Creationist can actively impede science. One of the largest mastodon fossils ever found was discovered on a ranch in Texas owned by a fellow named Joe Taylor — an infamous creationist who runs the Mt. Blanco Fossil "Museum", a wacky little place that peddles fossils while claiming they support a 6,000 year old earth. Now he's putting it up for auction, and you can buy the skull for something north of $60,000.
We can't win this one. Even if it's bought by a reputable museum and studied scientifically, it still means that this creationist is going to get a huge chunk of change to use in promoting more lies.
- Log in to post comments
Steal it from the bastard.
Have faith, PZ! The truth will out!
Eh, if we're lucky, he'll just put the money towards buying a new fancy car or something. Televangelists line their own pockets enough, and this guy is likely of the same stock, ne?
It's kinda endearing how much faith =avancna has in PZed's ability to rake in money.
I wish it were true.
- Sili (who doesn't go by that name on DA because it's his guilty pleasure)
You'd think that the man would, you know, give it to a legitimate scientific institute, so that they can prove it's only 6,000 years old. After all, Jebus's word is irrefutable, right? So what's the harm in letting the scientists disprove their own "dogma"?
danley-- Its only ~5 hours from me. We will have it 7 am tomorrow morning.
A mastodon skull will fit in the backseat of a Malibu, right?
Hasn't some of its scientific value already been destroyed through having been removed from the scene by a nutter, of no relevant training, who won't have kept a proper record of the in situ disposition? Or were other people employed by him to do the tricky stuff? :-/
FEXAKE!!! Have you gone to this crackpot's site? He's made the lower tusks snap on and off the lower maxila by fitting the skull with little magnets! And he's strung led lights in the hollowed out teeth! AND he's used the leds to illuminate the brain cavity!
He hasn't done the lighting as part of the display-- HE'S FUCKING MADE IT A PART OF THE SKULL!!!
--Sorry-- I'm an amateur paleontologist, and I cannot believe how this putz has tampered with the fossil. "Improving" it for viewing. Fucking putz!
He has no idea of the true value of this find.
I suppose I should be grateful this madman hasn't just ground it up to keep it out of the hands of scientists.
Let him keep it.
I hope he has to stare at it for the rest of his life. It will remain as his personal monument to his outdated, corrupt, and worse-than-useless belief system who's authorities so easily prostitute themselves for their own greed.
As for science, there will be many more mastodon skulls.
If a reputable science organization buys it, it will, at the very least, prevent some crackpot fundie group from using it to spread lies. True, he will profit from the sale no matter what happens, and may well use the proceeds to fund more outrageous programs, but it's better that a real museum or research outfit gets it, rather than another creationist front.
Eminent Domain?
And no doubt he takes the windfall as a sign from God to keep up the good work.
Ignore it. It could have been important, but a) it's not unique, and b) he's screwed around with it enough to have degraded its significance.
ERV, just make sure you're packing heat. This has to be a strictly covert operation.
The first word should be in the plural, I think.
Sounds like this guy has already heavily damaged the fossil, and while large specimens are neat and all, we can get by just fine without this one.
I bet ground mastodon tusks would sell for a pretty price in Chinese herbal shops as an aphrodisiac or general health potion.
http://www.mtblanco.com/ForSale/2006/4_Tusk_Crew.JPG
I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
I'll take a bullet for ERV. Plus, I have a truck. Although, I've seen what happens to trucks in that part of the country, and I'm not too sure I want to risk it.
From one of their funny pages.
Can't wait! lol
I visited the Mt. Blanko site, and read a bit about a fossil dinosaur with another fossil dinosaur in the first's stomach. In a couple of pages the first fossil is described (I assume most accurately) as a dog-sized dinosaur, then as a dog-like dinosaur, and finally as simply a dog living among and eating dinosaurs. Oh yeah, it was also a parrot-like dinosaur for a bit.
The word "fucktard" fits so well that it is nearly impossible to speak of these... well, fucktards, without resorting to it. I hope it doesn't become trite, as I love using it.
Autumn, I will not be checking on that site but my guess is they had seen an article somewhere on Repenomamus, an Early Cretaceous stem-mammal (nearly badger-sized, one of the biggest Mesozoic mammals known and one of the most complete skeletons) which had ?Psittacosaurus (small ceratopsian dinosaur) remains inside it. To most fucktards, and many others besides, 'dinosaur' just means any vertebrate fossil.
Maybe someday--in the far future--he will be the fossil that's for sale. Skull, late Holocene, good condition, ...
Why is it always Texas?
Not true Z, sometimes it's Florida. ;)
ooooh, my favourite is the fossil "Giant Race of Men" femur they have on display. 120 centimetres long. Jeez, we got all short in 6000 years. And since the Shroud of Turin shows Jesus to be of normal height I guess all that there shortening must have happened in the first 4000 years.
Interestingly the staff seems to consist solely of relatives and the odd crackpot. However this very powerhouse of paleontological knowledge does have one person on staff with sciencey-type qualifications - a B.Sc in Biomedical Science.
Bride 'o shrek:
that "giant race of men" con goes a LONG way back.
an interesting bit of trivia:
http://www.historybuff.com/library/refbarnum.html
Having apparently nothing better to do with my life I have just perused their catalogue and interestingly one of the fossils is described as Triassic. WTF?I thought they didn't believe there was a Triassic period. Or, do they use all the usual names for the Epochs, Periods etc but just think they're, like, 3 days long? The sheer dickheadedness of it all is making my brain hurt. Fuck this, I'm off to stare at the bottom of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire.
Arrrrggghh!!!! I need a sacrifice here! The fossil will do. The Texan not the mastodon skull.
Ichthyic,
Brilliant stuff. My fake's more real than your fake so there. Nyah, nyah,nyah.
For a bit there I was going to email the museum and ask what happened to the big guys. I mean did God not like basketball so he smote them all out of existence?
Bride o'S.
It all happened because of the Fall, don't you know. Part of His divine retribution was that He messed with their genes and made them shrink, from one generation to the next.
My reference for this is PZ's post on that YEC cartoon Pink Giants in the Earth, which claimed "Adam may have been around 15 feet tall. Then mankind "deteriorated"... Noah at 12 feet... and now we're down to half of that!"
'Sides, their hoops had to have been higher off the ground. Likely they used coconuts and the T. Rex types held the hoops in their mouths and got to keep the coconuts after the game.
:)
JohnnieCanuck, I can buy into the T Rexes being kind enough to to the hoops. I can even buy into the T Rexes being rewarded with the coconuts after the game. But I cannot buy into the idea of coconuts bouncing. How could these teams of giants dribble the coconuts?
I have found the True Cross and the Holy Grail in my back yard. They're for sale for 1,000,000 dollars each. I hope you don't mind I have mounted some LED lights on the Cross and shined the Holy Grail with some sandpaper. Oh and I filled these ugly nail holes on the wood. I attached a hook on the back for mounting on the wall and put a neon sign saying INBI on top.
come on I want some bids from Christiuns
#18
Wow, look, it's Darwin and Marx dressed up as cowboys.
Fuck this, I'm off to stare at the bottom of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire.
ooh, good choice; think I'll ditto that.
Ugh. I tried reading this guy's website and it was cringe worthy.
What a douche' bag.
Dan and Abbie, y'all can use my house in Austin as a lair. And forget the truck, we'll use my minivan. The skull will fit inside and we can put all that junk I carry (coats, extra pillows, abandoned articles of the kids' clothes) in with it for the perfect disguise. I've always declared that a white woman in a minivan could rob a bank and drive way unsuspected -- this would be a good time to test my hypothesis. Plus, I speak Texan and know "church talk" in case we have to talk our way out. It will be like Ocean's 13 without the explosives.
p.s. Don't bring the guns. We can do fine without them.
I think I misspelled ERV's name. And I don't really know how big this skull is, come to think of it. I have a big minivan, so maybe this could work. If not, we can use my husband's truck; it has Texas plates so we can get away clean.
Of course Joe's Mastodons command a premium- finest provenance in the business- his family's been raising the critters since Grandad Taylor drove the Folsom Gang off the ranch, and Joe's been burying them and digging them up in timely fashion ever since he was a lad. It seems mighty unchristian of y'all to rail at him so, as the poor feller's memory's been failing him since he turned 8200
Leigh- I'm thinking you could just rope the critter to the front of your husband's truck. A few spotlights,a gun rack and you'll just pass for a couple of Good Ol' Boys coming back from a huntin' trip.
Ichthyic- Fair way into the Sapphire, and yet still not numb to the stupidity that is the Mt Blanco Fossil Museum. Is there no drug that will dull this pain?
Sad dilemma indeed. I'd just pay the guy, probably cheaper than funding an expedition to find something similar.
The Bull Terrier Club of America used to attend USDA auctions to buy up their breed to save them from millers, etc. Then they realized that by doing that, they were promoting the continued auctioning of Bull terriers. Tough call. Let some go as collateral damage so others can be saved, or save the one in front of you.
Let him keep it.
The contribution to science that the Mastodon skull brings in a legitimate science institution will last generations longer than the contribution this twerp will make to creationism with $60k.
Besides, all this guy wants is a new F-150, a purdy new dress for his wife, and to replace the rusty screen door he ripped off bringing a tusk into the house.
I predict that the skull will be bought by a rich Texan who will mount it in his living room next to his elk rack and elephant tusks.
If ever there were a time for eminent domain, this is it.
Let's see if we can dredge up Piltdown Man.
Shouldn't we just try to convince the Creation Museum to buy it? It sounds like the specimen is nearly useless for real science now anyway. If the CM (or other "Creation Science" interests) buy it, then this asshat gets money, but the Museum loses money, and the net result is zero gain for creationism.
I will get my Britsh Motorcycle Gang, Pack our Flintlocks
and get that "SOB" to do the Creatin Hop.
I don't really know what the problem is. Do any of us boycott creationists as a rule? I mean, I would try hard not to enrich Behe or Dembski, but I bet that I buy products made from oil found with conventional science, yet with royalties being paid to idiots who deny that science. I wouldn't ask even if I could get the answer.
I just think it's amusing how readily they allow others to use real science to help them find fossils or petroleum, and how they're oh so willing to make money off of the evilutionists who are just going to "tell lies" about the mastodon's origins. Very few of them are going to use either their fossil finds or their money to try to develop ID or creationism into a real science, since they all know that there's no money in it (however, they do think that Dembski's doing science, for the only result they're interested in is "God did it", and the lack of working science from ID doesn't even register because they're not interested in that).
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Don't worry - The Market will fix everything in the end.
Grrr. There was a piece in our local paper a couple of years back about the field trip that the third grade took to Taylor's heap of shit. At taxpayer expense, of course, since it was Educational and all. They had a picture of the Giant Human Femur, proportioned just like my femurs, with a couple of kids standing by it. The paper published my letter the next week, but I doubt that it helped.
Texans? Okies? Do we need a field trip of our own? I can find the really-freakin-good Mexican food up near Crosbyton....
#43:
"The contribution to science that the Mastodon skull brings..."
Hrmm... What is the contributon to science that this skull brings? I mean, it's not a new species. There's some data from the place and the size of the find.. but surely science now knows that. Is the contribution $60,000 worth? That amount of money will fund a postdoc (like me) for maybe a year and a half. How much science can I do in a year? More than that skull, I'll betcha.
--Nathaniel
If he sells the skull with tusks, won't that break some rules against trade with endangered species? (Fossil ivory is after all still ivory.)
Fossil ivory is exempt from the ivory trading ban, as are elephant ivory objects which can be shown to have been made prior to a certain date.
In fact, mammoth ivory from Siberia was hoped by some to be able to supply enough ivory for those who were willing to pay enough, as there is a large amount of ivory in Siberia. Unfortunately, however, very little of it is of a very good quality.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
I wish our laws were more like Canada's - I believe that fossils are effectively owned by the state regardless of what land they're on, by virtue of being a part of common history. Can one of our northern readers clarify this for me?
Here's a link about archaelogical finds, Carlie:
http://www.pc.gc.ca/docs/r/pfa-fap/res-abs_e.asp
With respect to paleontological finds,
One wonders what the fearless Texas mastodon hunter makes of all the mammoth tusks recently found to be peppered with BB sized meteorites.
An obvious Hypothesis is that God and Dick Cheney are equally dangerous quail hunting companions
I say buy it with his guarantee of its claimed age, then have it carbon-dated and begin legal action for misrepresentation of age.
Thus, the lawyers get the money (nothing new there), and karmic equilibrium is maintained.