what is this??

ob said:
I guess it doesn't make me very popular, either, then; no offense intended :oops:

None taken. Some friends of mine (among them the author/artist of "Who Will Be Eaten First?") were recently chuckling about the term (they're Jewish) and I had to explain that the mighty grouper is an awesome predator. They were under the impression that it was considerably lower in the foodchain than that and were laughing about the anti-semitism of naming a presumed bottom-feeder after the Hebrews. The next comment was something along the lines of renaming it the Moshe Dayan-fish, to which I responded that they generally have two eyes. The conversation kept devolving from that point.
 
bobwonderbuns said:
I haven't figured out how to quote something in my reply.

Well, if it helps, you need to write [ QUOTE] before the section you are referring to, then [ /QUOTE] afterwards. Don't put the space in I have placed after the bracket though, I've only done that here or these instructions would come out as quotes themselves!

Advanced class: to quote a named invidual you need to write something along the lines of [ QUOTE=George W Bush], then [ /QUOTE] afterwards.

You can always try editing any post you have already made to fix it.

Cheers!
 
Well, while the scientists scoff at the existance of large carcharodons, their only proof is "well, we haven't dissected one yet.", hardly sufficient to sway me, I'm afraid...this same mind set declared the coelecanth extinct, the idea that an anaconda could swallow a person insane.

They also seem to not believe in King Arthur, which horrifies me.
 
Watch it guys, I'm from herring country! Bring me your biggest tree!!!

Grouper can get really large, but they'd have to be in the order of tens of feet, not 8, to qualify as sufficiently large to swallow a man whole, including enough air to allow for three days worth of respiration. You'd be hard pressed to find a grouper of appropriate size, especially in the mediterranean...

PS: Pressing the "quote" button also helps :biggrin2:
 
One reason I have no clue how to respond to this is that in looking at what's known to science to try to explain what is essentially a miraculous event in the Bible, one has to decide what parts of traditional science to disregard. Since you are willing to believe in the literal fact that Jonah was eaten by a large fish in the mediterranian, and that God miraculously allowed him to live for days, why wouldn't one believe that God created a special, customized fish as well. At least some Biblical literalists (I have not figured out whether you fall in this category or not) do not believe the Earth is old enough for any of this discussion about extinct fishes to be meaningful-- if the Earth is 6000 years old, then talking about conclusions we've reached about sharks that we believe were extinct a million years ago is a contadiction. Unless you somehow specify where you draw the line between science and faith, asking for some sort of scientific guess as to what might be referred to in this story seems to me to be an ill-posed question. From my understanding of science, which is of course not perfect, the some of the fish and whales listed might swallow a man, although many of them would be likely to chew them to death first, but none would allow him to live for days afterwards. If you are willing to accept supernatural explanations to get around this issue, then why limit yourself to the known natural possibilities for what species of fish it could be?

I don't think anyone is meaning to object to your faith, I think it's not obvious how to reconcile the parts of your faith that don't seem consistent with science in such a way that science can answer your question. Science pretty much says that there is no fish that can fit the bill... if you want the "closest fit," and assume that a miracle accounts for the difference, there's still a lot of room for argument as to what the "closest fit" would be, because once you accept that miracles are occurring, it's hard to decide whether it is a more likely miracle for it to have been a big whale, a big shark, a big clownfish, or a big river catfish that miraculously swam out of the amazon into salt water and made its way to the Mediterranean.

Just my -- I just haven't seen a coherent question so I'm not surprised that there's not much agreement on the answer. Monty

thanks Monty for your thoughts! I agree with you, there is a lot of wiggle room here -- certainly nobody can say "It was a great white shark, I know, I was there..." :hmm: At this point I like the thought it was a large fish (probably 15-25 feet long) but not of the shark family (as Jonah was vomited up -- going through those teeth which are pointed inward may pose a problem...:shock:) I like the thought of a grouper too. But that's just speculation on my part. Like you, I've also considered the possibility that God created a special fish just for the occasion. Hey, anything's possible! I've had a number of people ask, so I'll just say briefly, no I'm not a bible "literalist", I believe some is parabolic, some is literal, some is allegorical and some is figurative. The Jonah account I believe is factual. And no, my faith hasn't taken any hits on this one. Differing views make for the best conversations! It's been a very invigorating discussion and I appreciate the spirit very much! Now, about that grouper... :biggrin2:
 
cthulhu77 said:
Well, while the scientists scoff at the existance of large carcharodons, their only proof is "well, we haven't dissected one yet."...

But isn't that the true scientific way? Don't believe anything without empirical evidence? :squidaut:

And thank you, Feelers, for your thoughtful reply to my query. Again, I am not a scientist, and not up on all the "where withal" that most scientists are privy to. I can only question on the basis of what I read and hear on various news/documentary shows (very interesting stuff! - esp. Shark Week!).

But it still seems to me that there should just be "more" to go on than what I am seeing and hearing. There's no DNA to base things on when speaking of fossils... there's no real way to date fish fossils found in water as sea, ocean, etc is just too fluid (realizing of course that fossils are carbon-dated by the ground they're found in rather than by the fossil itself)... it just leaves too much up in the air! What else is there?

Again, thank you for the info... if I get on anyone's nerves... let me know.

P.S. It seems to be that a wise Creator who created all the laws of the universe would not be so quick to violate the very laws He put into motion -- at least, not too often. So any fish that would swallow a man would probably be one that was already here... perhaps this "sea monster" was one of those that was "fished" out of existance between then and now? I mean, how many whale species could no longer exist due to man's wastefulness?
 
I am not entirely sure, but I believe that carbon dating is only good for 50,000 years. After that, Argon dating is the method used, although that might be only for volcanic activity. Perhaps someone else can explain?

Anyways on the dating thing wikipedia has a fairly good brief rundown on the techniques used. Chronological dating - Wikipedia

Just thought I'd see if wikipedia had Megalodon, and the info your after about it is here... Megalodon - Wikipedia .
It appears there are different groups of thought within the scientific community about it. It even has that quote from 1918 in the start of the thread.
Wikipedia's awesome :biggrin2:
 
Carbon dating uses material from the fossil itself, and Feelers is correct is only useful to maybe ~50,000 yrs, which is actually pretty optimistic for most specimens and most laboratories. The half life of 14C is about 5730 yrs, so that's roughly 9 half-lives. Usually you don't go much beyond 6 half-lives.

Feelers is also correct there's a few other radioactive isotopes in the toolbox with different half-lives that are useful and I'm sure the Wikipedia entry has plenty of useful information.

There are a number of other drawers in the geochronologist's toolbox as well. The "key" is finding events that manifest themselves globally, but also quickly. Quickly as in they happen faster than the resolution of sedimentation. An example of this is the magnetic poles reversing. This happens on a scale of hundreds to thousands of years, and manifests itself in many sedimentary rocks. If you take a piece of a sedimentary rock out that has, say, magnetite grains cemented in it, you can tell which way was north and which way was south back when it was deposited. That in and of itself isn't very useful, but scientists have put together a complete record of every reversal going back hundreds of millions of years and given them nice numbers. I'll come back to that in a sec.

Another thing to use are fossils. Specifically fossils of animals that evolve and spread around the world quickly, like the ammonites.

The trick is putting all this data together. The project for my master's degree has to do with the Hell Creek and Fort Union formations in the US western interior. The Hell Creek is a system that is dominated by terrestrial sedimentation (flooding rivers), and it sits on another formation called the Fox Hills which is mostly deposition just offshore.

What if I want to know the age of the contact between the Hell Creek and Fox Hills? There's a few ash layers around, but they're not very good and no one's gotten a very good radiometric date from them. So I start looking for ammonites as close to the top of the Fox Hills as I can. When I find a good one, I know old it is because someone's already done the work of finding that genus of ammonite next to a date-able volcanic layer somewhere else in the world. Once I know that, I know the maximum age that contact could be, say roughly 70 million years. To find the other end of the range, I have to look in the Hell Creek formation. This is more difficult because its terrestrial where a) things don't always evolve as quickly, b) things don't preserve as well and c) the sedimentation rate might not be as high (lower resolution).

So maybe the only thing I see there are a bunch of Triceratops. That doesn't help me because they lived for a few millions of years, it doesn't narrow things down.

But then I do a paleo-mag study, and find there's a big pole reversal right smack dab in the middle of the formation. Since other scientists before me have made a near-complete record of when these reversals occured (again, by finding the reversal in another part of the world next to something that's dateable in a different way), then I only need to figure out which reversal it is. In fact (without looking at my notes) I believe its 29R to 29N (reverse to normal polar orientation) which we determine because we know its the only one between 70 and 65 million years (the latter date being a decent radiometric date from a number of separate locations for the K/T boundary), and we know from previous work that reversal is around 67 million years.

So from this we know our contact is between 67 and 70 million years old. To get this further we can do things like estimate sedimentation rates. Since we know two points in the Hell Creek, our reversal and a radiometric date from the top of the formation, we can determine a rate of sedimentation for that time, say a certain number of centimeters per thousand years. We might assume that was a constant rate (which in many cases is a testable hypothesis!!) and extrapolate the time to the bottom of the formation from that magnetic point we have in the middle.

Basically it all comes down to a framework of relative ages. We know event A is younger than event B because it is higher stratigraphically. We know that A is the same as C because the same index fossil (one that's global but goes extinct real quick) at both sites; thus we know C is younger than B. Etc, etc etc. Once you have that relative framework, you can start getting radiometric dates anywhere in the system and calibrating when everything is on an absolute scale.

Now, in reality, its a lot more complicated then that. You're using lots of different fossils at the same time :smile:

Dan
 
Thank you, Dan, for giving me what is probably the best reply one can provide to an amateur (or less). :wink:

Thank you, Feelers, for the link... very interesting! I really enjoyed the 1918 quote! One truly has to wonder what could possibly frighten so badly these seasoned fishermen! Wow!

Thanks to all! I have kept you off topic too long. Perhaps it is best I sit back and 'listen.'

My last poser would be... "are Jellyfish kosher?" :biggrin2:
 

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