Last Dinosaurs - In a Million Years: What You Need to Know About This Indie Rock Masterpiece

The last dinosaurs went extinct around 65 million years ago, so whether or not they saw the canyon hinges on one key question: Did it exist when they were alive? In an area subject to erosion, determining an exact age for rock formations can prove difficult. Thus, the age of the canyon remains a matter of significant debate.

For many years, researchers estimated that the Colorado River began carving out most of the canyon around five to six million years ago. Another analysis pegged erosion to 17 million years ago. Still, a 2012 study shockingly pointed to an earlier formation around 70 million years ago. The last estimate puts dinosaurs roaming the canyon rim on the edge of plausibility. However, each of these studies employed different dating techniques.

Last Dinosaurs - In a Million Years (2012)

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Based on a paper published in Nature Geoscience last year, it's clear that parts of the formation are young, while others are significantly older, as Smart News's Colin Schultz reported. That's likely because what is now the Grand Canyon was once a series of smaller canyons that joined through slow, massive process of erosion. While parts of the canyon began eroding 70 million years ago, most of the key integration happened much, much later.

The Aragosaurus was the first sauropod dinosaur described in Spain some 25 years ago in Galve (Teruel), but its age was never clear. The new dating would make it the only dinosaur of the Hauterivian age (between 136 and 130 million years ago) to be found in Spain.

"This is the only dinosaur of this period found in Spain and is also the most intact in Europe. It can be categorised amongst the well known sauropods of the Jurassic-Cretaceous transition (135 million years ago), the most abundant species during the Barremian age (116 million years ago). As this group has been studied the least, the Aragosaurus fills the gap," explains José Ignacio Canudo, lead author of the study and researcher in the University of Zaragoza's Aragosaurus-IUCA Group, which stands for the Aragon Research Institute of Environmental Sciences.

The new finding also reveals that in the Early Cretaceous Period (135 million years ago), what we now know as the European Continent was made up of a series of large islands that could have been, "the point of origin for many vertebrate groups including sauropod dinosaurs like the Basal Titanosauriform."

In relation to Aragosaurus ischiaticus "there are some lagoons that allude to its stratigraphic position," outlines Candudo, adding that dating "can often be complicated due to imprecision in continental scales." For this reason, the age of some dinosaur species can vary "even by tens of millions of years," assures the geologist.

Evolutionists claim dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. But it is important to realize that when they dig up a dinosaur bone it does not have a label attached showing its date. Evolutionists obtain their dates by indirect dating methods that other scientists question, and there is much evidence against the millions of years.13

Evolutionists once claimed that the fossil record was formed slowly as animals died and were graduallycovered by sediment. But they have acknowledged more recently that the fossil record must involve catastrophic processes.37 To form the billions of fossils worldwide, in layers sometimes kilometersthick, the organisms, by and large, must have been buried quickly. Many evolutionists now say the fossil record formed quickly, in spurts interspersed by millions of years.

If the shedding of blood occurred before sin, as would have happened ifthe garden was sitting on a fossil record of dead things millions of years old,then the foundation of the Atonement would be destroyed.

Based on this study, Bunce and his team put DNA's half-life at 521 years, meaning half of the DNA bonds would be broken down 521 years after death, and half of the remaining bonds would be decayed another 521 years after that, and so on. This rate is 400 times slower than simulation experiments predicted, the researchers said, and it would mean that under ideal conditions, all the DNA bonds would be completely destroyed in bone after about 6.8 million years.

Geological evidence for increasing day length can help us pin this time down more accurately. Tidal records laid down in ancient estuaries can show daily, monthly and seasonal cycles in alternating deposits of sand and silt. They indicate that 620 million years ago the day was 21 hours, says Mardling.

Even after those first scorching millennia, however, the planet has often been much warmer than it is now. One of the warmest times was during the geologic period known as the Neoproterozoic, between 600 and 800 million years ago. Conditions were also frequently sweltering between 500 million and 250 million years ago. And within the last 100 million years, two major heat spikes occurred: the Cretaceous Hot Greenhouse (about 92 million years ago), and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (about 56 million years ago).

Even after collisions stopped, and the planet had tens of millions of years to cool, surface temperatures were likely more than 400 Fahrenheit. Zircon crystals from Australia, only about 150 million years younger than the Earth itself, hint that our planet may have cooled faster than scientists previously thought. Still, in its infancy, Earth would have experienced temperatures far higher than we humans could possibly survive.

Rock formation in Namibia that shows a type of rock that only forms in warm water (cap dolostone) lying directly over a type of jumbled sedimentary rock, dated to 635 million years ago, that is commonly found at the margin of glaciers (diamictite). Image from teaching slides available at SnowballEarth.org.

Preliminary results from a Smithsonian Institution project led by Scott Wing and Paul Huber, showing Earth's average surface temperature over the past 500 million years. For most of the time, global temperatures appear to have been too warm (red portions of line) for persistent polar ice caps. The most recent 50 million years are an exception. Image adapted from Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Another hothouse period was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) about 55-56 million years ago. Though not quite as hot as the Cretaceous hothouse, the PETM brought rapidly rising temperatures. During much of the Paleocene and early Eocene, the poles were free of ice caps, and palm trees and crocodiles lived above the Arctic Circle.

Global surface temperatures were generally high throughout the Paleocene and Eocene, with a particularly warm spike at the boundary between the two geological epochs around 56 million years ago. Temperatures in the distant past are inferred from proxies, in this case, oxygen isotope ratios from fossil foraminifera, single-celled marine organisms. "Q" stands of Quaternary. Graphic produced using data from Zachos and Hansen, with help from Dr. Carrie Morrill, Director of the World Data Service for Paleoclimatology.

Scientists have discovered a new feathered dinosaur species that lived in the Early Cretaceous Period, about 125 million years ago, in northeastern China. The new findings, which are significant, provide direct evidence of the presence of extensively feathered dinosaurs and offer new insights into early feather evolution.

"Yutyrannus dramatically increases the size range of dinosaurs for which we have definite evidence of feathers," Xu said. "It's possible that feathers were much more widespread, at least among the meat-eating dinosaurs, than most scientists would have guessed even a few years ago."

The French popular-science magazine La Recherche ("Research") listed the discovery at SLAC of chemical traces of pigment in a bird fossil as a top 10 discovery in 2011. Researchers examined the remains of Confuciusornis sanctus, which lived 120 million years ago, at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource.

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal, publishedthe day after a big asteroid missed the earth by 17,000 miles and asmaller one blew out windows in Russia, is about the huge one thatextinguished the dinosaurs just over 66 million years ago:

The future has a richer past than the past did. By this I meanthat one of the great benefits of modern science is that itenriches our knowledge of the past. Imagine how thrilled CharlesDarwin would have been to learn this week that it's now all butcertain that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by anasteroid (much bigger than the one that missed us this week)slamming into Mexico about 66,038,000 years ago. In fact, I mightsend him an email to explain.

The generosity of Bill Gates has done much to speed the declineof polio, and he and most experts now see its end within six yearsat most. India, 10 years ago the worst-affected country, has beenpolio-free since 2011, and only three countries still host thevirus: Pakistan, Afghanistan and especially Nigeria. Though themurder of nine polio vaccinators in Pakistan by Islamists inDecember was a tragic setback, last year there were just 222 newpolio cases world-wide.

On 1 June this year a Mr Andrew Noakes was having lunch in Shropshire when "I thought Iheard something. The sound only went on for a few seconds and thenit stopped. There was no shaking cutlery or furniture." It was anatural earthquake, bigger than the ones caused by fracking inLancashire last year. Worldwide there are a million a year of asimilar size. Very few are even noticed. A magnitude 2.3 tremor isto a dangerous earthquake as a tiny stream is to the Amazon: thesame sort of thing but much less likely to drown you.

Until recently it was possible, even plausible, to think thatthe faculty of vision had originated several times during thecourse of animal evolution. New research suggests not: vision aroseonly once and earlier than expected, before 700 million yearsago.

Davide Pisani and colleagues from the National University ofIreland have traced the ancestry of the three kinds of"opsin" protein that animals use, in combination with a pigment, todetect light. By comparing the genome sequences of sponges,jellyfish and other animals, they tracked the origin of opsins backto the common ancestor of all animals except sponges, but includinga flat, shapeless thing called a placozoan. Some time after 755million years ago, the common ancestor of ourselves and theplacozoa duplicated a gene and changed one of the copies into arecognizable opsin. 2ff7e9595c