» Home > In the News

Spinosaurs in the UK

1 June 2023
Biology, Catastrophism, Geology

At https://phys.org/news/2023-05-spinosaur-britain-multiple-species-roamed.html … analysis of spinosaur teeth at Southampton University are evidence of several distinct species of the creature. All the fossils were collected from Lower  Cretaceous rocks of the Sussex Weald. These are thought to bave been deposited around 140 to 125 million years ago, well prior to the Chicxulub asteroid strike  65 million years ago. Spinosaurs had crocodile like heads, and fed mainly on fish. There is a very useful map at the link, of the Lower Cretaceous geology. One to keep.

At https://phys.org/news/2023-05-paleontologists-elephant-graveyard-north-florida.html … and on the other side of the Atlantic, we have an elephant graveyard – in northern Florida. They were  gomphotheres – and they lived over 5 million years ago. They were found buried in sediments in or near a river. Or what is thought to have been a river. It might have been a wall of water that swept inland. Their bodies were dumped at a single location. As is their want, the palaeontologists suggest they repeatedly were swept up and buried at the same spot, over many years. Such is the way uniformitarian thinking goes.

The river no longer exists – but the graveyard does. The sediments were up to 8 feet in depth, consisting of sand and clays. Clay has an origin in water. Sand is very often associated with water. It is possible the creatures were transported to the graveyard, we are advised – presumably by water. The clay was compacted and often mixed with sand, which formed a sort of layer cake. The question is, were  the layers laid down at different times or are they the product of turbulent water, with sand and clay suspended. When settled they took on the form of banding, even though the whole deposit could have formed within hours, or days. Interestingly, the graveyard is now about 30 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. In the Miocene it may have been a bit closer.

The deposit also included camels, rhinoceros, and llamas, as well as fresh and saltwater fish, turtles, aligators, and burrowing shrimps. It is a hodge podge  of bones from different animals, many of them broken and splintered. It is still in the process of being excavated but it  sounds like another catastrophic event of some kind – end of Miocene. It is also interesting to note that the dating of the sediments is based on uniformitarian processes – but not on a catastrophic one.

Skip to content