This problem's a snap to solve -- just change the name of the joint to 'Big Valley 'Cretin' Science 'Museum' "

Welcome to the Big Valley (Alberta) Creation Science Museum. Edgar Nernberg, the man who discovered five 60-million-year-old fish fossils, serves on the board of the "museum."

"This can go down as one of the best examples ever of why it's downright impossible to convince someone who's 'opposed' to evolution that it's a basic fact: If you think the very tenets of science are misguided, pretty much any evidence presented to you can be written off as fabricated or misinterpreted."

-- the Washington Post's Rachel Feltman, in "Whoops! A
creationist museum supporter stumbled upon a major fossil find"

by Ken

I think frequently of a pungent quote passed on to me by my college roommate Brian, who had grown up in Manchester, NH, and apparently once boasted, "Once I make up my mind, I don't let facts get in the way of my opinion." To which there's not a whole lot to be said.

In this spirit, imagine the situation of a confirmed creationist, secure enough in his comical delusions to put his money where his mouth is, actively supporting a "creation science museum" -- Canada's first, in Big Valley, Alberta (it opened in 2007), devoted to the "science" of the proposition that the earth is 6000 years old -- who while digging in a basement in Calgary stumbles across the fossilized remains of five fish a mere 60 million years old.


Calgary Sun caption: "An assemblage of fossilized fish was recently found during the excavation of a basement in a new development in northwest Calgary, Alta. Five fish were found in a block of sandstone in the Paskapoo Formation -- a roughly 60 million-year-old rock formation that underlies Calgary and much of the surrounding area. The discovery was made by Edgar Nernberg. Photo provided by the University of Calgary"

Actually, for Edgar Nernberg there doesn't appear to be any problem. The discovery "hasn't changed my mind," he's told the Calgary Sun. "We all have the same evidence, and it's just a matter of how you interpret it. There's no dates stamped on these things."

Which prompted this from the Washington Post's Rachel Feltman:

No sir, no dates. Just, you know, isotopic dating, basic geology, really shoddy stuff like that. To be fair, I'm not any more capable of figuring out when a particular fossil is from than Nernberg is. I'd be one sorry paleontologist, given the opportunity. I've never even found a fossil, so he's got me there. But the science of dating fossils is not shaky -- at least not on the order of tens of millions of years of error -- so this fossil and the rocks around it really do give new earth creationism the boot.

But this can go down as one of the best examples ever of why it's downright impossible to convince someone who's "opposed" to evolution that it's a basic fact: If you think the very tenets of science are misguided, pretty much any evidence presented to you can be written off as fabricated or misinterpreted.

Even if you dig that evidence up with your own hands.

Notwithstanding the discoverer's inability to understand what he discovered, it's a significant discovery, Rachel notes.

The scientific community is thrilled and grateful for the find, and the University of Calgary will unveil the five fossils on Thursday. These fish lived in a time just after the dinosaurs were wiped out, when other species were able to thrive in the giants' absence. It's an important point in Earth's evolutionary history, because new species were popping up all over to make up for the ecological niches dinos left behind. Creatures from this era give us some breathtaking glimpses of evolution in progress. But it's rare to find fossils of that age in Calgary, since most of the rocks are too old and yield dinosaurs instead.

In Edgar Nernberg's fundyworld, of course, those dinosaurs cohabited with humans, all within earth's 6000-year history.
"Ironically," writes Rachel, "Nernberg's contributions at the Creation Science Museum are almost certainly what scientists have to thank for the find."

He's an amateur fossil collector, and he knew the fish were special as soon as he spotted them. "When the five fish fossils presented themselves to me in the excavator bucket, the first thing I said was you’re coming home with me, the second thing was I better call a paleontologist," Nernberg said in a statement.

“Most people would have overlooked these. When these were uncovered, Edgar right away recognized them,” Darla Zelenitsky, paleontologist and assistant professor of geoscience at the University of Calgary, told the Sun. "He’s apparently interested in fossils, and that’s probably how he saw them. An ordinary person might have just seen blobs in the rock.”

Nernberg is reportedly seeking a cast of one of the fish so he can put it on display at the creationist museum.

Well, sure Edgar'd like that for his "museum." After all, those fish could be thousands of years old!

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