Two University of Virginia researchers believe that humans are genetically predisposed to be deathly afraid of snakes. Judy S. DeLoache, a U.Va. professor of developmental psychology, said she has a snake phobia, but wonders why. "The question was, where did that fear come from?"

She believes it's because snakes would have posed a significant threat to our ancestors, so a fear of snakes remains hardwired into human brains today.

Giant "Sea Monster" Fossil Discovered in Arctic

James Owen
for National Geographic News
February 26, 2008

A massive prehistoric sea reptile that was longer than a humpback whale and had teeth the size of cucumbers has been found by fossil hunters on a remote Arctic island. (See pictures of the "sea monster.")

Measuring some 50 feet (15 meters) in length, the bone-crunching predator represents one of the largest marine reptiles ever known, according to a team led by Jørn Hurum of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway.

The 150-million-year-old creature was first discovered in 2006 on Spitsbergen, part of Norway's Svalbard archipelago, in a polar wasteland littered with fossilized sea reptiles (see map).

(Read related story: "Dino-Era 'Sea Monster' Found on Arctic Island" [October 6, 2006].)

"We knew immediately this was something special," Hurum said. "The large pieces of bone and the structure of the fragments told us that this was big."

Hurum's team returned last summer to the Arctic island to excavate the fossil.

Removing a hundred tons of rock by hand while watching out for polar bears, the team recovered a large chunk of the skeleton, including portions of its estimated ten-foot-long (three-meter) skull, an almost complete forelimb, and sections of its dinner-plate-size vertebrae.

Dubbed "the Monster," it's thought to be a previously unknown species of plesiosaur.

"It's as big or bigger than the largest plesiosaur ever found," Hurum said. "This absolutely looks like a new species," he added.

(See 3-D animations of other sea monsters in our interactive time line.)

"T. Rex of the Ocean"

Plesiosaurs were marine reptiles that typically had small heads, long necks, and large flippers.

But the newfound plesiosaur is thought to have been a pliosaur, and pliosaurs were different from other plesiosaurs.

With short necks and massive heads, pliosaurs became the top marine predators during the Jurassic period, 200 to 145 million years ago.

Hurum said the newly excavated specimen is 20 percent bigger than what was until now the largest known pliosaur, Kronosaurus from Australia.

Calling the latest find "the T. rex of the ocean," Hurum said it "would have eaten other marine reptiles and maybe some of the huge bony fishes that were around at that time."

The newly excavated pliosaur was unveiled today at the Natural History Museum in Oslo.

Patrick Druckenmiller, a plesiosaur expert at the University of Alaska's Museum of the North, was a member of the expedition team that found and excavated the Arctic fossil.

"Not only is this specimen significant in that it is one of the largest and relatively complete plesiosaurs ever found, it also demonstrates that these gigantic animals inhabited the northern seas of our planet during the age of dinosaurs," Druckenmiller commented.

"Although we didn't get the entire skeleton, we found many of the most important parts," Druckenmiller said. "Amazingly, the paddle [of its forelimb] alone is nearly ten feet [three meters] long."

The fossil was found in permafrost among a prehistoric "graveyard" of large marine reptiles approximately 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) from the North Pole.

(See related pictures: "'Sea Monster' Graveyard Found in the Arctic".)

The site represents one of the richest accumulations of marine reptiles in the world, according to Hurum, who led the Artic fossil hunt.

The creatures swam in temperate seas and sank to the ocean floor after they died, where their bodies were preserved in soft mud.

Some 40 skeletons have been located to date. Most belonged to long-necked plesiosaurs and dolphin-shaped ichthyosaurs, Hurum said.

Another pliosaur specimen was also found last year, however.

"Hopefully it will be just as big as the first," Hurum said.

This newest fossil may help provide pieces that are missing from Monster's partial skeleton, he added.

"It seems to have more teeth, and hopefully there's more of a skull inside the hill [where it was found]. But first we have to move the hill," Hurum said.

The researchers plan to excavate the second pliosaur when they return to Spitsbergen this summer.

Plesiosaur expert Richard Forrest, affiliated with the New Walk Museum in Leicester, England, said pliosaur skeletons are extremely rare.

"As is the case with any big predator, the further up the food chain you go, the fewer you find," Forrest said.

Meal Breaks

Since pliosaurs were reptiles, which have slow metabolisms, they probably had long breaks between meals, he said.

"If [Monster] was eating something like a large plesiosaur, it would probably get enough food to keep it going for a couple of months," Forrest added.

Pliosaurs are thought to have been ambush predators, using their giant flippers to launch ferocious attacks.

"We don't think they were particularly good at cruising but were very good at accelerating, so they'd lurk in the depths and shoot up to catch things," Forrest said.

Pliosaurs likely had the most powerful bite force of any predator, living or extinct, he added.

"It can't think of any animal that would even come close," Forrest said.

"Inside their enormous skulls they had huge areas of muscle available for biting force. One of these animals would have been big and strong enough to pick up a small car and bite it in half."

Forrest added that he recently studied the remains of a 23-foot-long (7-meter) plesiosaur that almost certainly fell victim to a pliosaur.

"There's evidence that it was hit extremely hard and basically just ripped apart," he said.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/02/080226-sea-monsters.html

LiveScience: “Petrified Animals Died Quickly”

A team examining a fossil deposit in the Canadian Rockies has determined that the fossil “bonanza” was buried by a rapid, muddy “miracle of preservation.”

The team, from the University of Leicester, was looking at the Burgess Shale graveyard, where petrified bodies have been found with even soft tissue preserved. Scientists have found the remains of worms, eyes, and internal organs among the fossils at the site. But since the fossils were discovered in 1909, paleontologists have wondered what allowed such extensive preservation.

The researchers—geologist Jan Zalasiewicz and paleontologist Sarah Gabbott—concluded that the deposit was created by a rapid mud slurry that covered the bodies so completely that whole bodies were petrified. They also found that the rock layers were probably the result of the mud slurry that buried the unsuspecting creatures at the bottom of the site, which the scientists believe was then a sea bed.

Zalasiewicz explains that the mud slurry would have carried the creatures below the level at which scavengers or even most bacteria could have reached the corpses, with later mudslides (perhaps caused by earthquakes) burying the fossils even deeper.

Zalasiewicz also noted that the fossils are from “early in the history of complex multi-cellular life” and references the enigma of the Cambrian explosion, when, according to the evolutionary interpretation of the fossil record, life “very suddenly” became complex and diverse—still a mystery, as Zalasiewicz calls it, to Darwinists.

Evolutionists now have an explanation for why these fossils are so well-preserved—but it’s the same explanation creationists have had for thousands of years! The Flood model explains, in general, how a watery deluge combined heavy rain with subterranean water activity—and substantial geological and volcanic activity—that reshaped the physical world. From this model, we understand how catastrophic forces (including mud slurries) account for nearly all of the fossils we uncover today and explain the origin of geologic features (canyons, rock layers, etc.).

Those who accept millions of years continue to resort to a local catastrophe here, a local catastrophe there; a mud slide here, a flood there. Biblical creationists see this as triggered by the global Flood of Noah’s age—a Flood documented in civilizations around the world.

Weather Channel Founder Blasts Network; Claims It Is 'Telling Us What to Think'
TWC founder and global warming skeptic advocates suing Al Gore to expose 'the fraud of global warming.'

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
3/3/2008 6:11:04 PM



The Weather Channel has lost its way, according to John Coleman, who founded the channel in 1982.

Coleman told an audience at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 3 in New York that he is highly critical of global warming alarmism.

“The Weather Channel had great promise, and that’s all gone now because they’ve made every mistake in the book on what they’ve done and how they’ve done it and it’s very sad,” Coleman said. “It’s now for sale and there’s a new owner of The Weather Channel will be announced – several billion dollars having changed hands in the near future. Let’s hope the new owners can recapture the vision and stop reporting the traffic, telling us what to think and start giving us useful weather information.”

The Weather Channel has been an outlet for global warming alarmism. In December 2006, The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen argued on her blog that weathercasters who had doubts about human influence on global warming should be punished with decertification by the American Meteorological Society.

Coleman also told the audience his strategy for exposing what he called “the fraud of global warming.” He advocated suing those who sell carbon credits, which would force global warming alarmists to give a more honest account of the policies they propose.

“ have a feeling this is the opening,” Coleman said. “If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the media stand to testify, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”

Earlier at the conference Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy adviser to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, told an audience that the science will eventually prevail and the “scare” of global warming will go away. He also said the courts were a good avenue to show the science.

Using tiny brushes and chisels, workers picking at a big greenish-black rock in the basement of North Dakota's state museum are meticulously uncovering something amazing: a nearly complete dinosaur, skin and all.

Animal tissue typically decomposes quickly after death. Researchers say Dakota must have been buried rapidly and in just the right environment for the texture of the skin to be preserved.

"The process of decay was overtaken by that of fossilization, preserving many of the soft-tissue structures," Manning said.