General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 59th Session

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General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Kwabena Donkor

Yes, Creation!

Evolutionary thought, Spiritualism and the End of Time

Lee Spencer

How Many Dinosaurs Were On the Ark?

Ariel Roth

Some scientific data that favors a recent creation

Stan Hudson

The Biblical creation is central to the local church

Greg King

Is Biblical Creation Passé?

Nikolaus Satelmajer

Rollin Shoemaker

Sabbath and Creation

Paleontology and the Bible: Science in action

John Baldwin

Why Does a Good Creator Permit Evil?

JoAnn Davidson

...and it WAS good

Jim Gibson

Lions in the Garden of Eden

Richard Davidson

Does Genesis Really Teach a Recent, Literal, Seven-Day Creation Week and a Global Flood?

Tim Standish

DNA and Design

Jacques Doukhan

Creation, the Heart of SDA Theology

How to share creation in outreach on secular campuses

Do millions of years solve the problem?

Ed Zinke

Theistic evolution and the end of Adventism

Ronny Nalin

Dealing with uncertainty

Ted N.C. Wilson

God’s Literal, Six-day, Recent Creation--The Church’s Position

Creation and Evolution: A brief history

Clifford Goldstein

Seventh-day Darwinians


Paleontology and the Bible, science in action. What does that mean? If we're talking about research that we're doing today, wow that's a broad topic too. We have Adventist scientists all over the world doing research. We have Jean Sauveillon in France, and Roberto Viaggi in Argentina.

We have people in Brazil, Colombia, not to mention how many schools in the United States. So how do I focus on all that in 20 minutes or less. The answer is I'm not. I'm going to focus in on 2 that I'm involved with since I was asked to do the talk. 1 of them is the dinosaur project.

Anyway, there's a number of institutions working together on this project. We've been working on it for more than 10 years. This is the area in northeastern Wyoming, And this is the geology of the area. The green is Cretaceous, so that's going to be dinosaur age stuff. The browns are part of the mammal bearing layers above the dinosaurs.

And it's kind of a bowl that's sitting there. And that's why you see it on both sides, because you've had a bowl filled with the sediments, tipped up, and then shaved off. This is an area where we developed a new technology for studying fossils. We presented this, the results of our work, to the Geological Society of America and to the Vertebrate Paleontological Society. It's combining survey grade GPS with GIS to be able to plot these things.

Now, survey grade GPS is not the same as you carry in your wallet. Survey grade is plus or minus a few millimeters. So it's very accurate. We have a base station. By the way, this is what eastern Wyoming looks like.

A base station. And then we have a rover that then measures everything in relation to that base station. Now originally you had to do it that way because the US government invented the GPS system for what? Yeah, so they could drop 2 bombs down the same hole. And so they don't want the Russians to do that to us using our satellites, so they scrambled it.

And so the only way you could use it was to have some place that was surveyed that you knew where it was and then compared the signal where it said you were and correct for it. Now they have shut it off and so it's not as scrambled. So how does it work? Here is a drumstick of a dinosaur, the leg bone or femur. This bone is about 4 feet long and probably weighs about 200 pounds.

When we find a bone, then a technician with the rover comes through and they measure, they take several readings on each bone and they paint a red dot on the bone, actually using fingernail polish, and keep track of where it is and they measure each of a number of different positions on the same bone. So here are the positions for that femur that you saw sitting in the ground. So you have your femur, take a picture of it, cut out the picture. Now you've got all these little red dots on there. So you line it up with the red dots, and you know in three-dimensional space where that dinosaur bone existed.

And you can keep doing that. These are where all of these bones were found above this big femur. This is a backbone, etc. Femur, and this is a backbone, etc. So the area where we're doing this research is about 80-85 acres around this mesa, and the dinosaur bones all go underneath the mesa.

We have 8 quarry sites, and the red marks places where we have found dinosaur bone weathering out of the rock. So if we look at quarry site 1, this was the year 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, etc. You can see that we can build a virtual quarry. So you can look at those dinosaur bones just as they existed without any soil in there. Same thing with North Quarry.

By the way, that femur that we started with, that's it right there. And you can compare that to the number of dinosaur bones every year the team excavates about a thousand dinosaur bones Now you can see they're not all big leg bones, you have all kinds of little bones that made up dinosaurs as well. If you go to the second quarry site, you'll get the same kind of picture. Quarry site 3 down at the south end, hadn't been worked very much. Quarry site 4, quarry site 5 is up there, quarry site 6, et cetera.

Now we can take and make some predictions. We know that where our quarry sites are here, we know where the layer goes that has all of these dinosaur bones, and so we can do some reconstruction. So here are the dinosaur bones that were found at Quarry Site 1, Quarry Site 2, Quarry Site 3, etc. Based on that, and this quarry site here, you can predict what's underneath the cliffs. So that's what it would look like on a number of dinosaur bones that are preserved at this locality.

There had to be at least 25 to 35 individual, thousand individual dinosaurs that got buried in this 1 layer. So now let me go on to another research area. The search for ancient DNA, we just did this 1 last year. And we have several other institutions that are cooperating with us. Danilo Vosklovit from Loma Linda is working with us on this as well.

So why are we doing it? People that study forensic science want to know how long DNA hangs around after an organism is dead. So they have spent a lot of time investigating that. Now DNA has 4 base pairs, That's all. And all of your genes and genetics come from some combination of those 4 base pairs.

1 of those base pairs is cytosine, and it has a half-life of 345 years at room temperature. That means if in 345 years from the time it died only half of the cytosine would be left. And in what, 680? You would have 1 4th as much. By 10 half-lives, there's essentially none left.

And so that would be 3, 450 years. When it's frozen, the half-life goes to 17, 000 years. So after 10 half-lives or 170, 000 years, there should be no DNA. So the presence of ancient DNA can be a test between old life and young life models of earth history. If the earth really is millions of years old, There should be no cytosine on anything that's older than 170, 000 years.

The ice age boundary, the pleiopleistocene boundary, is 1.8 million. So that is 100 half-lives. So anything before the ice ages has to have be more than a hundred half-lives if it's been frozen the whole time. On the other hand, If the earth is less than 5 or 6 thousand years since the flood, that's less than 1 third of 1 half life, therefore there should be abundant DNA in it. So we went to, wanted to go to the Arctic where you have frozen plant fossils that are supposed to be middle Miocene or 17 million years old.

Why plant fossils? People have tried to, and maybe successfully, get DNA out of old things. There's a big controversy about whether they've gotten DNA out of dinosaur bone. The problem is when you make many, many copies of it, if you get a dandruff flake in there, it'll make a million copies of your DNA. And so how do you know it's not a contaminant?

Plus bone crystals make a real tight bond around the collagen which has the material with the DNA in it. So you can people have made the argument that bone can possibly preserve things longer than this half-life because of the special relationship of bone crystals to that DNA. Plants don't have bone. There's no way to make that argument for plant DNA. Furthermore, if we only use the DNA that are in the chloroplasts, the little organelles that actually capture the sunlight.

If we only look at DNA from them, it can't possibly come from me. I have no chlorophyll in me at all. I hope. So we decided to look for specific genes that are called barcoding genes in this fossil plants that we go to collect do what we call the PCR reaction, polymerase chain reaction. That's just a way of making millions and millions of copies of just a few strands of DNA.

Now you can see why it would be important not to let a dandruff flake in there when you make millions of copies. So we went to a place in northern Canada in the Arctic Ocean, Banks Island, where there are 2 sets of layers. 1 is 4.7 million early Pliocene and the other is 17 million middle Miocene. So let's take the 17 million 1. If the half-life is 17, 000 years, how many half-lives do you have in 1.7 million years?

A thousand half-lives? Here's Banks Island in the Arctic Ocean. Here is Inuvik. I was actually, with my wife, able to drive up to Inuvik. The rest of the crew flew in and then we chartered a bush plane and went up here to the northeast corner of Banks Island And we were our campsite was right there.

It's amazing what you can do with Google. This is our bush plane. This little puppy could be loaded with a lot of people and get off the ground in less than 50 feet. It's an amazing airplane. So here we are all jammed in with our gear.

You can't just go to the grocery store. And so we're going out across the McKenzie River Delta. You come into Saks Harbor, that's the only town on Banks Island. Booming metropolis. A lot of wildlife, these are all snow geese.

I think something like a third of the world's snow geese come to Banks Island to nest. I could be wrong on that number. And so we're flying in here at the middle of July. And you can see how tropical it is in the middle of July. Here are our formations.

The layer that contained the cones that we're looking for is this 1. All of the sediments from the top of that 1 down are the 17 million old layer. And everything from here up to the top is the Pliocene or 4.7 million year layer. So the bush plane lands out there in the middle of absolutely nowhere, sets our gear out there, and then promptly takes off. So we set up camp out there, and there are no trees to go behind.

Things you don't think about before you leave home. All of the 2 women that went with us thought about it. First day there it snows. In July. This is the Arctic Ocean and Arctic sea ice and our Chadwick swears he can see a polar bear out there somewhere.

I think he was using his paleo imagination. This is our daily attire for July. So we got to get through this. It's beautiful. There's a wolf.

It has a story about him chasing the sandhill crane. Those are muskox, silver fox, peregrine falcon. It's just a neat place. So anyway, we collected our specimen. These were reindeer.

They came within a few feet of our tents. We never did see this guy or that 1. But we were prepared. We found these spruce cones that are supposed to be 17 million years old. These are incredibly well-preserved, soft, seeds in them, amazing things.

We also took a chainsaw up there, people thought we were nuts, to cut down through the permafrost, and we collected a sample of frozen peat to look through the stuff. So anyway, we have since, yes, the only place to get empty boxes to pack up was the local liquor store. Anyway, too much to tell. Had a crash, broke my neck, and lived happily ever after. But we have gotten DNA.

Just this last week, we've gotten, it turns out it's preserved in small fragmented pieces. And so we had to develop special primers for those small pieces. We did that, we got the material, it's been sent off to sequence, and they haven't found out yet whether it's oak pollen or ancient DNA yet. Thank you.

Series

Yes, Creation!

Paleontology and the Bible: Science in action

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Other Teachings in Series

Evolutionary thought, Spiritualism and the End of Time

19m

How Many Dinosaurs Were On the Ark?

17m

Some scientific data that favors a recent creation

20m

The Biblical creation is central to the local church

17m

Is Biblical Creation Passé?

21m

Sabbath and Creation

19m

Paleontology and the Bible: Science in action

19m

Why Does a Good Creator Permit Evil?

18m

...and it WAS good

19m

Lions in the Garden of Eden

17m

Does Genesis Really Teach a Recent, Literal, Seven-Day Creation Week and a Global Flood?

21m

DNA and Design

21m

Creation, the Heart of SDA Theology

23m

How to share creation in outreach on secular campuses

20m

Do millions of years solve the problem?

16m

Theistic evolution and the end of Adventism

22m

Dealing with uncertainty

11m

God’s Literal, Six-day, Recent Creation--The Church’s Position

28m

Creation and Evolution: A brief history

30m

Seventh-day Darwinians

13m

Sound Doctrine