sonickid01

The compass on my screen is Zan's Minimap. It's usable by anybody and is simple to install.

Way to ninja all the points I was going to make!!! I was just about to reply to mattj's post and then I saw yours lol. Great to see another person with a brain here :)

If you want a real alternative religious theory to intelligent design, try this. (LOL)

intelligent

Sometimes I feel as if people don't understand me
Then I laugh because everyone must know Majungatholus atopus by first name

don't stereotype my people bro
Some paleontologists focus on not having a spine
having no back bone, you know?
Most prefer not even standing upright

or hate that song that much

Why do I suddenly want to bat your head into orbit using my boner?

I hope you're learning :D

who cares lol

well I think it beats a lot of the bullshit in there right now

you are welcome.

I got your religion thread going with gusto, I'm sure I'll get a fuckload of flak for what I said but it's what is what. :D

anytime, I try to educate people and obviously like talking about this stuff.

You know what blew my mind a bit- relativity. FUCK was that hard to grasp with my black and white mind.

hell no, academia can fuck itself. LOL

Yeah comparing one bone to another to see relationships and etc.

Typically (unless there is ash in the layer) you measure a layer of igneous that is fossil devoid and then you use stratigraphic principles to determine how old the layers above and below it are.

I believe that, with the exception of carbon, all of those are measured in the igneous rock itself and not an organism.

It's not daughter and parent nucleides, it's not DNA- it's isotopes.

I do comparative anatomy and consulting, mostly. It's what I'm really good at.

Eryops is part of a radiation of 'amphibians' called Temnospondyls, it's kind of the flagship member considering that everyone knows it. Not really a transition into much, to be honest.

A good rundown of radiometric methods.

Radiometric dating critics simply don't understand how it works. You take a radioactive parent isotope, deposited at an assumed constant to today (See: Uniformitarianism) and as it decays at a known rate, you use the half-life (the time it takes for half of the amount to decay to a stable isotope)to determine how many times it has been halved, which gives you a time frame. Obviously, as with any paleo, the focus decreases as you go back in time. Different types are used for different things- for example, Carbon dating is only good for like 5730 years in the past or something. We use a lot of volcanics in this because volcanics reset the decay clock, so you can measure from when it was deposited originally. It doesn't really work for sedimentary or metamorphic- so once you know the age of a dyke or a sill or something, you can use strat + sedimentology to determine a pretty decent age of the rock. That's why there is always a range and that range gets bigger as you go further back.

Eryops isn't a transitional form. Well, technically everything is a transitional form...but yeah, it's not one of them pegged like that. Try something like Eusthenopteron, Lagosuchus, Petrolacosaurus or Hylonomus.

I certainly don't use radiometric dating, just the output from it. I use a lot of stratigraphy, which looks at rates of sedimentation in a given environment and observation that younger layers, unless overturned (and there is always evidence if they are), are always at the top.

Tell me about yourself. I'm a paleontologist, for reals, so it'd be nice to have another friend who is into this stuff!

Ah thanks man, yeah it and Eryops are pretty cool

Nice Tiktaalik avatar

i approve of your cong posts in the last day or so