News to Note, May 5, 2012

1. Choice of Timeline Determines Story

Choice of timeline determines the story.

2. Supposed Hominid Evolution

Weird walkers weigh in on supposed hominid evolution.

3. Big Dinosaurs Won the Battle but Lost the War

Big dinosaurs won the battle but lost the war, and the real winners took to the skies.

4. Molecular Magic’s “Magician”

Molecular magic still requires a “magician.”

5. British Isles

When the clock’s answers don’t meet expectations, get a new clock.

And Don’t Miss . . .

• The identity of Godzillus, the large Ordovician fossil found in Kenton County, Kentucky, remains a mystery. As we discussed last week, the fossil is definitely not a bony creature like a fish. According to geologist David Meyer, who has written a book on Ordovician fossils of the Cincinnati area, experts are still convinced the fossil has a biological origin. It may not be an ordinary animal or even a plant, however. “In general, we’re heading toward this being some sort of microbial structure that was preserved on the sea bottom, and it preserved some unusual patterns in the rock,” Meyer told FoxNews.com. Thinking the fossil could be “a mat or membrane made up of algae or bacteria that somehow captured enough dirt and debris that it could form into an unusual fossil,” Meyer adds, “It’s not the kind of thing that you would expect to fossilize.” The marine fossils of the Ordovician rock layers do show evidence of burial associated with violent catastrophe and are thus consistent with the turmoil present during the early stages of the global Flood. For more information see Cincinnati—Built on a Fossil Graveyard.
• Is dark matter a figment? Is dark matter detectable? Does dark matter matter? Analysis of data from Chile’s European Southern Observatory has failed to find evidence of any dark matter near our solar system. Dark matter has never been observed. (That’s why it’s called “dark.”) Current cosmological theories hypothesize the existence of dark matter to explain gravitational effects that cannot be accounted for by the amount of visible matter. Dwarf galaxies, for instance, are thought to be composed almost entirely of dark matter, and cosmologists estimate that as much as 80% of the matter in the universe is dark matter. Authors of the study to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, however, found that the motion of stars “within 13,000 light-years of Earth, are gravitationally attracted by the visible material in our solar system . . . and not by any unseen matter.” As lead author Christian Moni Bidin says, “The amount of mass that we derive matches very well with what we see — stars, dust and gas — in the region around the Sun. But this leaves no room for the extra material — dark matter — that we were expecting. Our calculations show that it should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!”1 The official ESO press release reports, “The most accurate study so far of the motions of stars in the Milky Way has found no evidence for dark matter in a large volume around the Sun. According to widely accepted theories, the solar neighborhood was expected to be filled with dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts. But a new study by a team of astronomers in Chile has found that these theories just do not fit the observational facts. This may mean that attempts to directly detect dark matter particles on Earth are unlikely to be successful.”2 While cosmologists worldwide are proposing a variety of explanations, most are not ready to throw out the existence of dark matter altogether as other evidence points to its reality. And while dark forms an integral part of current big bang cosmology, creationist cosmology models work whether it exists or not. For more information, see Super-colliders Looking for Dark Matter in All the Wrong Places and Cosmic Curveballs.