Neanderthals, Dinosaurs?

[The Barbarian]

So, there was a lesson in this for my son in learning that the public school educational environment is not really one that is open ended where all are free to exchange ideas. And I explained to him that on one level; that is valid, because what if a kid wanted to bring in a movie that glorified Satanism? It was a difficult thing for him to grasp and I think it was several years before he understood the principle of the position.

I once taught 8th grade science, and I had my AP kids each do a poster on the ethics of cloning. Several of them used religious arguments in their posters. I informed the AP that I was going to put them up in the hallway, and he said "that's a hill I'm willing to die on." (he was a retired Lt. Col)

 

[The Righterzpen]

99% DNA similarities between chimps and humans says that we’re apes .

98.9% with bonobos and chimpanzees.
98.4% with gorillas
96.9% with orangoutangs
93% with monkeys

Animals That Share Human DNA Sequences

90% with mice
90% with domesticated cats
84% with domesticated dogs
80% with cattle.

Humans share almost all of our DNA with cats, cattle and mice

99% with ....... wait for it folks!....... PLANTS!

Genetics, DNA, plants and humans

For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away:
1 Peter 1:24



So thus the Lord hath a warped sense of humor! (My kind of Redeemer!)

Another mutation is our ability to sweat copiously.

We’re a little unusual in that we evolved as long distance runners

This would enable man to persue prey over long distances and easily outrun a Neandertal.

Also, being able to sweat, oddly; allows us to live in all sorts of environments. Where as most of the rest of life on earth is constricted to a particular climatic habitat; or totally dependent on humans.

The gene is called CMAH and in humans it’s disabled . This loss of genetic information ( using that term deliberately since creationists claim falsely that this isn’t evolution) enables the limbs to use O2 more efficiently and makes them more resistant to fatigue

How is a disabled gene a "loss of information" when the gene is still there?

 

[The Righterzpen]

The big bang, which is still having mysteries, just means it seems to have suddenly come into existence, and a theory thinks it may have expanded with amazing (faster than light)-speed. It's not an "explosion" in the way we think of such normally, but something so much more fascinating and amazing.

Interesting take on "big bang". I don't think that's what atheistic scientists describe it as.

You do raise an interesting question here though with "expanded with amazing (faster than light) - speed." when considering the "without form and void" verse in Genesis. Obviously non living atomic material existed. And that does make some sense looking at the fossil record; how we see life "explode" on the scene fully formed. That's one thing "The Case for the Creator" pointed out. The "Cambrian explosion" is that all the phyla appear suddenly and fully formed in the fossil record.

There's some consistency there with your "faster than light" theory.

I don't know if you'd previously made that observation; but it's an interesting connection.

 

[GodLovesCats]

"Faster than light" is not Biblical.

God said, "Let there be light." And there was light. So it took a fraction of a second for light to appear if Genesis 1:3 is to be interpreted literally.

 

[The Barbarian]

Humans share almost all of our DNA with cats, cattle and mice

99% with ....... wait for it folks!....... PLANTS!

Genetics, DNA, plants and humans

Your link says 60%, with banana plants, the only comparison it makes with humans. Perhaps you linked to the wrong site?

How is a disabled gene a "loss of information" when the gene is still there?

Because the information necessary to code for that protein is no longer there. If you had a manual for assembling a machine, and someone tore out a few pages, maybe inserting a page of random letters, that would be a loss of information, wouldn't it? That's how disabled genes happen.

 

[ViaCrucis]

In order for any of this to be true though, you'd have to have fundamentally different forces at work in the universe at the onset. Hubble (the guy who invented the telescope) made an observation that the universe is expanding. That jives with entropy. (Things going from a state of order to a state of chaos; or what we might call "decay".)

Two things are wrong in this statement. The telescope is named after Hubble, but he didn't invent it. Edwin Hubble died in the 1950's, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990. And second you have entropy backward. Entropy is not things going from a state of order to chaos, but rather just the opposite; entropy involves things entering into a state of equilibrium. Entropy is like if you were to take a snowglobe and tip around a few times and all the material is now floating around (because an external force was applied) and now the particulate inside the globe slows, the water movement slows, and the particulate falls back to the bottom and everything enters into a state of rest. Energy reaches equilibrium and nothing continues to happen at all. A state of perfect entropy would mean perfect equilibrium of all energy. And so the process of entropy is closer to chaos -> order, not order -> chaos. A star burning through its reserves, dying, and then eventually cooling to a point of absolute zero until nothing is happening at all is entropy.

Now if he's right; which I don't see any reason to think that he's not. At one point obviously the universe was "smaller" (and smaller and smaller and smaller) as you go back through time, until you get to a "singularity" and the "second" before that it didn't exist. Now that jives with Genesis. Some unknown "force" brought this universe into existence; yet did so in an organized matter.

The first verse in Genesis describes "earth is without form and void and darkness upon the face of the deep". This is still an organized dividing of (probably) atomic mass from what ever other forces are created to govern the universe from the standpoint of physics. Gravity is only one "element" of that. It is the mass / attractive property of the physical matter. There is a "counter law" to that though. I don't even know if science has a name for it? "Anti-gravity?" Either way; what is "without form and void" is still delineated from the "darkness upon the face of the deep." Now quantum physics has a theory of "dark matter" which is a counter force to the material atomic structure of the universe. (Again, fit's Genesis.) (Matter / dark matter, Gravity / "anti-gravity"?) Time?

Time only goes one direction because "we" can't reverse entropy. Thus making time travel as science fiction has depicted it impossible. We can not go back into an event that is past. That being said though, there is this "rubber banding" of "time" as it relates to gravity of objects in the universe. For example: The further you move from a sun, the slower "time" goes. i.e. A human on Pluto is not going to age as quickly as one on earth, yet the process of their aging is still moving forward. Just the pace at which this happens is relative to the gravitational pull of the bodies in the solar system.

Yet is there some sort of "counter time" to the forward motion of time? That is certainly a valid question. I believe the answer to that is "eternity". God exists in a domain that has no time. That, I believe is the stabilizing "factor" that makes time as we understand it exist.

Now the other aspect of this is physicists have realized that the space between objects of mass contains something. It's not just "empty". There's "stuff" in the "space". Now this "stuff" operates like a grid for the material universe (stars, solar systems, galaxies) to exist in. Now what that is, they don't know, but they know it's there because it's not just random "gravitational force" that keeps objects in place. And here's where your cereal in the bag example does not fit the paradigm of what we currently understand about gravity. The mass of the universe is not evenly distributed. On the vertical plane of this "bag of cereal" the objects of mass are not distributed according to size surrounding a gravitational center (or gravitational "direction"). The mass of the universe is "caught" in this "grid". And on top of this we seem to have "holes" in the grid (black holes) that we don't really understand how they operate, why they are there; yet it does appear to us that they are a destructive force upon matter.

Now it is assumed that the universe is a "closed system"; meaning mass and energy are constant factors; but maybe that's not true either? In order to sustain life, there has to be a constant injection of energy into that process. Because just like the passing of time; once energy is "spent" its "gone". "Renewable resources" of energy (like trees) all come from the creation of life. The amount of "matter" on a planet, very much depends on the amount of life it contains. The multiplication of life, just like the "rubber banding" of time, is a variable factor. The agent of the injection of that "energy" into the system that creates life is called "the breath of life" which comes from God.

So here raises another question. Does "spent mass" leave the universe as new mass is created (in the form of life) by God. Is that the purpose of black holes? Thus keeping the mass of the universe at a stable level and having to do so because of the operation of gravity?

Now if one looks at "quantum physics" from the vanish point of having to account for energy and mass entering and leaving an open system. You'd reasonably draw the conclusion that the universe would contain a lot of life.

So moral of the story is; considering what is currently known about the laws that govern the operation of this universe; the only theory of origin that makes any sense is intelligent design. It's too pristinely organized in all of it's components to be otherwise.[/QUOTE]

The problem with intelligent design as a theory is that it is built upon the premise that purely natural systems require a mind behind them to work. But, for example, this obviously isn't the case with what we observe with natural systems. And simply pushing back the intelligent designer backward, or merely speaking of the intelligent designer acting in a stop-gap fashion is neither scientific nor theologically sound.

Now of course I believe God is the maker of all things, that the universe is what God made, that He brought it into existence, and that He is the One present working through the universe to bring about His purposes. I believe these things as a matter of faith, it is a theological position. As I confess the Nicene Creed which reads, "We believe in one God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things seen and unseen." But that isn't a scientific statement it is a religious, theological statement. It is not a statement based on observation and naturalistic methodology (science) but a statement based on divine revelation.

"God did it" isn't and cannot be a scientific statement. No matter the fact that it is a true statement.

I believe the orthodox Christian position isn't to postulate a god-of-the-gaps, or to entertain the Deist philosophy of the clock-maker-god; but rather to confess the God who is at work and is present through His creation. So when we talk about "the big bang" it is not a matter of the universe having a beginning apart from the Divine Creator, but rather this is the work of the Divine Creator. In the same way that we can say that the Psalmist can say, "You formed me in my mother's womb." and this is not at odds with the purely naturalistic processes of human sexual reproduction.

There's no need for "Intelligent Design", because science and faith are not enemies on a battlefield which need to be reconciled through forced arbitration; but rather two distinct ways of engaging with the world which are simply not at odds with one another.

Science is allowed to be science--a purely naturalistic discipline.
Faith is allowed to be faith--a matter of trust and conviction in the revelation which we have received by God sending forth His Son, His very Word, made flesh and dwelling among us.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[ViaCrucis]

Interesting take on "big bang". I don't think that's what atheistic scientists describe it as.

No that's a pretty accurate view of what scientists think (whether they are atheists or theists or agnostics is irrelevant on that point).

You do raise an interesting question here though with "expanded with amazing (faster than light) - speed." when considering the "without form and void" verse in Genesis. Obviously non living atomic material existed. And that does make some sense looking at the fossil record; how we see life "explode" on the scene fully formed. That's one thing "The Case for the Creator" pointed out. The "Cambrian explosion" is that all the phyla appear suddenly and fully formed in the fossil record.

The Cambrian explosion and the expansion of the universe aren't related.

The universe is currently expanding faster than the speed of light, this does not violate the theory of special relativity since nothing is actually moving faster than the speed of light. That's kind of a strange idea, but it's like if you were to take a balloon and mark two spots on it and then you blow the balloon up. The space between the two spots expands, but it's not that the two marked spots are themselves moving; it's a weak analogy, but it's one I've seen used a lot. The point is that space itself is expanding, not the objects in space (or rather, the objects are moving, but their movement is relative to where they are in space, and it is the space itself that is expanding).

There's some consistency there with your "faster than light" theory.

I don't know if you'd previously made that observation; but it's an interesting connection.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[The Barbarian]

That's one thing "The Case for the Creator" pointed out. The "Cambrian explosion" is that all the phyla appear suddenly and fully formed in the fossil record.

That's one more goof he made. We see a number of phyla in the Ediacaran, long before the Cambrian, and new phyla appeared after the Cambrian. The "explosion" seems to have been the result of whole-body sclerites, permitting a wide variety of organisms, which quickly evolved to fit those new niches.

 

[JackRT]

Entropy is not things going from a state of order to chaos, but rather just the opposite; entropy involves things entering into a state of equilibrium.

Everything is running down and going to pieces. ----- Well, that is a rather simple way of describing it. A better definition would be "in a closed system,
(a measure of disorder) will on average constantly increase" Since this is a statistical law, two terms are vitally important ---‘closed system’ and ‘on average’.

***”closed system” means that there is no net influx of energy from outside the system. So far as we know the universe as a whole seems to be a closed system with the result that it will eventually wind down and suffer a heat death. However the planet earth is not a closed system. It receives a net influx of energy from the sun and it is this that allows entropy to decrease and makes evolution possible.

***”on average” means that while entropy in a closed system may be increasing on the whole, there may be localized parts of that system where entropy is actually decreasing. Think of the universe as the system and the earth as such a localized part.

***being statistical laws also means that thermodynamics does not govern the behavior of every single bit of matter at a microscopic level but rather the behavior of collections of matter at the macroscopic level. To say that the class average in the last test was 48% does not mean that every student got that mark or even that the majority of students failed. It is in fact entirely possible that some students bucked the trend and wrote perfect papers.

 

[The Barbarian]

***being statistical laws also means that thermodynamics does not govern the behavior of every single bit of matter at a microscopic level but rather the behavior of collections of matter at the macroscopic level. To say that the class average in the last test was 48% does not mean that every student got that mark or even that the majority of students failed. It is in fact entirely possible that some students bucked the trend and wrote perfect papers.

If so, it would indicate that the entropy of the class was very low. If the entropy was very high, all students would have gotten roughly the same scores.

 

[The Barbarian]

The telescope is named after Hubble, but he didn't invent it.

Wait! Are you telling me that Galileo didn't design the Galileo probe?
(Barbarian is so disillusioned)

 

[The Righterzpen]

Your link says 60%, with banana plants, the only comparison it makes with humans. Perhaps you linked to the wrong site?

Because the information necessary to code for that protein is no longer there. If you had a manual for assembling a machine, and someone tore out a few pages, maybe inserting a page of random letters, that would be a loss of information, wouldn't it? That's how disabled genes happen.

DNA and gene sequences:

The point I believe the article was making about the plants, is that DNA sequencing and how much of it one species may have in common with another is somewhat of a misnomer, seeing how all DNA is only composed of 4 nucleotides anyways. The arrangement of DNA is what makes all the difference, not how much commonality of gene duplication one species shares with another.

We share 90% of the genome with cats and 93% with monkeys. Which does this mean cats and monkeys are only 3% away from each other? I don't know? The articles don't compare cats and monkeys. Yet obviously cats and monkeys are very different animals even in physical structure.

Likewise that 1% difference between humans and chimps is a huge difference when you look at what are brains are capable of in comparison. Like I said before chimps have never built cities or civilizations.

That 1% makes a huge difference and its assumption upon the part of the scientist to say that 99% means "common ancestry". Obviously there's common design structure that composes all life. We're all made out of carbon based atomic arrangements; but so is non-life. I'm sure there's a certain percentage of congruent atomic arrangement between us and sedimentary rock. Again though, it's not the commonalities that proves anything. It's the differences.

A disabled gene?

I looked up this language. The other terminology they used is for a gene to be turned on or off. (If it's turned off its "disabled". Like you'd disable a car by unplugging the battery.) It doesn't say that "disabled" means "missing".

 

[The Righterzpen]

"Faster than light" is not Biblical.

God said, "Let there be light." And there was light. So it took a fraction of a second for light to appear if Genesis 1:3 is to be interpreted literally.

Your point raises a valid question here since as far as we know, nothing in this material universe travels faster than light because of issues of objects mass.

Would to "travel faster than light" then mean omnipresent?

The question of whether "faster than light" being or not being Biblical; I'd never thought of before. Would to interpret Genesis 1:3 as literal entail some sort of definition / relation to light's speed? If it does, than your statement about "faster than the speed of light" being unbiblical would be true. I don't know if any connection to light's speed is couched in the Hebrew there or not.

Intriguing question you raise.

 

[The Righterzpen]

The telescope is named after Hubble, but he didn't invent it.

You are correct here, now that I looked it up. I stand corrected on the technicalities of his not actually inventing that telescope. It's said that it is named after him because it has helped to prove a lot of the theories he had. Being an astronomer, I have no idea if he contributed any design ideas to that telescope's final outcome. If he did, he would have been a partial "inventor" of it.

And second you have entropy backward. Entropy is not things going from a state of order to chaos, but rather just the opposite; entropy involves things entering into a state of equilibrium.

In our current observable universe, according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics things only go from a state of order to a state of chaos; even with active input of energy in an attempt to maintain, systems still break down. That in layman's terms would be called decay. So in that sense entropy only goes in one direction and it's not to a state of order.

Total entropy either increases or remains consistent. Entropy would have to decrease in order to go from a state of chaos to a state of order. For entropy to remain consistent would mean no decay. There's only one time in history post fall that I'm aware of where that ever happened. (Entropy remaining consistent.) And that was in regards to the dead body of Jesus Christ. It didn't decay.

The problem with intelligent design as a theory is that it is built upon the premise that purely natural systems require a mind behind them to work. But, for example, this obviously isn't the case with what we observe with natural systems. And simply pushing back the intelligent designer backward, or merely speaking of the intelligent designer acting in a stop-gap fashion is neither scientific nor theologically sound.

Only if you assume that natural systems don't need an intelligent mind behind them to work, would you ever assume the Designer is operating in a "stop gap" fashion. I think you have a misconception of what intelligent design means as a theory of origin / (or maybe more importantly as a theory of maintenance)!

Now of course I believe God is the maker of all things, that the universe is what God made, that He brought it into existence, and that He is the One present working through the universe to bring about His purposes. I believe these things as a matter of faith, it is a theological position. As I confess the Nicene Creed which reads, "We believe in one God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things seen and unseen." But that isn't a scientific statement it is a religious, theological statement. It is not a statement based on observation and naturalistic methodology (science) but a statement based on divine revelation.

You can't "have your cake and eat it too". Either God runs all things by His sovereign will or they run on chance. If you are going to stand on the authority of Scripture, you'd have to "throw out" much of the theories "science" totes as "true".

"God did it" isn't and cannot be a scientific statement. No matter the fact that it is a true statement.

Define "science". If science is suppose to be founded on what is observable and provable truth; why can't "God did it" be a scientific statement? Granted that statement doesn't explain, how, why, or arguably even "when"; but neither do the opposing theories in "science".

And here is a perfect example of how those who oppose intelligent design as a theory fail to see that all their arguments can simply be turned around to topple their own sacred towers.

Again, simply boils down to the matter of what does one choose to believe?

 

[The Righterzpen]

Everything is running down and going to pieces. ----- Well, that is a rather simple way of describing it. A better definition would be "in a closed system,
(a measure of disorder) will on average constantly increase" Since this is a statistical law, two terms are vitally important ---‘closed system’ and ‘on average’.

***”closed system” means that there is no net influx of energy from outside the system. So far as we know the universe as a whole seems to be a closed system with the result that it will eventually wind down and suffer a heat death. However the planet earth is not a closed system. It receives a net influx of energy from the sun and it is this that allows entropy to decrease and makes evolution possible.

***”on average” means that while entropy in a closed system may be increasing on the whole, there may be localized parts of that system where entropy is actually decreasing. Think of the universe as the system and the earth as such a localized part.

***being statistical laws also means that thermodynamics does not govern the behavior of every single bit of matter at a microscopic level but rather the behavior of collections of matter at the macroscopic level. To say that the class average in the last test was 48% does not mean that every student got that mark or even that the majority of students failed. It is in fact entirely possible that some students bucked the trend and wrote perfect papers.

I'm not sure your logic here is particularly sound?

If earth is an open system receiving energy from the sun; (which I would not disagree with principally speaking) than what is to guarantee that the universe itself is "closed system" when "open system" is obvious in a portion of it? To say that the universe is a closed system I think is an assumption.

Now if we are to say that God is the outside force interjecting "the breath of life" into the system to make living things, than it is an open system.

Entropy though is still running to a state of chaos because life's ability to maintain post fall is still outpaced by decay. Thus "the day that you eat of this you shall surely die". This of course is held under a locus of permitted control by God.

So thus God being the "valve" that controls the energy flow into the system and the fact that He doesn't turn it on "full blast" to cause entropy to decrease makes evolution impossible.

At the point God "opens the valve" and lets it "full blast" is a recreated universe.

 

[The Righterzpen]

That's one more goof he made. We see a number of phyla in the Ediacaran, long before the Cambrian, and new phyla appeared after the Cambrian. The "explosion" seems to have been the result of whole-body sclerites, permitting a wide variety of organisms, which quickly evolved to fit those new niches.

Regardless of what guesstimated age phyla are found; they still appear suddenly in the fossil record fully formed.

And as far a phyla emerging post Cambrian; even evolutionists claim the phyla that emerged mammals was present in previous ages. So is it really the "new appearance" of a phyla, or rather now the lack of suppression of a phyla that now emerges as dominant because these other species die off?

All phyla (not yet extinct at a given time) are still represented in all post "ages", but it's a matter of a numbers crunching game depending on which "age" (or rather packet of fossils) you are looking at. You may find 10 thousand dinosaur fossils to every one human fossil; but that does not negate that the human fossils are still there.

Remember, you need very specific environmental factors to create fossils. You need a lot of water and a lot of debris to bury them quickly. So even in observing that fossil layers post a certain "age" represented flooding of different eras; and fossil "pits" representing only mammals would be representing catastrophic local flooding; does not negate that lesser numbers of that phyla are found in the layers underneath.

Also considering that rock layers are funny things because techtonic plate activity tends to very affectively rearrange them at times.

 

[The Barbarian]

Barbarian observes:
That's one more goof he made. We see a number of phyla in the Ediacaran, long before the Cambrian, and new phyla appeared after the Cambrian. The "explosion" seems to have been the result of whole-body sclerites, permitting a wide variety of organisms, which quickly evolved to fit those new niches.

Regardless of what guesstimated age phyla are found

Wrong. The Ediacaran is long before the Cambrian your source claims was the sudden appearance of all phyla. And we see organisms there that are partially-formed examples of later organisms your guy assumed to have appeared in the Cambrian.

they still appear suddenly in the fossil record fully formed.

No. Want to see some examples?

And as far a phyla emerging post Cambrian; even evolutionists claim the phyla that emerged mammals was present in previous ages.

That's not very clear. Can you do that one again?

Remember, you need very specific environmental factors to create fossils. You need a lot of water

So how is it that we have many, many desert fossils?

and a lot of debris to bury them quickly.

No. For example, the first specimens of Archaepteryx fell into anoxic bottoms, and were preserved the the environment, and slowly buried in accumulated silt.

So even in observing that fossil layers post a certain "age" represented flooding of different eras;

Including those desert fossils?

Also considering that rock layers are funny things because techtonic plate activity tends to very affectively rearrange them at times.

Geologists know how to recognize and identify them.

 

[The Righterzpen]

The point is that space itself is expanding, not the objects in space (or rather, the objects are moving, but their movement is relative to where they are in space, and it is the space itself that is expanding).

The expansion of space being part and participle of evidence of decay seems reasonable to me.

Now granted if there is life on other planets; we don't have access to it to compare whether or not our environment is decaying faster than theirs. Yet it's pretty clear with the exponential multiplication of diseases and disorders via known genetic mutations we see today (that didn't exist even 250 years ago); decay is accelerating in our environment also.

 

[Halbhh]

Interesting take on "big bang". I don't think that's what atheistic scientists describe it as.

I only wrote a simplified way of presenting the leading mainstream physics theories of today (and of many decades) about the 'big bang' and 'inflation'.

While scientists and science writers try to communicate in a very simplified way by calling it an "explosion", my main point to you was simply that's it's not an 'explosion' that destroys order. This so-called 'explosion' (the word used sometimes when talking to the public that has not much understanding of physics), this "big bang" , doesn't prevent order -- instead it leads inevitably to order, since it itself is merely the physics we know of and hypothesize about in action, and that same physics leads to order as we see it all around us.

Put into a different wording (instead of 'big bang' or 'explosion':, let's call it instead a "sudden expansion of astounding rapidity but with underlying order". This sudden expansion as simply physics in action we think: it happened instantly once the physics existed. So, therefore it's built on physics that apparently is very strongly leading to a highly ordered and stable universe, as we can see.

 

[The Righterzpen]

Wrong. The Ediacaran is long before the Cambrian your source claims was the sudden appearance of all phyla. And we see organisms there that are partially-formed examples of later organisms your guy assumed to have appeared in the Cambrian.

Show me a certifiable example of a "half formed" organism; that did not emerge as the result of some fluke of nature (like Siamese twins today).

So how is it that we have many, many desert fossils?

"Desert fossils" or fossils found in deserts? There is a difference. Things under certain conditions that die in deserts tend to become mummified. That's different than fossilization.

Fossils are found in deserts because at one point, obviously that area had been subject to vast quantities of water to form those fossils in the first place. This is why "weird" fossils (like fish and other aquatic life) are sometimes found in high altitude deserts.

No. For example, the first specimens of Archaepteryx fell into anoxic bottoms, and were preserved the the environment, and slowly buried in accumulated silt.

How did they go from an oxygenated environment (assuming that they'd need it to survive although there are some life forms that do not need oxygen) to the anoxic bottom? There would have to be a reason for them getting there and some sort of cataclysmic event that buried them.

Although it is true that the further down one goes into the ocean, the less oxygen, the less heat the slower decomposition is. But are things even today that are buried under layers of silt truly considered fossils? I guess that depends on how broad your definition of a fossil is. There are objects and humans preserved in air tight containers who don't decompose; but that's not truly a "fossil" either.