Fascinating fossil fence-wire
Photo 2 (inset): The very hard surface close up, showing encased seashells.
Click for larger view.
Photo 4 (inset): The surface of where the specimen fractured, showing the circular cross-sections of the wire.
Click for larger view.
The circular object in photo 1, about 70 cm (2.3 feet) in diameter, was found at Eighty Mile Beach in the north of Western Australia by Amy Lewis, the 11-year-old daughter of the local caravan park owners, Col and Jo Lewis.
Exposed at low tide, the object was extremely hard1 and heavy—about 75 kg (165 pounds). On examination, it was obvious even before cutting it open that a roll of modern-day fencing wire had become ‘petrified’, completely encased in solid rock.
Photo 2 shows the outside surface close up, complete with ‘fossil’ seashells.
Photos 3 and 4 show this wire-containing rock in cross and longitudinal sections.
The rock is a hard, dense, calcareous sandstone. The wire is ordinary ‘Number 8’ fencing wire of the type used at nearby Wallal Downs station between 1920 and 1970.2 Mr Lewis recalls seeing one old wing of fence running into the sea in this spot in the 1970s.
The standard practice in the area was that at the perceived end of its life (about 10 years on the coast) fencing wire was rolled into coils like this and discarded, sometimes onto the beach or into the sea.
It is clear that sand, shells and shellgrit accumulated around the wire. Then iron oxide compounds from the rusting wire acted to chemically bind this sandy shellgrit into solid rock around the wire. All of this happened in a few decades, not millions of years.
Unfortunately, the average person is still conditioned into thinking ‘millions of years’ when considering how rocks and fossils form. But as we’ve said many times with many examples—given the right conditions, rocks and fossils will form in a very short time.
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References and notes
- The specimen was so hard it ‘rang’ like a bell when struck. Even before the inside was exposed, the visual suspicion that it contained fencing wire was strengthened by the fact that it would attract a magnet. After only a few weeks in the dry air of our air-conditioned Brisbane office, it cracked and sheared cross-sectionally. Return to text.
- This was during the station’s ‘sheep era,’ when both barbed and plain wire was used. The subsequent fencing for cattle used only barbed wire. Information: Mr Col Lewis, who has lived in the area for many years. Return to text.
Readers’ comments
Bottom line, I want to know what the science is … not someone’s understanding or interpretation. Until there is empirical evidence, both evolutionists and creationists are taking a leap of faith.
In geological and paleontological parlance, which are the fields directly relevant to the article, accreted artifacts or remains do not generally constitute fossils as they are understood by professionals of those fields. While the definition you choose to apply may be valid under certain circumstances, it is at best fallacious, and at worst deliberately misleading to portray these findings using the terminology differently than those you are refuting might. It’s dishonest to comment on one definition while using another, portraying the two as equivalent while refusing to acknowledge the actual differences between the two.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia
Accretion may refer to:
In science
This is clearly fossilisation people.
There is no such thing as millions of years to a scientifically logical mind it makes nonsense thinking that.
Job 8:9: for we were born only yesterday and know nothing, and our days on earth are but a shadow.
Can preservation of organisms take place suddenly? Sudden freezing is a prime example, a variation of which occurred during the Ice Age. One however doesn’t need millions or billions of years to achieve this.
I agree with this article and the inherent argumentative logic.
I wonder if any conventional methods of dating fossils were used to see how many ‘millions of years old’ the wire is. If indeed any lab would run the tests, obtaining an outrageous age may shed a little light on how or why such methods are so patently erroneous.
We need to have a simple explanation that will convince the masses as to why those methods are so far off the mark, and if it can be done, create reliable and accurate alternative dating methods–not my area of expertise.
But of course, it’s God’s design for us to exercise faith, and that may never satisfy the materialists’ intellectual arrogance.
Your reference to this artifact as a “fossil” is grossly incorrect. Your description of the electro chemical process does not produce “rock” nor “sandstone”.
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