» Home > In the News

Millipedes as Big as Cars

27 December 2021
Biology

Robert sent in some interesting links, such as https://phys.org/news/2021-12-millipedes-big-cars-roamed-northern.html … millipedes as big as cars roamed northern England. The link has an image which shows a sandstone boulder with a fossilised section of a giant millipede within it – caught up in sand during a catastrophic event [or the discarded casing of a millipede that was later fossilised, as in the interpretation given]. He dates the millipede to the Carboniferous period, famous for its coal measures, around 326 million years ago on the geological column. This was long before the dinosaurs. It is the longest known invertebrate animal known so far. The segment was 75cm long, not exactly a giant. However, it is estimated the whole animal was 27m in length – a very big millipede. It was found in 2018 when a large block of sandstone fell down from cliffs on to the beach at Howick in Northumberland. It split apart to reveal the fossil. A geology student ambled along, scuffling for finds following the cliff fall, and picked it up. It is thought that during the Carboniferous, Britain was located near the equator. The specimen, we are told, was found in a former river channel – or a channel of water [marked by the sand deposit]. The fossil boulder was so big it took four people to carry it up from the beach.

At https://phys.org/news/2021-12-ancient-relative-velociraptor-unearthed-gr… … an ancient relative of the Velociraptor has been found on the Isle of Wight in southern England, a rich picking ground for dinosaur fossils that fall out of cliffs above the beach. See also https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cretres.2021.105123

Finally, Robert provides a further link, to https://crev.info/2021/12/microfossil-divination/ … by David Coppedge, a Creationist. Robert adds, David Coppedge, at the Creation Research centre has a post on fossils. He says they are found in 'mass kill' events that do not represent the original habitat of the living animals, or plants. In fact, land marine life forms are often found together in  the same deposit, buried immediately and together. Coppedge says it is necessary to deflate the rhetoric in order to analyse the work they have really done. That is something that is worth taking onboard, as the media often simply accept the press releases and don't bother to actually read the research papers themselves. Or question the findings.

This particular post concerns a mass kill site in North Dakota which was on the News a few weeks ago. It dates back to close to the K/T or K/Pg boundary event, the asteroid strike so beloved by media and schoolboys. It is 2000 miles from Chicxulub, the impact site in the Yucatan. Coppedge repeats several times that the dinosaurs were  wiped out – but not the butterflies. I will have to look this up as I don't kn ow what he is talking about here, but he seems to think butterflies lived beyond the boundary event date. According to the research paper the impact caused a huge surge of water, from the Inland Seaway. However, both the sea way and the surge into North Dakota could have been as a result of a huge tidal wave from the impact site in the Gulf of Mexico. Coppedge is in denial. Why? The answer to that is quite obviously bound up with Creationists wishing the Cretaceous strata to represent evidence of Noah's flood. Coppedge didn't explain that but went out of his  way to debunk the asteroid impact storyline. It doesn't fit his agenda. What he would not also acknowledge, of course, is than an extraterrestrial object was associated with the Biblical event as well – the giant Og. However, that would have been at some point in the Holocene -not the Cretaceous.

Skip to content