thought we were out, (of the center) they pulled us back in”!

It probably should be called the “Reverse Copernican Gambit”.
Check—mate?
Orginal s8int.com treatment here

10)Climategate: Global Warming Might Not be Man Made-But the Data May Be

The great climate change science scandal. Thousands of leaked e-mails have
revealed the unwillingness of climate change scientists to engage in a proper debate with the sceptics who doubt global warming. Thus, a little of the “Inconvenient Truth” leaked out.

The emails indicate that they have hidden, obscured and even deleted data contrary to the global warming case. They have worked to deny skeptics the right to publish dissent in scientific journals and have created statistical ‘tricks” to make charts appear to show what they want them to show.

Believers should along with everyone else do everything they can to take care of our planet. Believers do believe that the world will end with “fervent heat” but that the cause will be God—not man.

More Here

11) Mammoth, Giant Sloth and the Whale Fossils found ‘Together” at Thomas Jefferson Law School Construction Site

How does science account for the discovery of the fossils of giant land and ocean creatures together in such close proximity? Fossils are rare because the conditions necessary for their formation are thought to be rare.

What calamity could account for the simultaneous death, instant burial and preservation of these giant sea and land creatures?

Believers should have little trouble conceiving of just such a scenario. Consult the book of Genesis.

Orginal s8int.com post: “This Weak in Fossils”

12) Poll Reveals Public Doubts over Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

Belief in creationism is widespread in Britain, according to a new survey.
By Jonathan Wynne-Jones, Religious Affairs Correspondent
Telegraph UK 31 Jan 2009

“This year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species.

More than half of the public believe that the theory of evolution cannot explain the full complexity of life on Earth, and a “designer” must have lent a hand, the findings suggest. And one in three believe that God created the world within the past 10,000 years. ” … Jonathan Wynne-Jones

Orginal Post

This was our own subjective list of the Top Science Stories of 2009 for Christians. I’m sure that our list missed some important news. What do you think?

To comment, send an email to s8intcom@comcast.net and we’ll post here for you.

by Wal Thornhill, Holoscience
December 23, 2009

The Global Warming circus in Copenhagen was politics driven by a consensus that, by definition, has nothing to do with science. The apocalyptic nonsense that opened the meeting highlighted that fact. How many who attended or demonstrated at the meeting actually understand the (disputed) scientific grounds for the hysteria?

Meanwhile, leading science journals allow skeptics of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) to be labelled “deniers” and refuse them the right of reply. It is doctrinaire denouncement, not science. It is the journal editors who are denying the scientific method by censoring debate. It is they who are peddling ideology.

Despite the glossy media image, modern science is a mess. When the fundamental concepts are false, technological progress merely provides science with a more efficient means for going backwards. At the same time, government and corporate funding promotes the rampant disease of specialism and fosters politicization of science with the inevitable warring factions and religious fervor.

“Science has become religion! ..although religion may have borrowed some of the jargon of science, science, more importantly, has adopted the methods of religion. This is the worst of both worlds.” —Halton Arp

There have been several warm climatic periods documented in history that had nothing to do with human activity. There seems to be evidence that the Earth has actually been cooling since 2001, in line with reduced solar activity. So it would be more realistic to consider climate change as a normal phenomenon and to plan accordingly because despite all of the hoopla in the media, modern science is founded on surprising ignorance. An iconoclastic view suggests the following:

— cosmologists have been misled by theoretical physicists who don’t understand gravity, which forms the basis of the big bang theory. Imaginary ‘dark matter,’ ‘dark energy,’ and black holes have been added to make models of galaxies and star birth appear to work. When all else fails, mysterious magnetic fields are invoked. The bottom line is that cosmologists presently have no real understanding of the universe;

— astrophysicists don’t understand stars because they steadfastly ignore plasma discharge phenomena;

— particle physicists don’t understand matter or its resonant electrical interactions. They prefer to invent imaginary particles;

— geologists have been misled by astronomers about Earth’s history;

— biologists have had no practical help from theoretical physicists so they don’t understand what might constitute the ‘mind-body connection’ or ‘the spark of life;’

— and climate scientists have been misled by astronomers and astrophysicists so they have no real concept of recent Earth history in the solar system and they don’t understand the real source of lightning and the electrical input to weather systems. For example, the major city in northern Australia, Darwin, was utterly destroyed in tropical cyclone ‘Tracy’ in 1974.

The catastrophe was described in part, “At 3am, the eye of the cyclone passed over Darwin, bringing an eerie stillness. There was a strange light, a diffuse lightning, like St. Elmo’s fire.” There was no solar energy being supplied to the 150km per hour winds at 3 in the morning. “A diffuse lightning” is an apt description of the slow electrical discharge (distinct from impulsive lightning) that drives all rotary storms and influences weather patterns. That is why the electrically hyperactive gas giant planets have overwhelmingly violent storms while receiving very little solar energy.

Yet with these unacknowledged shortcomings we have bookshelves filled with textbooks, science journals and PhD theses, mostly unread, that would stretch to the Moon, fostering the impression that we understand most things. And the public is assailed with documentaries that breathlessly deliver and repeat fashionable science fiction as fact. How can this be?

Science has left its classical and philosophical roots, rather like surrealist art departed from realism. The analogy is fitting. It is demonstrated by the fondness for expressing theoretical models in artists impressions, computer animations and aesthetic terms. The artist/philosopher Miles Mathis is of the opinion that “ Science has become just like Modern Art. The contemporary artist and the contemporary physicist look at the world in much the same way. The past means nothing. They gravitate to novelty as the ultimate distinction, in and of itself. They do this because novelty is the surest guarantee of recognition.”

So why does the media not have science critics alongside art critics? Has science become sacrosanct? Bluntly, the answer is yes. No science reporter wants to have the portcullises lowered at the academic bastions.

Happily, the Internet allows the curious to circumvent such censorship.

Click Here to Read the Remainder of this Article by Wal Thorn at Holoscience

By Jes Alexander on December 9, 2009
(Herald de Paris)

WASHINGTON, DC (Herald de Paris) - EXCLUSIVE - Researchers have revealed the first images from the Caribbean sea floor of what they believe are the archaeological remains of an ancient civilization.

Guarding the location’s coordinates carefully, the project’s leader, who wishes to remain anonymous at this time, says the city could be thousands of years old; possibly even pre-dating the ancient Egyptian pyramids, at Giza.

The site was found using advanced satellite imagery, and is not in any way associated with the alleged site found by Russian explorers near Cuba in 2001, at a depth of 2300 feet.

“To be seen on satellite, our site is much shallower.” The team is currently seeking funding to mount an expedition to confirm and explore what appears to be a vast underwater city.

“You have to be careful working with satellite images in such a location,” the project’s principle researcher said, “The digital matrix sometimes misinterprets its data, and shows ruins as solid masses. The thing is, we’ve found structure - what appears to be a tall, narrow pyramid; large platform structures with small buildings on them; we’ve even found standing parallel post and beam construction in the rubble of what appears to be a fallen building.

You can’t have post and beam without human involvement.”

Asked if this city is the legendary city of Atlantis, the researchers immediately said no. “The romanticized ideal of Atlantis probably never existed, nor will anyone ever strap on a SCUBA tank, jump in the water, and find a city gateway that says, ‘Welcome to Atlantis.’ However, we do believe that this city may have been one of many cities of an advanced, seafaring, trade-based civilization, which may have been visited by their Eurocentric counterparts.”

It is unknown at this time how the city came to be on the sea floor, and not on dry land. “We have several theories.”

The team hopes to conduct a massive mapping and research expedition, to learn as much as possible about who these people were, before turning the site over to the Caribbean island’s home government.

“Whatever we’ve found does not belong to us,” the project’s leader said, “It belongs to the people of this island, and to the world at-large. If any pieces are brought to the surface, they belong in the hands of a museum.”

The project team asks that for more information, or to find out how to help fund their research, please contact the Herald de Paris’ publisher, Jes Alexander, at a specially set-up telephone number: 415-738-7811.

Original Source with Additional Photos

See also: Underwater City Off Cuba 1/2 Mile Down–2001

by Chris Parker, Copyright 2009

Isaiah 30:6 (New King James Version)
The burden against the beasts of the South. Through a land of trouble and anguish, From which came the lioness and lion, The viper and fiery flying serpent….

One might think that the continent of Africa would be the repository of animal fossils of all types but the number of pterosaur fossils discovered there have been few and far between. I say this with the knowledge that many locations in modern day Africa have been the scene of pterosaur-like sightings.

In addition, the ancient art of Western Africa and the coast of Eastern Africa has featured a number of pterosaur like creatures -as we shall see.

In 2005, a particularly fine pterosaur fossil was discovered by paleontologists in the Sahara.

PHOTO 1, Top Left. Senufo. Medicine container/statue. Note the featherless head, the strong legs. This reptilian appearing creature has captured what appears to be a monkey in its beak.
PHOTO 2, RIGHT. The same piece compared with a model of the fossil African pterosaur discovered in the Sahara in 2005 on the left and another type of long-billed pterosaur shown on the right for comparison.

Click either photo to see an enlargement

Pterosaur Fossils in Africa
“Giant flying reptile lands on Chicago’s West Side
Paleontologists discover pterosaur fossils in the Sahara
© University of Chicago

A new species of pterosaur with a 16-foot wingspan has been discovered in the southern Sahara by a team led by University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno.

“This find puts African pterosaurs on the map,” said Sereno, who is also an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society.

Previous finds of these winged reptiles in Africa had been limited to individual bones or teeth. The 110-million-year-old fossils include most of one wing and several slender teeth from its over-sized jaws.

PHOTO 3,4 & 5 Senufo. The following three photographs feature an African mask which contrives to show two different types of pterosaurs, one upon another. The mask is shown entire in this intial photograph and then each of the two creatures are compared to pterosaur types (dimorphodon top, Campylognathoides and similar below) in separate photos. Click either photo to see an Enlargement.

“To find a wing composed of a string of paper-thin bones in a river deposit next to the sturdy bones of dinosaurs is a remarkable feat of preservation,” Sereno said. The bones and teeth were found in Cretaceous-age rocks in Niger that were deposited by ancient rivers…”

It might be instructive at this point to examine just what types of pterosaur fossils have been found on the continent of Africa especially because in a few paragraphs we will attempt to match several pieces of ancient art with certain known pterosaur types as potential identifications.

“Africa shows a great potential for pterosaur material due to the extensive outcrops in several areas. However, pterosaur remains have been found only in nine African countries (Kellner et al. 2007) and, prior to 1997, just postcranial material had been reported (Reck 1931, Galton 1980, Mader and Kellner 1999, Wellnhofer and Buffetaut 1999).

Recently new deposits were found with associated bones, including a partial wing from Lebanon (Dalla Vecchia et al. 2001) and a sequence of five cervical vertebrae from Morocco (Pereda-Super-biola et al. 2003). The red beds of Albian Cenomanian age from Morocco and Late Jurassic Tendaguru beds, located approximately 75 km northwest of Lindi, Tanzania (Maier 1997), are the most potential deposits in providing isolated remains up to now (Kellner and Mader 1997, Wellnhofer and Buffetaut 1999, Mader and Kellner 1999).

Regarding Tendaguru beds, four species were first established by the pioneer studies of Reck (1931): “Rhamphorhynchus” tendagurensis (based on radius and ulna), “Pterodactylus” maximus (based on a comparatively large ulna), “Pterodactylus” brancai (based on a tibiotarsus, fibula and the first phalanx of the wing finger), and “Pterodactylus” arningi (based on the first phalanx of the wing finger). Later, Galton (1980) reviewed the tibiotarsus from “Pterodactylus” brancai and reclassified it as “Dsungaripterus brancai” (Dsungaripteridae).

However, all those specimens are too fragmentary or incomplete for any determination at a species level, being regarded as nomina dubia by Unwin and Heinrich (1999). These authors also described a new taxon (Tendaguripterus recki) based on a short section of a mandibular symphysis.”….
On two pterosaur humeri from the Tendaguru beds (Upper Jurassic, Tanzania) Fabiana R. Costa; Alexander W.A. Kellner

PHOTO 6 & 7 Dan Tribe. Astriddahl.com. “This piece is a Zoomorphic representation of a story or fable involving a crocodile, bird and a snake.” Note the cape-like wings and strong legs. Here we show the “bird figure” in comparison with certain pterosaurs (Photo 7). This “bird” has teeth–and birds do not have them. Click either photo to see an Enlargement.

“Ancient” Pterosaur Sightings

“Though dragons have completely dropped out of all modern works on natural history, they were still retained and regarded as quite orthodox until a little before the time of Cuvier;…For instance, Pigafetta, in a report of the kingdom of Congo (The Harleian Collections of Travels, vol. ii, 1745, p. 457.) ‘gathered out of the discourses of Mr. E. Lopes, a Portuguese,’ speaking of the province of Bemba, which he defines as ‘on the sea coast from the river Ambrize, until the river Coanza towards the south,’ says of serpents,

There are also certain other creatures which, being as big as rams, have wings like dragons, with long tails, and long chaps, and divers rows of teeth, and feed upon raw flesh. Their colour is blue and green, their skin painted like scales, and they have two feet but no more.

‘The Pagan Negroes used to worship them as gods, and to this day you may see divers of them that are kept for a marvel. And because they are very rare, the chief lords there curiously preserve them, and suffer the people to worship them, which tendeth greatly to their profits by reason of the gifts and oblations which the people offer unto them.’

And John Barbot, Agent-General of the Royal Company of Africa, in his description of the coasts of South Guinea, (Churchill, Collections of Voyages, 1746, p. 213.) says: ‘Some blacks assuring me that…there are winged serpents or dragons having a forked tail and a prodigious wide mouth, full of sharp teeth, extremely mischievous to mankind, and more particularly to small children.’” Gould, Charles, Mythical Monsters, 1886

PHOTO 8 Senufo, Senjen bird figures. Pteros on the wing? Photo 9. Senjen. More pteros on the wing. Note the reptilian character (central bony and raised skull ridge) and the teeth of these flying creatures in the Enlarged photo. Click either photo to see an Enlargement.

It should be noted that the two earlier books quoted, from 1745 and 1746, accurately describe pterosaurs many years before their “discovery” by science which first described them in 1784 and first suggested that they might fly in 1801.

“Modern” Pterosaur Sightings

Eyewitness continue up to present day all over Africa. One of the most well known of them is of creature known as the Kongamato.

“The Kongamato (”breaker of boats”) is a reported pterosaur-like creature from the border area of Zambia, Angola and Congo. Suggested identities include a modern-day Rhamphorhynchus, a misidentified bird (such as the very large and peculiar Saddle-billed Stork), or a giant bat.

Frank Melland, in his 1923 book In Witchbound Africa, describes it as living along certain rivers, and very dangerous, often attacking small boats. It was red, with a wingspan of 4 to 7 feet. Members of the local Kaonde tribe identified it as a pterodactyl after being shown a picture of one from Melland’s book collection.

In 1956 an engineer, J.P.F. Brown, allegedly saw the creature at Fort Rosebery near Lake Bangweulu in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). It was about 6:00 p.m. when he saw two creatures flying slowly and silently directly overhead. He observed that they looked prehistoric.

He estimated a wingspan of about 3 to 3 1/2 feet (1 meter) and a beak-to-tail length of about 4 1/2 feet (1.5 meters). It reportedly had a long thin tail, and a narrow head which he likened to an elongated snout of a dog.

PHOTO 10 The auction house calls this creature a monster-and so it is. Here we’ve shown it in comparison to one of the tapejara crested pterosaurs. Note the reptilain character, the wing shape, the very unusual mouth treatment, the teeth? It is obviously some type of crested pterosaur. If you go back and look at Photo 8, it is appears that they represent the same type of pterosaur. Click either photo to see an Enlargement.

The following year, at a hospital at Fort Rosebery, a patient came in with a severe wound in his chest, claiming that a large bird had attacked him in the Bangweulu swamps. When asked to draw the bird, he allegedly drew a creature resembling a pterosaur. This drawing does not appear to have survived to the present.

It is curious to note that the area concerned is advertised as a prime birdwatching site, but this large, flying animal seems not to have been reported by any visiting birdwatchers.

There are reports of similar creatures (no details given) from Angola, Zimbabwe, Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, Tanzania and Kenya”…..wikipedia

Ancient African Art and the Senufo and Dan Peoples of West Africa

BONUS PHOTO Cheeky! Compare mouths of these two types of crested pteros. Flip pteros mouth on the right from vertical to horizontal in your mind’s eye…. Click either photo to see an Enlargement.

Ancient African artists have occasionally portrayed creatures very much like pterosaurs. As we look at these pieces of African art, keep in mind that there are many types of pterosaurs and that modern artists might have a less developed idea of what these creatures looked like than the ancient artists who might have actually seen them fly.

Birds do not have teeth. Many pterosaurs do have teeth and of course do not have feathers. The toes on the feet of many pterosaurs are “parallel” and thus their feet and footprints are more human like in shape than are those of the typical bird.

Pterosaurs are thought to have been reptilian rather than “bird like” and of course their wings are more “bat like” than like those of birds. Keep those items in mind as you examine these pieces.

PHOTO 11 Senufo mask. PHOTO 12 Compared with pterodactylus kochi. Click Here to Read That Article
Senufo Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire) The Senufo are made up of a number of diverse subgroups who migrated into their current location from the north during the 15th and 16th centuries.

Unlike their neighbors to the north they have remained relatively sheltered from intrusive cultures including the Songhai and Hausa. Although they have certainly borrowed knowledge from their neighbors, they have not had to fear constant attacks and social upheaval.

All Senufo art is made by specialized artisans, which may diminish regional stylistic differences. Figures representing the ancestors are common, as are brass miniatures and small statues, which are used in divination. There are several types of masks used by the Poro society…..Art &Life in Africa

Dan Peoples Location: Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire. Dan sculptors mainly produce masks which deal with virtually every element in Dan society, including education, competition, war, peace, social regulation, and of course, entertainment. They also produce stylized wooden spoons and intricate game boards used for mancala, a common game of “count and capture”.

Ancient Nigerian Art

PHOTO 13: Antique art from Nigeria, from the book; “L’Oiseau Dans Ll’arte de Afrique L’Oues”, (Birds in the art of West Africa). PHOTO 14 The Nigerian piece compared with the fossil skulls of pterosaurs and with ancient drawing from Kalimantan.
“Nigeria’s art dates back a long time, over 2000 years by some archeological beliefs. The Nok Terracotta and the Igbo Ukwu are examples of some excavations that have been discovered by archeologists to indicate a highly developed artistic and technologically based civilization.

Some of the really old art found shows very much detail and very distinctive features suggesting technological skills way back when. The Nok art for instance, has many images made from iron-smelting. The Igbo artifacts show skills in bronze and copper utensils as well as sacred objects.

The Ife bronze heads are said to represent some of the past Ooni’s (rulers) of Ife.

The Benin have a lot of ancient artwork that has become famous over different parts of the world, and they can be seen in museums around the world. Most Benin art is made from bronze, though there is art made of other materials.” MotherlandNigeria.com

See Also: Don’t Tell Him He’s Not a Chicken, We need the Eggs

Pteranodon on a Stick: Egyptian “Was” Scepter Creature No Mystery Without Darwinian History

Did you know that all FBI agents are called “Special Agents”? I wanted to be a Special Agent back in the days of Efrem Zimbalist Jr.’s FBI, (when I was a kid), but I thought that being “Special” would mean that I was in charge of the unit.

In the last couple of months I occasionally catch a show on cable called “Criminal Minds”. This show follows profilers from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico, Virginia as they track “unsubs” across the U.S. This show is no Law and Order but is always better than whatever else is on. I initially kept watching the first show because unlike even Law and Order they were after unsubs rather than “perps” or suspects. (Unidentified Subject). Anyone can track a mere suspect.

One thing that bugs me about this show is how much they can deduce from the minutest clue.

“The unsub is extremely intelligent, highly educated, left handed, drives a domestic automobile and likes fast food. He is probably left handed, parts his hair on the right, and wears a van dyke beard”, one special agent might say.

Another one, stroking his chin thoughtfully might say with a sudden insight; the unsub is a woman!

The point is their deductive capabilities would put Sherlock Holmes to shame. In fact, there is only one group of people in the entire world who exceed them in deductive capability; Paleontologists!

By their own admittance, fossil evidence is “spotty”. They have therefore apparently developed the ability to weave fantastic, just so evolution stories from wispy evidence, supposition, instant coffee and a commitment to evolutionary theory. This is how they “knew” that the fossil “Ida” was “going to change everything”. (Ida is already dead-again).

When they discovered fossilized octopi allegedly 95 million years old which are identical to “modern” octopi they avowed that the unsub can tell us much about evolution.

In the following story, a paleontologist makes use of this same kind of “deduction” to conclude from one specimen that “dinosaur lineages diverged early”. This fossil has been named Tawa, presumably because cute names make this kind of story more palatable and marketable to the public. Still, even if you assumed evolution to be true, how could a scientist arrive at any conclusions based upon a single, partial fossil?

Wouldn’t there have been false starts and evolutionary lines that died out or which turned out to be dead ends?

Even Criminal Minds is careful not to draw too much from “spotty evidence”, but to be fair to the evolutionists, evidence is scarce because the theory of evolution is untrue…….s8int.com

Bones Show Early Divergence of Dinosaur Lineage
Thanks to , Scott S.
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
Published: December 10, 2009, NYT

The early evolution of dinosaurs, in the late Triassic period, is fuzzy, to say the least. Paleontologists know that the first dinosaurs appeared about 230 million years ago, but fossil evidence is so spotty that it is unclear where and when the major lineages — theropods, sauropods and ornithischians — began to diverge.

Some excellent 215-million-year-old fossils unearthed in Ghost Ranch, in northern New Mexico, are helping to clarify things. The bones, of a theropod that the discoverers have named Tawa hallae, support the idea that the lineages diverged early on in the part of the supercontinent Pangea that is now South America.

“What Tawa does is it helps signify the relationships at the base of dinosauria,” said Sterling J. Nesbitt, a University of Texas researcher and lead author of a paper in Science describing the find. Dr. Nesbitt worked on the fossils while at the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University.

Like later theropods, Tawa walked on two legs and had sharp teeth for tearing apart its food: other animals. The most complete specimen, a juvenile, was about six feet long.

Tawa shares some features with an early South American dinosaur, Herrerasaurus, that had been a source of confusion for paleontologists. Tawa, in effect, shows that Herrerasaurus was a theropod. Because Herrerasaurus was found near some early sauropods and ornithischians, the new finding strongly suggests that all three main lineages diverged early on.

The New Mexico fossil beds included several other theropods that the scientists found were more closely related to different groups of South American theropods than to each other. That suggests theropods diverged and radiated from South America. And if theropods had that dispersal pattern, the findings suggest, the other lineages probably did, too.

Wired Science
Brandon Keim

“What may be the most thorough study ever of a single organism has produced a beta code for life’s essential subroutines, and shown that even the simplest creatures are more complex than scientists suspected.

The analysis combined information about gene regulation, protein production and cell structure in Mycoplasma pneumoniae, one of the simplest self-sustaining microbes.

…..M. pneumoniae has just one-fifth as many genes as E. coli, the traditional single-cell model organism. That makes it an ideal target for systems biologists who want to understand how cells function.

……In the new studies, German and Spanish researchers documented almost every single protein used by M. pneumoniae. They looked up the known functions of each of its genes, and made recordings of gene activity. They documented all the chemical reactions inside M. pneumoniae and mapped its physical structure. Then they put all this together.

What emerged was a picture of surprising complexity. M. pneumoniae needs just eight gene “switches” to control its molecular activities, compared to 50 in E. coli — a number so low that it implies other, as-yet-unknown regulatory processes. Groups of genes thought to work in unison did so only intermittently. At other times they worked in isolation, or in unexpected configurations.

…….In short, there was a lot going on in lowly, supposedly simple M. pneumoniae, and much of it is beyond the grasp of what’s now known about cell function.”
The Complete Article and Source, Here

from The Sunday Times November 29, 2009

Story 1
The great climate change science scandal
Leaked emails have revealed the unwillingness of climate change scientists to engage in a proper debate with the sceptics who doubt global warming

Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

The storm began with just four cryptic words. “A miracle has happened,” announced a contributor to Climate Audit, a website devoted to criticising the science of climate change.

“RC” said nothing more — but included a web link that took anyone who clicked on it to another site, Real Climate.

There, on the morning of November 17, they found a treasure trove: a thousand or so emails sent or received by Professor Phil Jones, director of the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

Jones is a key player in the science of climate change. His department’s databases on global temperature changes and its measurements have been crucial in building the case for global warming.

What those emails suggested, however, was that Jones and some colleagues may have become so convinced of their case that they crossed the line from objective research into active campaigning.

In one, Jones boasted of using statistical “tricks” to obliterate apparent declines in global temperature. In another he advocated deleting data rather than handing them to climate sceptics. And in a third he proposed organised boycotts of journals that had the temerity to publish papers that undermined the message.

It was a powerful and controversial mix — far too powerful for some. Real Climate is a website designed for scientists who share Jones’s belief in man-made climate change. Within hours the file had been stripped from the site.

Several hours later, however, it reappeared — this time on an obscure Russian server. Soon it had been copied to a host of other servers, first in Saudi Arabia and Turkey and then Europe and America.

What’s more, the anonymous poster was determined not to be stymied again. He or she posted comments on climate-sceptic blogs, detailing a dozen of the best emails and offering web links to the rest. Jones’s statistical tricks were now public property.

Steve McIntyre, a prominent climate sceptic, was amazed. “Words failed me,” he said. Another, Patrick Michaels, declared: “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.”

Inevitably, the affair became nicknamed Climategate. For the scientists, campaigners and politicians trying to rouse the world to action on climate change the revelations could hardly have come at a worse time. Next month global leaders will assemble in Copenhagen to seek limits on carbon emissions. The last thing they need is renewed doubts about the validity of the science.

The scandal has also had a huge personal and professional impact on the scientists. “These have been the worst few days of my professional life,” said Jones. He had to call on the police for protection after receiving anonymous phone calls and personal threats.

Why should a few emails sent to and from a single research scientist at a middle-ranking university have so much impact? And most importantly, what does it tell us about the quality of the research underlying the science of climate change?

THE hacking scandal is not an isolated event. Instead it is the latest round of a long-running battle over climate science that goes back to 1990.

That was when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the group of scientists that advises governments worldwide — published its first set of reports warning that the Earth faced deadly danger from climate change. A centrepiece of that report was a set of data showing how the temperature of the northern hemisphere was rising rapidly.

The problem was that the same figures showed that it had all happened before. The so-called medieval warm period of about 1,000 years ago saw Britain covered in vineyards and Viking farmers tending cows in Greenland. For any good scientist this raised a big question: was the recent warming linked to humans burning fossil fuels or was it part of a natural cycle?

The researchers set to work and in 1999 a group led by Professor Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, came up with new numbers showing that the medieval warm period was not so important after all.

Some bits of the Atlantic may have been warm for a while, but the records suggested that the Pacific had been rather chilly over the same period — so on average there was little change.

Plotted out, Mann’s data turned into the famous “hockey stick” graph. It showed northern hemisphere temperatures as staying flat for hundreds of years and then rising steeply from 1900 until now. The implication was that this rise would continue, with potentially deadly consequences for humanity.

That vision of continents being hit by droughts and floods while the Arctic melts away has turned a scientific debate into a highly emotional and political one. The language used by “warmists” and sceptics alike has become increasingly polarised.

George Monbiot, widely respected as a writer on green issues, has branded doubters “climate deniers”, a phrase uncomfortably close to holocaust denial. Sceptics, particularly in America, have suggested that scientists who believe in climate change are part of a global left-wing conspiracy to divert billions of dollars into green technology.

A more cogent criticism is that there has been a reluctance to acknowledge dissent on the question of climate science. Al Gore, the former US vice-president turned green campaigner, has described the climate debate as “settled”. Yet the science, say critics, has not been tested to the limit. This is why the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia is so significant.

Its researchers have built up records of how temperatures have changed over thousands of years. Perhaps the most important is the land and sea temperature record for the world since the mid-19th century. This is the database that shows the “unequivocal” rise of 0.8C over the last 157 years on which Mann’s hockey stick and much else in climate science depend.

Some critics believe that the unit’s findings need to be treated with more caution, because all the published data have been “corrected” — meaning they have been altered to compensate for possible anomalies in the way they were taken. Such changes are normal; what’s controversial is how they are done. This is compounded by the unwillingness of the unit to release the original raw data.

David Holland, an engineer from Northampton, is one of a number of sceptics who believe the unit has got this process wrong. When he submitted a request for the figures under freedom of information laws he was refused because it was “not in the public interest”.

Others who made similar requests were turned down because they were not academics, among them McIntyre, a Canadian who runs the Climate Audit website.

A genuine academic, Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Canada, also tried. He said: “I was rejected for an entirely different reason. The [unit] told me they had obtained the data under confidentiality agreements and so could not supply them. This was odd because they had already supplied some of them to other academics, but only those who support the idea of climate change.”

IT was against this background that the emails were leaked last week, reinforcing suspicions that scientific objectivity has been sacrificed. There is unease even among researchers who strongly support the idea that humans are changing the climate. Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said: “Over the last decade there has been a very political battle between the climate sceptics and activist scientists.

“It seems to me that the scientists have lost touch with what they were up to. They saw themselves as in a battle with the sceptics rather than advancing scientific knowledge.”

Professor Mike Hulme, a fellow researcher of Jones at the University of East Anglia and author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, said: “The attitudes revealed in the emails do not look good. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organisation within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.”

There could, however, be another reason why the unit rejected requests to see its data.

This weekend it emerged that the unit has thrown away much of the data. Tucked away on its website is this statement: “Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites … We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (ie, quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

If true, it is extraordinary. It means that the data on which a large part of the world’s understanding of climate change is based can never be revisited or checked. Pielke said: “Can this be serious? It is now impossible to create a new temperature index from scratch. [The unit] is basically saying, ‘Trust us’.”

WHERE does this leave the climate debate? While the overwhelming belief of scientists is that the world is getting warmer and that humanity is responsible, sceptical voices are increasing.

Lord Lawson, the Tory former chancellor, announced last week the creation of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank, to “bring reason, integrity and balance to a debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant”.

Lawson said: “Climate change is not being properly debated because all the political parties are on the same side, and there is an intolerance towards anybody who wants to debate it. It has turned climate change from being a political issue into a secular religion.”

The public are understandably confused. A recent poll showed that 41% accept as scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made, while 32% believe the link is unproven and 15% said the world is not warming.

This weekend many of Jones’s colleagues were standing by him. Tim Lenton, professor of earth system science at UEA, said: “We wouldn’t have anything like the understanding of climate change that we do were it not for the work of Phil Jones and his colleagues. They have spent decades putting together the historical temperature record and it is good work.”

The problem is that, after the past week, both sceptics and the public will require even more convincing of that.

STORY 2
Reposted from TBR.cc Investigate magazine’s breaking news forum:

New Zealand’s NIWA accused of CRU-style temperature faking

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century:

The caption to the photo on the NiWA site reads:

From NIWA’s web site — Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand, from 1853 to 2008 inclusive, based on between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from 1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual differences from the 1971 – 2000 average, the solid black line is a smoothed time series, and the dotted [straight] line is the linear trend over 1909 to 2008 (0.92°C/100 years).

But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result:

Gone is the relentless rising temperature trend, and instead there appears to have been a much smaller growth in warming, consistent with the warming up of the planet after the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850

Read the Rest of this Story Here

by Chris Parker, Copyright 2009

Painting, left: Grace, by Rhoda Nyberg, 1918. Click for larger version.

Dateline: Brenthurst, South Africa, Sept 5, 2009

“Chickens refusing to eat the maize they had been fed has led to the discovery that their feed had been genetically modified to include a well-known weed and insect killer.

Strilli Oppenheimer’s indigenous African chickens were refusing to eat the mealies in the chicken feed bought from a large supplier. Concerned that the birds may be ingesting genetically modified maize, she had the maize tested.

The results confirmed Oppenheimer’s initial suspicion — the maize had been genetically engineered to produce proteins that are toxic to certain insects and weeds.

About her chickens’ refusal to eat their maize, Oppenheimer said: “They’re smart””……By Dr. Mercola , Mercola.com,

An expert on genetically modified foods said that this was the first instance of which he was aware that chickens had refused to eat such food. The corn contained Bt1, which made it insect resistant as well as Roundup, which made it weed resistant.

Dateline: Cornell University, Nov. 19, 2009

The complex corn genome—coming in at a hearty two billion base pairs (compared with the human genome’s 2.9 billion base pairs)—has been mapped by more than 150 researchers, who worked for years to decipher the grain’s genetic code.

Photo:Varieties of Maize (corn). Click for larger view

….”Deep into the maize- Getting to the bottom of this staple’s DNA, however, was no small task. The corn genome actually has 12,000 more genes than humans do and manages to stuff them onto 10 chromosomes (as opposed to humans’ 23).

All of this data, and the repetitiveness of corn’s code, made the task a daunting one. The team used a combination of physical and optical mapping to arrive at the findings”…..Katherine Harmon, Scientific American

The article also noted; 1) over 200 genes were involved in simply increasing the size of maize and 2) that the wheat genome is even more complicated than that of maize (corn).

Smart Chickens and Dumb Clucks

Smart chickens and informed humans seem to be in agreement when it comes to genetically modified foods—they are potentially dangerous. There is a huge problem with this conclusion, however.
Science tells us that all the major cereals; corn, sorghum, oats, rice and wheat for example, were genetically engineered by prehistoric humans over a few thousand years, thousands of years ago.

They were somehow engineered by these ancient farmers from several inedible grasses into the life sustaining cereal grains that we eat today.

The point is, if what science says about the origins of these important cereal grains is true then the food that provides the basis of most diets around the world—are genetically modified foods and on an order undreamed about by the current crop of genetic modifiers.

“On the other hand, those Stone Age farmers who were fresh out of their caves and only just beginning to turn soil for the first time (as the “official” scenario goes), somehow managed to transform the wild grasses, grains, and cereals growing around them into their domesticated “cousins.” Is that possible? Only through a course in miracles.

Actually, it requires countless miracles within two large categories of miracles. The first was that the wild grasses and grains and cereals were useless to humans. The seeds and grains were maddeningly small, like pepper flakes or salt crystals, which put them beyond the grasping and handling capacity of human fingers.

They were also hard, like tiny nutshells, making it impossible to convert them to anything edible. Lastly, their chemistry was suited to nourishing animals, not humans.

So wild varieties were entirely too small, entirely too tough, and nutritionally inappropriate for humans. They needed to be greatly expanded in size, greatly softened in texture, and overhauled at the molecular level, which would be an imposing challenge for modern botanists, much less Neolithic farmers. “…Lloyd Pye,.. THE LITERAL CREATION OF MANKIND AT THE HANDS OF YOU-KNOW-WHAT”

So, what is it that smart chickens know that science doesn’t? If what science says is true, then smart chickens and smart humans complaining about the recent modifications to food crops would be akin to refusing to drive cars that had been mechanically modified by humans. Since cars were invented and modified over time by humans, why should one suddenly get worried and upset by the equivalent of a rear window washer blade?

Is it because smart chickens and aware humans; including scientists and the enviromentally aware seem to know intrinsically that there is something wrong with the official story?

How could “primitive” man set out to create nutritious, edible, efficient food that would continue to be inedible for hundreds or even thousands of years? How and why would they do it?

What did they eat in the mean time? Such a project would have been the biggest and most ambitious project in human history, dwarfing the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, the construction of the pyramids of Egypt and the Apollo program to place a man on the moon—and there would have had to have been separate projects each for wheat, corn, rice and barley!

Note that for corn, according to the latest research, they would have needed to manipulate 200 genes just to increase the size of the maize-never mind softening it and making it digestible for humans.

In an attempt to cement scientific opinion, “science” has been rather insistent that the parent source for maize is teosinte, an inedible grass that does not resemble maize. Not all scientists working in this area agree with that conclusion however and there are competing theories. Some scientists believe that they have evidence of corn appearing before teosinte.

Pennsylvania geneticist Nina V. Federoff states that “to get corn out of teosinte is so – you couldn’t get a grant to do that now, because it would sound so crazy. Somebody who did that today would get a Nobel Prize! If their lab didn’t get shut down by Greenpeace.”

Indeed, maize is, in origin, genetically modified food, which is at the centre of much controversy today. Still, our ancestors seem to not only have had no such social opposition, but more importantly, were able to pull this stunt off…Maize; from the Gods? …… PhilCoppens.com

Photo, right:”Wine, Worship, and Sacrifice: The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani was the inaugural exhibition at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. It features spectacular finds from four graves excavated at Vani, a major administrative and religious center of ancient Colchis (present-day Republic of Georgia) and the setting for the myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece. More than 100 objects from these graves, which date from the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., are on display.” NYU–

If this golden necklace is sporting corn stalks, it shows that this cereal crop was in Europe way ahead of the current scientific opinion. Click for larger view

Photo:From Gunnar Thompson Phd’s Press Release Re: Ancient Egyptian corn. Click to view larger version.

When Darwin formulated his evolution theory, he assumed that the single cell was very simple—something that one could imagine could possibly arise by chance. It turned out, that the single cell is more complex than any artifact of man.

When science formulated its theories concerning the origins of the major cereals, it was likewise assumed that the projects to turn an inedible grass into a major food crops were fairly straightforward and conceivable. In June of 2009, in an article by Thomas H. Maugh II, the Los Angeles times reported that sophisticated granaries were found near the Dead Sea which were 11,300 years old as science recons time.

This might have pushed the origin of domesticated crops back 1,300 years more and upset their carefully plotted just-so cereal history-so they claimed that the sophisticated storage facilities were built to store inedible, wild, barley 1,000 years before actual cereal domestication! Science will stretch and pull and ignore facts to fit its theories.

Recent scientific discoveries concerning the dna of plants like corn make the ‘created by ancestors” theory even more unpalatable—but no matter how unlikely science’s version of cereal origin is—they have no choice but to cling to it—or admit that they were created by God.

The Bible establishes the creation of domesticated plants in the beginning by God. Consequently, from the beginning all cultures would have had access to the various cereals. Science on the other hand says that the various cereal grains were domesticated by man in various parts of the world at various times over the last 5,000 to 10,000 years. In accordance with that, they have timelines and locations for the various grains.

Corn for example is supposed to have been first domesticated in South America and then spread to other parts of the world after being brought back to Europe by Columbus. Other scientists and researchers however have shown that corn existed in ancient Egypt, China, India and even old Europe way before Columbus landed on American shores.

Which is more diificult to believe; the random undirected evolution of living, breathing creatures or the directed creation of the most imortant food crops known to man by “primitive” ancestors over hundreds and thousands of years? Cluck, cluck, cluck….

Draft 2;Citations and links

Genetic Manipulation (Domestication) of Plants and Animals.

Corn Predates Teosinte?

Cracked Corn: Scientists Solve Maize’s Genetic Maze

Corn: Egyptian Queen beat Columbus—by 3000 Years!

Rice in China 4,000 Years Ago

Maize: food from the Gods?

Maize in Pre-Columbian China

Maize in Pre-Columbian India

Pre Columbian Maize North of the Old World Equator

Plant domestication: early and often

November 21, 2009
Richard Owen in Rome
Times Online Source

Photo: Artist impression of “face” on Shroud of Turin
The Shroud of Turin on Wikipedia

A Vatican scholar claims to have deciphered the “death certificate” imprinted on the Shroud of Turin, or Holy Shroud, a linen cloth revered by Christians and held by many to bear the image of the crucified Jesus.

Dr Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican secret archives, said “I think I have managed to read the burial certificate of Jesus the Nazarene, or Jesus of Nazareth.” She said that she had reconstructed it from fragments of Greek, Hebrew and Latin writing imprinted on the cloth together with the image of the crucified man.

The shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral and is to be put in display next spring, is regarded by many scholars as a medieval forgery. A 1988 carbon dating of a fragment of the cloth dated it to the Middle Ages.

However Dr Frale, who is to publish her findings in a new book, La Sindone di Gesu Nazareno (The Shroud of Jesus of Nazareth) said that the inscription provided “historical date consistent with the Gospels account”. The letters, barely visible to the naked eye, were first spotted during an examination of the shroud in 1978, and others have since come to light.

Some scholars have suggested that the writing is from a reliquary attached to the cloth in medieval times. But Dr Frale said that the text could not have been written by a medieval Christian because it did not refer to Jesus as Christ but as “the Nazarene”. This would have been “heretical” in the Middle Ages since it defined Jesus as “only a man” rather than the Son of God.

Like the image of the man himself the letters are in reverse and only make sense in negative photographs. Dr Frale told La Repubblica that under Jewish burial practices current at the time of Christ in a Roman colony such as Palestine, a body buried after a death sentence could only be returned to the family after a year in a common grave.

A death certificate was therefore glued to the burial shroud to identify it for later retrieval, and was usually stuck to the cloth around the face. This had apparently been done in the case of Jesus even though he was buried not in a common grave but in the tomb offered by Joseph of Arimathea.

Dr Frale said that many of the letters were missing, with Jesus for example referred to as “(I)esou(s) Nnazarennos” and only the “iber” of “Tiberiou” surviving. Her reconstruction, however, suggested that the certificate read:

“In the year 16 of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius Jesus the Nazarene, taken down in the early evening after having been condemned to death by a Roman judge because he was found guilty by a Hebrew authority, is hereby sent for burial with the obligation of being consigned to his family only after one full year”. It ends “signed by” but the signature has not survived.

Dr Frale said that the use of three languages was consistent with the polyglot nature of a community of Greek-speaking Jews in a Roman colony.

Best known for her studies of the Knights Templar, who she claims at one stage preserved the shroud, she said what she had deciphered was “the death sentence on a man called Jesus the Nazarene. If that man was also Christ the Son of God it is beyond my job to establish. I did not set out to demonstrate the truth of faith. I am a Catholic, but all my teachers have been atheists or agnostics, and the only believer among them was a Jew. I forced myself to work on this as I would have done on any other archaeological find.”

The Catholic Church has never either endorsed the Turin Shroud or rejected it as inauthentic. Pope John Paul II arranged for public showings in 1998 and 2000, saying: “The Shroud is an image of God’s love as well as of human sin.

The imprint left by the tortured body of the Crucified One, which attests to the tremendous human capacity for causing pain and death to one’s fellow man, stands as an icon of the suffering of the innocent in every age.” Pope Benedict XVI is to pray before the Shroud when it is put on show again next Spring in Turin.

Photo: Left and bottom, left left; Romanian, Neolithic zoomorphic head compared with artist representations of lambeosaurine dinosaurs (hadrosaurids). Click to enlarge.

Science tells us that dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago and that they reigned on earth for a period beginning 230 million year ago. Science believes that dinosaurs eventually evolved into birds.

The Word of God on the other hand claims that God created the universe including earth, its flora and fauna and man- in six days. Using the Bible’s history as a guide it has been calculated that the earth is less than 10,000 years old?

Which dinosaur view is correct? Dinosaur bones and fossils have been found together with other terrestrial vertebrates and invertebrates and vast fossil bone yards around the globe. A number of dinosaurs have been found with recoverable red blood cells, protein and or blood vessels which only the foolish would believe could have survived more than 65 million years.

Photo: Neolithic, “zoomorphic” ceramic vase from Romania. 5,000 B.C. Uploaded by Londonconstant-Flickr. Click to Enlarge.

Many dinosaur fossils have been found with their heads thrown, their mouths wide open and their tails curled toward their heads as if in agony and as if –they had drowned (Noah’s flood come to mind?).

Here at s8int.com, we thought that if the Biblical view was correct, that we should be able to find examples of these creatures that we now call dinosaurs in the art of ancient peoples. This is in fact what we have found. In the section of the site entitled Dinosaurs in Literature, History and Art, we catalog hundreds of examples.

The photo at the top of this post is of a “zoomorphic” ceramic from the Neolithic period, from Romania, Gumelni-Karanovo culture. It is estimated to have been fired in the 5th millennium B.C. or 5,000 years before Christ. ”

“The Gumelni–Karanovo culture is a chalcholithic (5th millennium) culture, extending along the Black Sea coast to central Bulgaria and into Thrace. The aggregate “Gumelnita-Karanovo VI-Kodjadermen” evolves out of the earlier Boian, Marita and Karanovo V cultures. It is supplanted by Cernavod? I in the early 4th millennium.” Wikipedia

These types of representations most likely would be identified by archeologists as a bird, a duck or as a “zoomorphic” (animal like) or perhaps as a mythical creature.

We note however that it bears a striking resemblance to the duck-billed dinosaurs which were among the creatures that science claims died out 65 million years ago. A number of dinosaurs have been found in Europe and in Romania including hadrosaurs or duck-billed dinosaurs. Here we compare the ancient ceramic depiction with a number of duck-billed dinosaurs.

“Hadrosaurids or duck-billed dinosaurs are members of the family Hadrosauridae, and include ornithopods such as Edmontosaurus and Parasaurolophus. They were common herbivores in the Upper Cretaceous Period of what are now Asia, Europe and North America. They are descendants of the Upper Jurassic/Lower Cretaceous iguanodontian dinosaurs and had similar body layout. They were ornithischians.

Hadrosaurids are divided into two subfamilies. The lambeosaurines (Lambeosaurinae) had hollow cranial crests or tubes, and were generally less bulky. The hadrosaurines (Hadrosaurinae) lacked hollow cranial crests (solid crests were present in some forms) and were generally larger.

The hadrosaurs are known as the duck-billed dinosaurs due to the similarity of their head to that of modern ducks. In some genera, most notably Anatotitan, the whole front of the skull was flat and broadened out to form a beak, ideal for clipping leaves and twigs from the forests of Asia, Europe and North America”. ..Wikepedia

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