Saturday 8-6-2005

James Taylor, the son of  my younger brother Tom grew up south of Crosbyton on the S/K Ranch.  He lives in Mississippi with his wife and kids but began helping me on digs back in the 80's.  James is the co-pastor of the Aberdeen Primitive Baptist Church.  He graduated from Texas A&M, class of '93, with a degree in Biomedical Science.  Click here to read his article.

Thursday  7-7-2005

This email was forwarded to Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, concerning the facts of the "Raising of the Allosaur" video.  The author of this letter, Dana Forbes, is the owner of the property where the allosaur was discovered and is an eyewitness of the events which transpired during its discovery and excavation.

Dear ***********,

     Your e-mail of 8/11/2003 was passed on to me by someone who was involved in the 2001-2002 excavation of the allosaur from my property. I was the landowner the film refers to, and thought it might be helpful, even though some time has elapsed, to pass along what transpired.

     I quote from your email:  "I watched the documentary on the Allosaurus. It was the DeRosas and Doug Phillips' team that excavated it. I also understand that there was an agreement that what Doug Phillips' team found they could have. As far as I know Joe Taylor was not involved. The site is owned by a Christian home schooling couple, and the DeRosas have the fossil rights."

     First of all the Vision Forum group that came out was just a tour group. They were given an opportunity to dig some at a site that I had found the year before. We had already excavated some field jackets encasing parts of the allosaur's spine in 2001. This was done under Joe Taylor's direction and supervision. The DeRosas were there helping, but so were a number of others. The VF group in general was a fantastic group of people who helped move a lot of dirt and helped locate some important bones.  They did no actual removal of significant bone material. During their digging they uncovered a neck vertebra at which point they were done. Joe Taylor came out after the VF people left and conducted the excavation of the vertebral column including the skull. The DeRosas were clearly involved, but they did not direct the removal of anything from the site.  Joe did.  (By the way, the vertebra that the Vision Forum group uncovered was removed in a separate jacket from the skull and was a dirt load of distance from it).  Doug Phillips and VF had no rights to any of the bone material excavated. The DeRosas, Joe Taylor and my family all had a stake in the allosaur.

     It is amazing that Joe’s team, the main ones responsible for "raising the allosaur”, are given no credit in the film at all.  Joe's Mt. Blanco team is not mentioned.  Let me repeat, those most responsible for quote "making the film” based on its given title received NO credit whatsoever.  Additionally certain necessary others involved and our family as well are not listed in the credits.  However, home schooled boys and girls out on an adventure with their parents are said to “raise from the ground what appears to be the most complete Allosaur…ever found in the history of paleontology (gross overstatement of bone percentage), including the monster’s giant skull.” *  And Doug Phillips’ name is listed everywhere.  (*Taken verbatim from the back cover of the “Raising the Allosaur” video.  Italics are mine.)

      Other major problems with the film include the comment that I found the bones with a scintillator.  The awareness of bones on the property came from a local old-timer and my actual discovery of my first bones came as a direct answer to prayer.  Later, I did use a handheld scintillator in an effort to help find new sites, but this mostly led to dead ends.  Most of my discoveries came from what I believe to be a God given ability to see the bone material and then the ability to follow it up to its source.  The site that is called the "behemoth site" was discovered by my son, Evan.  A paleontology student from Mesa College in Grand Junction discovered what the DeRosas have termed the “steg site”.  I found the allosaur site and had removed other bone from it before any excavators were ever on the property. 

     We were never involved with the Grand Junction Museum or the Museum of the Rockies.  One of the world's largest dinosaur fossil museums did express an interest in partnering with me, but that is a far cry from "major, major museums…chasing after" me.  There are other less glaring, yet important technical inaccuracies.

     The video certainly conveys the idea that the DeRosas and Doug "did it all". It also incorrectly describes the landowner's story. I communicated with Doug Phillips about the problems with the film, but he never connected with me.  Later, when I questioned Doug, based on the allosaur “documentary”, about his qualifications to host a Christian film contest which cited integrity as a major standard, I received angry accusations from his establishment that I was simply looking out for my own gain.

      Personally, we do not view this film as a documentary.  It has too many flaws and promotes fantastical PR for VF and Creation Expeditions.  Frankly I believe it has done a tremendous amount of harm.  Not only does the film reduce the scientific value of the discovery because of lack of true reporting of the facts, but it also in the long run hurts the home school movement that the producer indicated that he was trying to promote.  Hyperbolism does not sit well with science and does not belong in the creationist's toolbox.  Exaggeration eats away at the foundations of integrity and virtue that we are trying to instill in the upcoming generation.  There are other issues as well that I prefer not to go into here. 

     Vision Forum could tell their own story, but they had no right to tell or make any one else's story their own.  For us, the film promotes a falsehood that masquerades as truth.  I think you would find it hard if not impossible to find anyone who was originally part of the dig project on the Forbes Ranch that did not feel that way or worse about the film.  This is of course magnified when one realizes the amount of money that VF probably made on the film as well as the other doors of opportunity flung open because of the falsely placed notoriety gained from it.

     Hope this corrects some of the misunderstandings surrounding the history of the site.  I am copying this statement to those that were indicated as having received your original statement.

 In a message dated 6/3/2005 7:23:46 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, erazz@------- writes:

Interesting New York Times article on the soft tissue  Tyrannosaurus Rex  find. I've added some emphasis to the article  below. Great  jabs between advocates of the Bird to Dinosaur link and  opponents as well.

T. Rex Fossil's Surprise: She Was Ovulating
By _JOHN  NOBLE WILFORD_
Published: June 3, 2005
For the second time in two months, a Tyrannosaurus rex recently excavated  in Montana has surprised scientists. Among its rock-hard fossils, the scientists had already isolated soft  tissues, including blood vessels and cells lining them - a most improbable discovery after 70 million years. The same paleontologists may now have topped that. They are reporting today 
that the same T. rex has yielded unusual bone tissue that shows that the  animal was an ovulating female. Until now, distinguishing the sex of dinosaurs  has been impossible without well-preserved pelvic bones. Moreover, after careful testing, the scientists determined that the  estrogen-derived tissue was similar to substances now present only in living  birds that produce eggshells.
The discovery team concludes in a report in the journal Science that the  finding "solidifies the link between dinosaurs and birds" and "provides an  objective means of gender differentiation in dinosaurs." Dr. Mary H. Schweitzer of North Carolina State University, the team leader,  and John R. Horner of the Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University  described the research on Tuesday in a teleconference arranged by the American  Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of the journal. When she first examined the marrow cavities of the dinosaur leg bones, Dr.  Schweitzer said, "I knew right away there was special bone tissue, and it had  all the characteristics of medullary bone tissue." Medullary tissue, previously associated just with female birds, is formed  by an increase in estrogen levels during a bird's egg-laying cycle and is  deposited on the interior walls of the leg bones. The tissue serves as a  reservoir of calcium for eggshells. After the last egg is laid, the tissue is 
completely reabsorbed into the bird's body. Dr. Schweitzer said the presence of such tissue in the T. rex indicated  that the reproductive physiologies of some dinosaurs might have been similar  those of to modern birds, in particular flightless ones like ostriches and  emu...

Joe's Thoughts
On the new T-rex "ovulating female" article. Two things; First, in 1998, when professor Mark Armitage electron scanned my piece of T-rex hip bone from Wyoming and found collagen, there was  more to it than I may have told you. He also scanned hip bone material from an East Indian man who died about 15 years before. He said that under high microscopy of the human collagen, that it was virtually identical to that of the T-rex. Sooo...if the estrogen derived lining of an ovulating bird is "similar" to that found in the T-rex bone and therefore its strong evidence of a common ancestor....are we to suspect that humans and T-rexes had a common ancestor? Second; the article says that T-rex eggs have never been found. If I'm not mistaken, there were some for sale a few years ago. I'll try to find that info. I know of a clump of "T-rex dung" from Canada that was for sale for $800 a few years ago. It was gray and had black bones sticking out of it.

Atmospheric Telescoping
Hugh et al:
Consider atmospheric "telescoping": Having dug all over and worked with fossils from the obvious flood sediments such as the Ordovician, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, and then having worked in the areas of question, the Tertiary, Oligocene, Miocene, and then in the pretty much accepted Post flood layers of the Pliocene and Pleistocene, and then in the unquestioned Holocene, and lastly modern, without going in to all the ramifications, it seems to me that the earth ala C-14 reckoning went through a "telescoping" after the flood. It seems like the pre-flood world was constant, albeit there may have been violent earthquakes and volcanic activity, but at least the "canopy" or something kept things a tolerable "tropics" all over the globe. This "canopy" may have broken up which may account for all the limestone, clay, limestone, clay etc. layers all over the earth. But, here's my point, maybe there was a disintegration of the pre-flood atmosphere that we are not giving enough thought to, such as the air stayed warm for a while, then it telescoped down and has become increasingly colder at perhaps some "knowable" rate. There may have been a lot of dust in the air for a time. Also, the sediments that cover much of the dinosaurs may have been hot, at least warm. There appear to have been a lot of water on the land after the waters abated. Also, all of those vast layers of mud in Colorado, Montana etc. must have created a lot of springs and artesian wells and were probably a big water factor for perhaps several hundred years. Over in Artesia New Mexico, there used to be lots of artesian wells, springs, in the middle of flat land. I have studied these thousands of playa lakes all over West Texas and they appear to have once been artesian wells.  

So, maybe C-14 dates need to be "telescoped" down a little further to account for the "un-hitched train car" affect of a slowly disintegrating pre-flood atmosphere and climate. Perhaps the idea of a pre-flood atmosphere and then the post-flood atmosphere being radically different to each other is not the whole picture. Maybe there was a "gray" period there between them. I think if this could be accounted for, it would help understand many of the fossil puzzles and give us dates that are more in line with the Biblical account. I think the adjustments to C-14 dates are long over due. Back 25 years ago when I asked Libby's assistant about how the "age" of C-14 was assessed, he hesitatingly replied, "it was established in the last half of the prior century." I took that to mean that "age" of the earth was more defined by the Darwinism of the 1800s than by empirical science.