Canadian Edgar Nernberg isn't into the whole evolution thing. In fact, he's on the board of directors of Big Valley’s Creation Science Museum,
a place meant to rival local scientific institutions. Adhering to the
most extreme form of religious creationism, the exhibits "prove" that
the Earth is only around 6,000 years old, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.
Unfortunately, Nernberg just dug up a 60-million-year-old fish.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Local outlets report that the man is far from shaken by the bony fish, which he found while excavating a basement in Calgary.
Because here's the thing: He just doesn't believe they're that old. And he's quite the fossil lover.
“No, it hasn’t changed my mind. We all
have the same evidence, and it’s just a matter of how you interpret it,”
Nernberg told the Calgary Sun. “There’s no dates stamped on these things."
No sir, no dates. Just, you know,
isotopic dating, basic geology, really shoddy stuff like that. To be
fair, I'm not any more capable of figuring out when a particular fossil
is from than Nernberg is. I'd be one sorry paleontologist, given the
opportunity. I've never even found a fossil, so he's got me there. But
the science of dating fossils is not shaky -- at least not on the order
of tens of millions of years of error -- so this fossil and the rocks
around it really do give new earth creationism the boot.
But this can go down as one of the best
examples ever of why it's downright impossible to convince someone who's
"opposed" to evolution that it's a basic fact: If you think the very
tenets of science are misguided, pretty much any evidence presented to
you can be written off as fabricated or misinterpreted.
The scientific community is thrilled and
grateful for the find, and the University of Calgary will unveil the
five fossils on Thursday. These fish lived in a time just after the
dinosaurs were wiped out, when other species were able to thrive in the
giants' absence. It's an important point in Earth's evolutionary
history, because new species were popping up all over to
make up for the ecological niches dinos left behind. Creatures from
this era give us some breathtaking glimpses of evolution in progress.
But it's rare to find fossils of that age in Calgary, since most of the
rocks are too old and yield dinosaurs instead.
Ironically, Nernberg's contributions at
the Creation Science Museum are almost certainly what scientists have to
thank for the find. He's an amateur fossil collector, and he knew the
fish were special as soon as he spotted them.
"When the five fish fossils presented
themselves to me in the excavator bucket, the first thing I said was
you’re coming home with me, the second thing was I better call a
paleontologist," Nernberg said in a statement.
“Most people would have overlooked these. When these were uncovered, Edgar right away recognized them,” Darla Zelenitsky,
paleontologist and assistant professor of geoscience at the University
of Calgary, told the Sun. "He’s apparently interested in fossils, and
that’s probably how he saw them. An ordinary person might have just seen
blobs in the rock.”
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