Darwin’s Dog-leg; The Last leg of his 1831 Welsh visit

At Capel Curig I left Sedgwick and went in a straight line by compass and map
across the mountains to Barmouth, never following any track unless it coincided with
my course. I thus came to some strange wild places and enjoyed much this manner of
travelling. I visited Barmouth to see more Cambridge friends who were reading there,
and thence returned to Shrewsbury and to Maer for shooting;” (Darwin and Huxley,
1983: 40).

So wrote Charles Darwin in his Autobiography which he wrote when he was nearly seventy, reminiscing about his geological tour of North Wales in which he joined Adam Sedgwick, geology professor at Cambridge in August 1831. This is repeated ad nauseam and often verbatim in biographies of Darwin as his pre-Beagle life is considered.

They only thing wrong with it is that it is simply not true and though Darwin did walk from Capel Curig to Barmouth, he had left Sedgwick a few days earlier in the vicinity of Bangor and he did not go “in a straight line by compass and map across the mountains to Barmouth, never following any track unless it coincided with my course.” If anyone does believe that Darwin did follow a compass bearing from Capel Curig to Barmouth I shall happily follow that direct route with him  (no woman would be so keen to get a Darwin award) and plod along until he gives up.

This account describes the work I did twenty five years ago while living in North Wales and link to the paper I wrote in Archive of Natural History

Darwinsdogleg1998

During the nineties I obtained copies of all Darwin’s geological notes of Shropshire and North Wales and slowly visited all the sites. I worked out his routes and compared his geological notes with modern understandings. Luckily I did not have time contraints as most researchers would have and combined it with my own exploration of the area. I had an excellent field assistant and companion, Topper, who always accompanied me. Here he is as the top of Cwm Cneifion in the Glyderau when he patiently waited for me to surmount a cornice which he found easy-peasy.

For the first part of his 1831 geological trip to Wales Darwin’s companion also had a dog-collar*, the Rev Prof Adam Sedgwick, one of the greatest geologists of his generation. Darwin was very lucky to be taught by him, even if he was more liable to snap than Topper. Sedgwick gave us the Cambrian and much of the Devonian too. As a devout Christian he had no time for the Creationists of his day and his spat with the creationist Dean Cockburn of York was little more than farce.

• not actually true as dog-collars came in later in the 19th century!

Read here;

https://michaelroberts4004.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/how-to-deal-with-victorian-creationists-and-win/

This map traces his route. From 4th  to 19th August Darwin was with Sedgwick, travelling from Shrewsbury and then round Anglesey after a quick visit to Dublin. Account here

https://michaelroberts4004.wordpress.com/2020/07/03/just-before-the-beagle-darwin-in-wales-1831/

The router superimposed on an old geological map

After leaving Sedgqwick near Bangor, Darwin travelled to Ogwen Cottage. I presume he took a coach as what is now Ogwen Cottage was a coaching inn, much needed to change exhausted horses after the pull-up from Bethesda. From there he went round Cwm Idwal on his own – contrary to his Autobiography – and made geological observations which are described in the second part of this paper;

https://michaelroberts4004.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/darwins-first-attempt-at-geology-llanymynech/

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I could go into raptures about Cwm Idwal which I first visited in 1963. I first climbed the peaks round about. It is the place of my first rock climb. Since then I have regularly been up the peaks in all weathers. This is the same view as the above!!

Darwin went round the lake but we may ask how did he get to Plas Y Brenin in Capel Curig. He could have walked along the old road, got a ride or went over the tops of the Glyderau, which are about 1000 metres. That would have been a nice stroll for Darwin!

Cwm Idwal is a great place for bog plants, especially sundew, butterwort and bog asphodel.

This is looking down to Llyn Idwal and Nant Francon from the Glyderau.  That day I was on a field trip with Harvard students. By the lake it was raining and when a speck of blue sky appear Andrew Berry suggested we walked over the tops to Plas y Brenin. The weather simply improved with my best views ever. As we walked over the tops one student told me I was very fast for my age. I was only 61 then! Cheeky blighter!

For comparison, the road walk from Idwal to Plas y Brenin is six miles and would have taken less than two hours. The mountain route is seven miles and would take at least three hours, except for mountain goats. It took us a good three hours, but I slowed the students down!

And so we sped over GlyderFawr and Glyder Fach and then down the ridge to Plas y Brenin. This was a coaching inn and both Darwin and Queen Victoria stayed and both scratched their names on a window!

The ridge as we dropped down to Plas y Brenin and the lakes.

Plas y Brenin, a Victorian coaching inn

An early morning view of Snowdon from Plas y Brenin looking over the Llynau Mymbyr. As Darwin stayed here many times in the 1820s as well as 1831 and then in 1842, he would have known the view.

Darwin began his route to Barmouth from Plas y Brenin and I describe it in this paper 

Archives of Natural History (1998) 25 (1): 59-73
Darwin’s dog-leg: the last stage of Darwin’s Welsh field trip of 1831

PDF here; Darwinsdogleg1998

Darwin spent two nights at Plas y Brenin. On the first day he climbed Moel Siabod 872 metres and an easy climb from the inn. Then, having left Sedgwick a letter (missing from Cambrdiger University Library) describing his geological findings at Cwm idwal, walked to Barmouth.

Darwin claimed to have followed a compass bearing to Barmouth, which would give a route of 26 miles or 40 km. I think Darwin could have done it in a day but would have been totally knackered for the next few days. The compass route is horrific with very rough terrain and few paths. The first part to the Vale of Ffestiniog is bad enough but to continue over the Rhinogau would be ten times worse. It would involve wading through large heather covered boulders! I suppose it could be done. It is excess of anything I have done in Snowdonia, or anywhwere but then I am lazy. It makes my walk of 20 miles and 6000ft of climbing from Bethesda over all the Glyderau summits and then from Capel Curig to Dolwyddelan, or 18 miles and 6000ft of climbing over the Carneddau seem short strolls! (Both of these took me about ten hours. I was 41 for the Glyderau walk and 53 for the Carneddau.)  To my knowledge nobody has actually followed Darwin’s remembered route! To do so you would be given a Darwin award!!!!

A study of Darwin’s notes gives markers to the route, as he gives notes to various outcrops. Most significant was the outcrop at Carreg y Fran which he described in detail (see paper) and is locality no 7 on the map. It is 6km or 4 miles to the east of his compass route. As his notes are a fair description of the site it is beyond question. I slowly pieced together his route and walked most of it with my assistant, Topper. There was no following of a compass direction with a masochism worthy of Orde Wingate in Ethiopia, but Darwin followed clear tracks from Capel to Dolwyddelan then over the Sarn Helen, past Carreg y Fran to Ffestiniog where he spent the night on 22nd August.

The following day he followed the road south before taking a track over Bwlch Drws Ardudwy  and thence to Barmouth. It was two fairly easy days.

On page 61 of my paper I gave a timeline for August 1831, which I made in 1997 before I had realised than Darwin had accompanied Sedgwick around Anglesey. Hence I had Darwin staying in Barmouth for eleven nights. On realising he went round Anglesey I revised the dates with Darwin visiting Cwm Idwal on 20th August and leaving Capel Curig on the 22nd. Thus he would most likely have stayed in Ffestiniog on the 22nd. This is confirmed by Lucas in Archives of Natural History 29 (1) p1-26, 2002. Lucas looked more at documentary evidence rather than identifying geological localities.

Moel Siabod. Darwin  climbed from the RHS just out of view and descended the ridge facing the camera!

For the journey Darwin had a copy of Walker’s map which was published in 1824. It was a small scale and not always accurate. Those familiar with the area will acknowledge the difficulty of using this map, but Darwin was familiar with the area. However he knew the terrain in the Rhinogau from previous visits.

There is, and was, a good track from Capel Curig to Dolwyddelan and from there went south along the valley to the boggy moreland east of Moel Penamnen and joined the Sarn Helel.

Moel Siabod from above Dolwyddelan.

Snowdon                               Glyderau                                               Moel Siabod

The boogy moor!

Carreg y Fran from the summit of Manod Mawr with Cwm Penmachno in the background. Sarn Helen is a matter of yards on the far side of Carreg y Fran.

A close-up of the crag, which Darwin described as conglomerate but today is agglomerate.

Carreg y Fran from B4391 to the west of Ffestiniog. This photo was taken on the return from climbing Snowdon by the Rhyd Ddu path which was my son’s 75th birthday present for me!

Manod Mawr with Carreg y Fran behind. During WWII art treasures from London were stored in the caverns in Manod Mawr.

Darwin continued to Ffestiniog and stayed at the Pengwern Arms.

Pengwern Arms.

Note Manod Mawr behind the inn on the right.

The next day he continued south joining the main Dolgellau road before turning off into the hills to Bwlch Drws Ardudwy.

Looking down on Bwlch Drws Ardudy from the slopes of Rhinog Fach. Boulders covered with heather does not make for easy walking! In the distance on RHS is Arenig Fawr with Migneint on LHS.

Looking back at the Bwlch, with Rhinog Fach to the right. Well to the right below Diffws Darwin found a rock glacier and found similar in the Falklands.

My field assistant examining one of Darwin’s outcrops.

Working out the last leg of this walk was tricky as from Darwin’s notes I could piece together several alternatives.

But he arrived in Barmouth in the evening of the 24th August and stayed there a few days.

He had no idea what was to befall him!

A view of Barmouth from the south. The mountain to the right is Diffws.

Cyfrwy from the summit of Cadair Idris with Barmouth in the background

No one knows what Darwin did with his mates at Barmouth. Perhaps he even went up his favourite mountain Cadair Idris. But he wanted to get home for the beginning of the shooting season. However when he got home there was a letter from John Henslow suggesting he joined the Beagle. He never went shooting at Maer.

And so ends his 1831 trip to North Wales, which ended in a bit of a climax!

Darwin’s geological evolution.

During the summer of 1831 Darwin spent much time geologising. This was in several stages;

1. His vist to Llanymynech hill on the Welsh Border, when he used his newly-aqiured clinometer.
2. His production of maps of Shropshire and Anglesey. He also marked in some geology i.e. New Red Sandstoone by Nesscliff, and made notes of several sites. This will appear soon as a blog
3. accompanying Sedgwick around Shrewsbury on 4 th and 5th of August
4. Accompanying Sedgwick from Shrewsbury through Llangollen to conwy and then Bethesda.
5. After a weekend with Sedgwick they went round Anglesey using Henslow’s map as guide
6. After leaving Sedgwick near Bangor, he went first to Cwm Idwal and then to Barmouth as described here.

He did no more geology until he landed at the Cape Verde islands. It is fascinating to read through his notes starting with the not-very-good ones at Llanymynech  and then on the main part of his trip with Sedgwick. As the two lots of notes are often similar it is clear that Sedgwick was tutoring him. Then lastly in Wales the notes he made at Cwm Idwal and then on the “dogleg”, which showed how he had improved since his visit to Llanymynech. and then lastly his notes at Cape Verde show more improvement and are perceptive.

It is interesting to compare with my own development in mapping. at Easter 1967 I was at the mapping course at Horton and made a pigs ear of mapping. In the July I was in Northern Canada mapping an intrusion at 64 degrees north. I was commended for my map. It was fun to discover a layered basic intrusion.

Darwin’s 1831 is both interesting in that it shows how Darwin learnt his science and was thus competent when he sailed on the Beagle and how a geologist develops in their field work with practice.

William Buckland – Ice Man

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Buckland was one of the great 19th century geologists who taught at Oxford. Here is a sketch of him teaching. His students included Charles Lyell, Samual Wilberforce and one  saint, Saint John Henry Newman.

In June 1842 Charles Darwin undertook his last geological field trip. He was at his father’s house, The Mount  in Shrewsbury, that month and after a winter of sickness, he felt somewhat better. Thus, he went in his gig to Snowdonia to assess whether Buckland was correct in identifying proof of a former Ice Age. In October 1841 William Buckland travelled to Wales with Thomas Sopwith (his grandson designed the Sopwith Camel, a WW1 fighter plane) to see whether Agassiz could be right about a former Ice Age. In a few days of horrendous Welsh weather Buckland identified all the main glacial troughs.

Buckland was one of the leading geologists of the early 19th century but there is no decent biography of him apart from Rupke’s study  The Great  Chain of Being (1983). His eccentricities were numerous, but are mentioned more than his geological work.

He was the first to find a Mesozoic mammal, worked with Mary Anning on Dorset fossils, wrote a Bridgewater treatise on geology and, my interest here, introduced the concept of Ice Ages to Britain in 1940.

Before then what we now see as glacial deposits and glacial geomorphology was explained by an effect of the Deluge. In the 1830s Charpentier, a mine own in the Rhone valley, and Louis Agassiz, of Neuchatel and then Harvard, recognised that glaciers were far more extensive and explained erratics like the Pierre au Bot above Neuchatel. Darwin was originally totally unconvinced and preferred floating icebergs to explain erratics and had explained the Parallel roads of Glen roy as fluctuations of sea level, only to be trounced by Agassiz in 1840.

When he visited Switzerland in October 1838 and met Agassiz, Buckland was convinced of an Ice Age – note the singular, as then no one envisaged a whole series over 2 million years. Two years later in 1840 Buckland, Agassiz and Lyell travelled north on a glacier hunt.

Just south of Lancaster they found signs of glaciation as it is the southern limit of a drumlin swarm. I live 10 miles south of Lancaster and see them whenever I go north. In the Lake District they noticed the glacial cwms on the east side of Hellvelyn. Going further north they checked out Darwin’s work at Glen Roy and found what he admitted was a “great blunder” . It was not a lowering of sea level but a lake dammed by a glacier as Agassiz had found by the Aletsch glacier.

And so in October 1841 Buckland headed for Snowdonia with his friend Thomas Sopwith. Sopwith made this sketch the year before in northern England

Buckland dressed for Welsh Glaciers by Thomas Sopwith, note the writing. This shows Sopwith’s sense of humour, but some humourless sciency types thought it was getting at Buckland for believing a young earth. That didn’t stop a recent biographer of Buckland saying it was on the way to Scotland!!

View from top of Y Garn 3104ft showing the Llugwy trough leading to Capel Curig, Llyn Idwal, a morainic lake. Buckland visited the valley behind Tryfan in the middle distance and note glacial features

To the left is Nant Francon, viewed below – with embellishments.

In 1831 de la Beche painted this watercolour to show that little rivers could not produce big valleys. He was right, but ideas of glaciation were a few years ahead.

This map shows the routes of both Buckland and Darwin in 1841-2 with some further details. I have retraced both routes.

The lake Llyn y Gader is WSW of Snowdon summit. The glacial troughs were sorted by Buckland in an amazing bit of work.

for detail please read my paper in Proc Geol Assoc BucklandDarwinWalesIce

Snowdon from the old coaching inn Plas y Brenin taken early morning. Buckalnd identified the glacier coming down here from Snowdon, but it also went down Nant Gwynant.

Buckland and Sopwith started at the glacial lakes at Ellesmere before heading for Snowdonia. despite filthy weath they sorted out the essential glacial features in a few days

One place he stopped was by Rhyd Ddu (the start of the quietest path up Snowdon, which I climbed last year on the 60th anniversary of my first ascent of Snowdon in 1961. It was about my 50th ascent.) . There he found a roche moutonnee by Llyn y Gader

which Tom Sopwith sketched

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He also did a water colour of Buckland inspecting the roche moutonee which some think is Mary Anning. Compare the scenery with the pen and ink sketch and photo.

It even appears on book covers!!

This is an interesting sketch in Llanberis  made in the 1820s. The unannoted copy is to be found in the Oxford Museum but this with the word “Glacier” added is found in the Agassiz collection at Neuchatel. Thanks to Hugh Torrens telling me to go and find it while in Neuchatel.

On the left is one of the many erratics blocks in Llanberis Pass. Snowdon is up to the right.

For more read my paper which deals with Darwin as well.

Darwin spent a few days in Capel Curig and then several around Cwm Idwal before moving on to Moel Tryfan and then Llanberis and Snowdon.

For further reading

Darwin, Buckland and the Welsh Ice Age, 1837 – 1842, Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 123 (2012) 649–662

to read the original paper open this link

BucklandDarwinWalesIce

Creationists diss Climate Change. Snowballs from “Is Genesis history?”

Well, Creationists from “Is Genesis History?” are giving reasons why we should not worry about climate change.

Here it is in a short blog showing their arguments to be dubious and duplicitous and thus misleading their flock. It also shows how bad science or pseudoscience can lead to bad ethical decisions – here on climate mitigation.

Before you read this, here is an account of Evangelicals and climate Change taking the story up tp 2010, so is now rather out-dated https://michaelroberts4004.wordpress.com/2018/07/10/evangelicals-and-climate-change-1990-to-2011/

So here is there blog from the glaciers of Washington State;

https://isgenesishistory.com/reason-no-one-worry-about-climate-change/?fbclid=IwAR0SnsFm3YqgFE6BsxBIuk0bIYQjLXedm8JDlRc8fyR6aKGZo6lJYUmQER4

Part is all about a winter’s visit to the glaciers of Washington state and Vardiman and Purifoy use that backdrop to play down climate change. Read the whole article, which is like a cosy chat with some dubious ideas thrown in.

I reproduce their dubious ideas and then show why they are flawed both in their explicit comments and what is implicit.

Del, Larry, and the other guys in our crew had donned their snow shoes and were slowly making their way to the passage we had dug out. I was amazed to see them climb up, put one foot on the snow…and not sink in! Del, who is from Colorado, chuckled at my comments about snowshoes: he had spent years using them and knew how necessary they were in deep snow.

It was an incredibly beautiful day. The snow flurried a bit in morning, then the clouds cleared away and the sun came out. The ice on the glacier literally shone with a blue light. It was amazing.

I love the mountains of Washington but have only climbed Mt St Helens in October 2009. Many are covered in glaciers and what is most evident is that these glaciers are receding.  No mention is made of  retreating glaciers. This has been considerable in the last century and in itself indicates a warming temperature, whether the warming is natural of not. This is a useful article and shows some of the changes in Washington State where there visiting.

I enjoyed seeing the new glacier on Mt St Helens in 2009

Here is an article on Washington glaciers

https://glaciers.us/glaciers.research.pdx.edu/Glaciers-Washington.html

During the Ice Ages much more of the Rockies were glaciated right down to New Mexico. The evidence for glaciation is clear above Taos around Wheeler Peak.

To put a spanner in the works this photo looking north from Wheeler Peak NM is either of a rock glacier, or a short-lived glacier from the Little Ice Age, i.e. about the 18th century.  I’d like to go back and check it out.

Surely not mention glacial retreat is rather selective and shows at least an unconscious bias? Or conscious?

Virtually all glaciers have receded in the northern hemisphere since about 1815 with the end of the Little Ice Age. I have seen many examples in the Alpes

As we settled in to listen to Larry and Del, I was absolutely fascinated. Larry explained the cause of the Ice Age and how it related to the unusual atmospheric conditions in the world immediately after the global flood.

This begs so many questions. Larry admits to an Ice Age, but then fails to say the the Ice Ages started 2 million years ago and there have been a whole succession of Ice Ages and warmer periods . This has been gradually worked out and in Britain the main period is the Late Devensian reaching a maximum 18,000 years ago.  This carved out most of the glacial features in British mountains. Later, there was a smaller glaciation  – the loch Lomond Stadial, which was a short cold spell and resulted in much less glaciation, often leaving smaller moraines where the previous glaciation had been active.

Larry is showing a conscious bias by not mentioning the wider context.

When the Ice Age(s) were discovered it was almost assumed there was only one Ice Age and not a succession. Agassiz and Charpentier were there first to discover the Ice Age in the 1830s in Switzerland. When Buckland visited Switzerland in 1838 Agassiz convinced him of the Ice Age and then on a visit and tour of Northern England and Scotland Agassiz, Lyell

and Buckland demonstrated that Britain too had an Ice Age. They found their first proof in  a drumlin between Lancaster and my house in Garstang. They also challenged Darwin’s blunder at Glen Roy.

The following October Buckland and Sopwith went to Snowdonia in appalling weather and identified the main glacial features there. (picture of Buckland here often wrongly claimed to be of Mary Anning!)

In june 1842 Darwin checked out Buckland’s work and concurred! He found various glacial troughs which could not have been formed by piddly little streams!!

a re-enactment (almost) as it was sketched by de la Beche in 1831

Darwin made much of these boulders found in Cwm Idwal

To read more see https://michaelroberts4004.wordpress.com/2017/08/04/darwins-boulders/

To most geologists this was the final draining of the Flood, but in some illegible notes Buckland argued that the Flood was a result of all the ice melting.

However there have been several sets of Ice Ages during geological time with five significant ice ages throughout the Earth’s history: the Huronian (2.4-2.1 billion years ago), Cryogenian (850-635 million years ago), Andean-Saharan (460-430 mya), Karoo (360-260 mya) and Quaternary (2.6 mya-present). Approximately a dozen major glaciations have occurred over the past 1 million years, the largest of which peaked 650,000 years ago and lasted for 50,000 years. The most recent glaciation period, often known simply as the “Ice Age,” reached peak conditions some 18,000 years ago before giving way to the interglacial Holocene epoch 11,700 years ago.

The Cryogenian is often known as Snowball  Earth as it seems the whole planet was covered in ice. I was lucky enough to work on the Numees glaciation of Cryogenian age in South Africa , at a time when its glacial basis was questioned. What convinced me were dropstones falling into varved sediments. I have also seen Ordovician glaciation in rocks of the Howgill Fells of Northern England.

So much for a summary of standard glacial geology, so back to the specious nonsense from these expert geologists of “Is Genesis History?”

i am simply gobsmacked by his suggestion of “the unusual atmospheric conditions in the world immediately after the global flood.” There is simply no evidence. Further the last great diluvial geologist, William Buckland, argued that the Flood was the result of melting ice from the Ice Age. He was not far off.

I’d love to know what these supposed atmospheric conditions actually are!! It may sound convincing to those who are aware there was an Ice Age but little more! It is simply duplicitous bullshit.

This led to an explanation of current concerns about climate change, and how they are the result of a deep confusion about earth history.

WHAT!!!! This just dismisses earth history in a throw away comment.  It is simply absurd to say there is “deep confusion about earth history” when earth history is so well known and understood and has been for over two centuries. The deep time of earth history goes back further than the Periodic Table and even Dalton’s atomic theory and predates Phlogiston! Geology was on the right track before chemistry!!

This is a duplicitous way of getting ill-informed readers to believe that earth history is unfounded and thus “Is Genesis History?” s claim of a 10,000 year old earth is correct.

By casting Climate Change as a result of confusion over earth history, doubts are implied about climate Change and the unreliable arguments and claims about it.

Duplicitous is not the right description of this. The wording is vague but is intended to lead readers into thinking that Climate Change is not happening and thus is of no concern.

There is no doubt that Climate Change is happening and that much/most of caused by humans and is have a bad effect of the whole planet and the conditions many people live under.

He then moved to the question of ice cores and explained how they actually point to a major catastrophe in the past.

Really? I’d love to see the evidence for that. This is another unsubstantiated throwaway comment, which the less-informed will take as indicating a Flood in the past.

This is a must-see video if you want to dispel the concerns and hysteria that have overwhelmed so many people today concerning climate change.

This is cleverly and deceitfully put as if concerns about Climate Change are to be equated with the hysteria which some come out with. We need to see firstly the reality of issues of Climate Change  and thus of dangers  as well as hysteria, which is whipped up by some, including school truants wanting you to panic.

Only a fool would deny the seriousness of Climate Change and the need for carefully thought-ought action and mitigation

The concerns are real. The amount of CO2 has doubled in my lifetime and it is clear that world temperature is rising.

Without going into details CO2 and CH4 emissions must be reduced. Not all agree on how that should be done. Often the emphasis is on governmental level action, with insufficient on the sum of actions of individuals.    ???

Too often Climate Change is considered above all other environmental issues, and then only in relation to fossil fuels. The more extreme wish only renewables (which are insufficient) a rapid  disengagement with fossils and an refusal to use nuclear power. As we see in the energy crisis of late 2021 this will result in fuel poverty and associated deaths as winter draws in.

There also needs to be consideration of more “natural” solutions; tree-planting (but only the right trees in the right places!), restoration of wetlands (peat bogs), inter-tidal zones  as well as shallow seas. There will need to be changes in agriculture and not necessarily those put forward by activists like Vandana Shiva!!

Here is a useful article from an Oxford/Oriel professor

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-10-11-natural-world-critical-climate-professor-yadvinder-malhi

What I wrote previously are the real concerns of Climate Change which need addressing.

There is also the hysteria.

This comes out with protesting youngsters holding up placards “You will die of old age, we will die of climate change.”

That is due to extreme green groups whipping up hysteria and over-egging the problems so that all seems apocalyptic. It is seen when founders of Extinction Rebellion untruthfully say billions will die of climate change.

It comes out with school kids write of their fears of the future and creating eco-anxiety. Certain truants from school add to this hysteria, along with some scintists, who let their activism guide what they say.

This is not helped by activists slating others and being quick to dismiss the unhysterical as climate deniers. There are some climate deniers but many of the so-called deniers don’t buy into the hysteria.

Here the right buttons of the Creationist audience are pressed and with carefully crafted dismissal, Creationists are liable to reject the essential truth of Climate Change and the need for action by implying it is simply hysteria.

If you’d like to learn more about creationist ideas concerning the Ice Age, I recommend two books by Mike Oard, another scientist who worked closely with Larry Vardiman: The Frozen Record (on ice cores) and Frozen in Time (on the Ice Age).

https://creation.com/michael-j-oard

Oard’s arguments for an Ice Age lasting only a few hundred years are simply poor and also depend on the rejection of geological Time and the previous four glaciations going back two billion years. I wonder how he ties the Cryogenian into a Genesis timescale. Maybe it was after Cain murdered Abel!!!

For more information on climate change, consult The Cornwall Alliance. (Sign up for their emails – they are fantastic!)

Actually they are fantastical and have no grounding in reality.

Dr. Vardiman’s full interview is included in Beyond Is Genesis History? Vol 1 Rocks & Fossils. The topics he talks about are extremely important to understanding what happened after Flood.

Conclusion

This blog from “Is Genesis history?” is written to persuade readers that Climate Change is not happening and uses dubious arguments to get that across.

I hope my comments make it clear why they are so very, very, very wrong and , in fact, rather duplicitous. It says little for the skills of the “scientists” behind “Is Genesis history?”

Jer 17 vs9 The heart is deceitful above all things,
And desperately wicked; Who can know it?

Climate Change is real, it is here and needs mitigation.

(we may disagree on how to mitigate it!!)

Is this really Mary Anning at Lyme Regis? Or someone else somewhere else?

Is this really Mary Anning at Lyme Regis? Or someone else somewhere else?

It is one of the most popular pictures of Mary Anning and even used on a suggested draft of a £50 note.

The most famous fossil collector was Mary Anning of Lyme Regis in Dorset. She spent years collecting fossils and selling them on. This is one of the most popular pictures of her at work;

It was used on the front cover of a biography and on The Geological Curator in 1985

In the next few months the film Ammonite on the life of the great fossil-collector Mary Anning will be premiered in the USA and the UK. Mary lived from 1799 to 1847 in the seaside town of Lyme Regis and unearthed may significant fossils on the Jurassic coast. She provided specimens for geologists like Conybeare, Buckland and de la Beche.

Duria Antiquior – A more Ancient Dorset is a watercolour painted in 1830 by the geologist Henry De la Beche based on fossils found by Mary Anning

(compare this with Mary anning picture – is it the same style?)

By the time she was died she was famous and here is a posthumous portrait.

Posthumous painting of Anning by B. J. Donne from 1847, based on the 1842 portrait at the head of this article, showing her pointing at an ammonite

Now back to the oft-posted picture of Mary geologising, alleged to be painted by Sir Henry de la Beche, who was more than capable as an artist. However he should be expunged from history as a former slave-owner.

Here she is, in shorter skirts, standing on a rock with her hammer ready with Golden Cap in the background.

Just a minute!

Is it really Golden Cap? Golden Cap is only 171 metres high (560 ft if you prefer) and with a flat top to play cricket on as I had to on family holidays.

And is it Mary Anning?

To me, as I am familiar with Lyme Regis, having been there on geology field trips and three summer holidays as a child, it just doesn’t look right and I am sure de la Beche was a better artist and would have drawn Golden Cap more accurately right down to the horizontal strata.

Looking at it, I am minded of one of favourite mountain ridges in Snowdonia, the Nantlle Ridge which starts at Rhyd Du  and works its way along the ridge to Craig Cwm Silyn. It is an exposed route as to the north cliffs drop into a series of glacial cwms. The first time I traversed that ridge I tore my brand-new anorak.

Here is the east end of the Nantlle Ridge from Rhyd Ddu with Llyn y Gader in the foreground.

The peak of Y Garn (653metres) on the right with steep (glaciated?) nose and a glacial cwm behind. To climb it the route takes you up the shoulder on the right of the photo. At the bottom was a scruffy sign telling the English to Far Cough. From the first top you move to the left to Mynydd Drys y Coed (695m) and then along the narrow ridge to Craig Cwm Silyn, the high point at 734 metres. From there I normally retraced my steps beck to Rhyd Ddu. The north side of the ridge is precipitous as there are several northerly orientated glacial cwms.

The engineer, geologist Thomas Sopwith drew a sketch of Pen y Gader in October 1841, during a visit to North Wales with the Rev William Buckland  to see if there had been glaciation in Wales as well as in Scotland.

It’s the same as my photo with a roche moutonee in the foreground.

Now for a bit of history. In 1838 William Buckland went to visit Louis Agassiz in Switzerland. Agassiz was full of ice as he had just publicised that the glaciers in Switzerland had been far more extensive and that there had been an Ice Age in the none to distant past. He claimed ice had spread right up to the Jura mountains , where a glacier had dumped the erratic block, Pierre a Bot, high above Neuchatel – and scratched some rocks in the process. On a field trip we also found many glacial grooves on exposed rocks. Buckland took a lot of convincing but in the end Agassiz froze him out, and Buckland became a convert.

In 1840 Agassiz came to Britain and went up to Scotland with Buckland and Lyell. Near Lancaster, where I live, they found their first evidence of an former ice age – drumlins  -and I used to live on one. They then went to Glen Roy with its famous and baffling parallel roads. Two years earlier Darwin studied them and concluding they were ancient raised beaches from the lowering of sea level from 1200 ft. Agassiz disagreed and said there were from an ancient glacial lake publicising it in the Scotsman. Darwin had made a “gigantic blunder”, as he later admitted.

Next year, the ailing John Eddowes Bowman toured North Wales to find evidence and claimed to find nothing. In October Tom Sopwith met up with Buckland near Chester and explored the area in one of the worst Octobers ever. They began at the meres at Ellesmere and reckoned to identify rocks from both Scotland and Wales, concluding that ice sheets met there. They were absolutely correct and I enjoyed doing the same. From there they went up the Dee valley to Bala and then past Arenig Fawr (2804ft) where they did not notice the result of glaciation.

After that they stayed at the coaching in  at Pentrefoelas and continued along the new road (A5) to Snowdonia, finding evidence of glaciation en route. They stayed at Llanrwst. And went up to Ogwen. From Llanrwst they went to Pen y Pass and in between the showers worked out the glaciation

This map shows the glacial troughs Buckland and Sopwith identified.

Llyn y Gader is the smallest of the three lakes just to the west of Snowdon. Note 2 glacial cwms are marked.

For my paper on the work of Bowman, Buckland and Darwin on Welsh Ice see

BucklandDarwinWalesIce

In a few days of torrential rain they delineated all the major glacial troughs in Snowdonia. It was brilliant work. After dropping down to Beddgelert, they ended up at Rhyd Ddu and noted that glaciers seemed to be going in three directions. As well as being an engineer and geologist, he also produced excellent models showing geological structures.

For his brilliant models go to Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ThomasSopwithAppreciationSociety

This Thomas Sopwith was the grandfather of Sir Thomas Sopwith, who designed the Sopwith Camel, a WWI fighter plane. The latter’s grandson, also Thomas, lived near where we lived in Chirk. Sopwith was a fine artist at both sketching and painting. His most famous was of William Buckland dressed for glacier work. It is both faithful, but a bit of a send-up.

The wording is entertaining. It is of Buckland at the Waterloo Bridge in Betws y Coed. I once hobbled over that bridge, having twisted my ankle trying to find one of Buckland’s sites.

This was also the basis of a painting, a poor copy by an APF. Who was it? Sopwith would say it was not up to scratch!

https://blog.geolsoc.org.uk/2014/08/21/a-new-version-of-sopwiths-buckland-portrait/

Now another sketch at Beddgelert by Sopwith on 16th October 1841

Here’s Buckland in the Pass of Aberglaslyn in the same garb. He stayed in Beddgelert but the record of his stay is “missing”

When you compare these with the “Mary Anning” picture, you will note the same clothes, shoes and hat! And then there are also the glacial striae on the roche moutonee, which is not possible for Lyme Regis as ice never reached Dorset during the Ice Ages. Further the painting is in the style of Sopwith and not the exquisite watercolours of de la Beche.

I think one can only draw one conclusion. This picture is not of Mary Anning, nor of Lyme Regis, nor by de la Beche, but is of William Buckland in Snowdonia and the original by Thomas Sopwith. (The hill on the right is Mynydd Cigwyn just above Nantlle.) Buckland’s cloak, much needed that October, does look a bit like a shorter skirt adding to the confusion.  It also warns against jumping to historical conclusions. Tom Sharpe, who has an imminent biography on Mary Anning, has also made the same points in a HOGG newsletter https://historyofgeologygroup.co.uk/hogg-newsletter/hogg-newsletter-61/

Some years ago I took the part of Sedgwick in a planned HBS documentary of evolution. But it got left out.

Here’s a photo of a woman in 1830s working class clothes

Who’s more like the person in the picture?

This annotated picture should make it clear. Go and visit the place and prove me wrong!

Now here is a picture of Buckland by de la Beche on Buckland’s favourite topic- coprolite. A mortarboard and not a top hat!  Also note what each animal is doing! What is between Buckland’s legs?

Maybe I’ve done what de la Beche did to Lyell’s ideas on uniformitarianism in 1831, when he reckoned that the little volumes of water couldn’t do what Lyell claimed in his uniformitarianism. Here Buckland’s son, Frank, is recruited to show why Lyell was wrong. I reckon this is above Idwal cottage looking down the Nant Francon, but Martin Rudwick is sure it is in the Auvergne. Take your pick, but I re-enacted it on a field trip in 2009

Darwin’s first attempt at geology – Llanymynech

After leaving Cambridge in early 1831 Charles Darwin returned to his home – The Mount – in Shrewsbury

and decided to learn some geology in preparation for a trip to Tenerife, which never came off. At that time geology was not well-developed and all the strata belowed the Carboniferous (U.S.A Mississippian) was unknown. Sedgwick and Muchison began to unravel later that year, with Darwin in tow with Sedgwick.

a superb presentation of the Geological Column by Ray Troll, accurate and witty.

By early July Darwin had obtained his geological equipment and was especially proud of his compass-cum-clinometer. Here is his actual field bag and actual equipment, which is stuill the basis for field work today.

He also needed maps and he used Robert Baugh’s topographic map of Shropshire (wait for my next blog) and Greenough’s geological map of England and Wales. This is a photo of Darwin’s actual copy in Cambridge Univ Library.

After leanig how to use his clinometer on furniture he went into the filed to try his hand at field work. His destination was Llanymynech Hill some 15 miles west of Shrewsbury. I presume he travelled on one of the horses. His notes, transcribed below say NE, but that is typical of Darwin’s compass inversion, which he did both at Llanymynech and Cwm Idwal. If you don’t visit the sites and sit in stuffy libraries just reading his notes you’d never see this. You cannot do the history of geology without fieldwork, getting soaked, chased by irate cows and twisting ankles.

TRANSCRIPTION OF THE LLANYMYNECH NOTES,g
Llanymynech 16 miles NE [sic] of Shrewsbury; to the north of the village about ] of mile in an extensive quarry of Limestone. On the road to it, passed over a hillock of a soft slaty rock. some of the Strata were crumblingaway by exposure to the air. Strata very distinctly defined inclined at 78″. Direction ESE 6a 1i7N!7. The quarry is worked in the escarpment of a range of Carboniferous Limestone facing S by ]if. On the Eastern side & high in the hill where the stratification is better marked the rock more compact & of a redder colour. the seneral D is NE b N 14′. To the Westward & lower down D of st.ata is more NW 6< the angle lessl In centre there of quarry are several great cracks passing strait thrugh the rock now filled with clay. To this line the strata on each side are inclined on each side from [E crossed out] tOf 10″ & from [W crossed out] E 15o. It gives to the strata the appearance ofcurves. The stratification of the whole Western side appears to be less regular than that of the East. At one place I observed a series of strata having D ENE 10″ – The lowest Strata of Limestone that are worked consist of rocks of a softer texture, marked in patches by a brightish red, called by the’Workmen’bloody veined’Beneath there is the Delve consisting of avery argillaceous Limestone, soft & wastingaway on exposure to the air. it is not worth being burnt for Lime – The Workmen have never gone beneath this.

This has recently been put on the extensive website Darwin on line 

http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=CUL-DAR5.B1-B4&viewtype=side

Llanymynech Hill bounds the west of the Shropshire plain and his an extensively quarried limestone hill of 226 metres. The carboniferous limes lies on top of silurian slate (hill of slaty rock) There is a golf course on top for those who like to spoil a good walk and ther is a heitage trail. It is a hill I know very well as I have walked all over it and also done several of the rock climbs. On the visit I made all my measuresments i’d cycled the 11 miles from Chirk.

View looking ovber Breiden Hills

viewpoint with details for trail and on Darwin

Information board gleaned from my work

From Darwin’s notes it seems he came up from Llanymynech village and truned off on a lane at the bend GR266212.

The exposures are at the bend just up the hill. Continuing up you see the quarry cliffs and then need to find the paths onto them.

As you go up the lane you find the “slaty rock” with some obvious bedding. That was infuriating to measure as I found they dipped to the NW. It seems he was dyslexic  – like the best of us. The strata were later seen to be Silurian.

Following up from those slaty rocks a path leads you into a quarry. This not as Darwin saw it as further quarrying took place for about a century.  It is now abandoned and a  haven for wild flowers and rock climbing. Some of the hardest routes are here, which I had to second rather than lead.

The limestne is well-stratified, with some interspersed muddy beds. Worsely is valuable on this. (The mud made for hairy rock-climbing in the rain.)

To read more, open up for my paper in the Brit Jour of the History of Science

Darwin at Llanymynech

Peter Worsley has corrected some of my conclusions on the mudcracks!

http://www.emgs.org.uk/files/publications/19(3)_contents.pdf

Darwin was baffled by the Bellstone in Shrewsbury, but in 1831 nop one knew that it had trundled down from Scotland on an ice sheet

After his next work on maps (my next blog) Adam Sedgwick arrived on the scene at the Mount. Big sis Susan took a shine to the reverend geological bachelor and his sister Caroline wrote to Darwin on the Beagle to say they expected Susan to become Mrs Sedgwick!! That would have been fun for historians.

So in August Sedgwick arrived and took Charles around North Wales in a gig and taught him a litte geology 

https://michaelroberts4004.wordpress.com/2020/07/03/just-before-the-beagle-darwin-in-wales-1831/

 

 

 

 

Is the Geological Column Evolutionary and Anti-Christian

Is the Geological Column anti-christian?

Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Green, Indigo, Violet

Many will know the colours of the rainbow/spectrum off by heart and won’t need an aid lie;

“Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain

There don’t seem to be many on the geological Column

(c) Ray Troll, @ratfishray

@ratfishray

Camels Often Sit Down Carefully; Perhaps Their Joints Creak? Persistent Early Oiling Might Prevent Permanent Rheumatism.

One cannot even study Geology 001, yet alone 101, without needing to remember; “Cambrian, Ordovician………………..”

The Geological Column is as central to geology as the Periodic Table to chemistry, yet it is frequently dismissed by Young Earth Creationists and has been since McCready Price challenged it a century ago. Price wrote an apparently erudite book, replete with references The New Geology (1923). Here he claimed that the arguments geologists put forward for the order of strata is based on circular reasoning and that strata could occur in any order and thus you could find Cambrian lying on top of Jurassic. The leading geologist Schuchert called it a “geological nightmare”.

The accusation of a circular argument has stuck and was repeated by Morris in The Genesis Flood  and many subsequent creationists.

https://michaelroberts4004.wordpress.com/2020/02/04/geologists-going-round-in-circles/

Essentially it is that you date the fossils from evolution and use the fossils to prove evolution. Sometimes geologists almost speak like that!! And so the Geological Column is often called the “Uniformitarian Evolutionary Geological Column” to stress that the column is based on the Uniformitarian Geology of Lyell and the theory of evolution Thus in one go you can discredit Lyell and Darwin and all they stand for.

But is it actually true to say the Geological Column is Uniformitarian and Evolutionary and anti-Christian?

Uniformitarianism stems from James Hutton in the 1780s and most of all from Charles Lyell in 1831. Though evolution had been suggested, it was only widely accepted after Darwin published The Origin of species in 1859. You need to note the dates 1831 and 1859 as you read this.

The Geological Column is a way of putting the strata in order of deposition and was worked out in the early 19^th century. Before that most “geologists” were convinced the earth was “tres vieux” (de Saussure) and there was an order which they couldn’t work out.

The first to give a kind of order was the Rev John Michell of Cambridge which was written down by a Mr Smeaton on the back of a letter!

Mr Michell’s Account of the south of England Strata

This gave a tolerably complete  list of strata from the Chalk (Cretaceous) down to the Coal Measures (Carboniferous/Pennsylvanian) you would find travelling from London to Yorkshire. Michell probably produced his “column” while travelling by coach or horse back and doing a little fieldwork. Thirty years later William Smith produced a classic cross-section of the strata of England and Wales from Snowdon in Wales to London to accompany his map of england and Wales, but had worked much of it out before 1800, almost fleshing out the sketch of Michell.. This order was impressed on me at the age of 16 and 17 as on three occasions cycled from mid- or north Wales to our house south of London. My geology then was just about good enough to identify the basic geology. Not that I’d studied geology then, beyond high school geography, but my geography teacher was a geologists and mountaineer. I even got commended when I wrote an essay describing one of my trips with a bit of geology thrown in! I’d broken the journey into geological stages. The third time I did it, I cycled the 350 miles home from Capel Curig in Snowdonia. I started by climbing Snowdon by the Snowdon Horseshoe and then still had 340 miles to cycle. It took me six days but I had climbed Snowdon and Cadair Idris as well. I can assure you that the hill of yellow strata on the right of the diagram (the Jurassic scarp of the Cotswolds) – Birdlip Hill is a very steep climb on a heavily laden bike.

(Smith’s 1815 Cross-section annotated by  Callan Bentley)

The cross-section is slightly simplified, but it shows progressively younger rocks lying on top of the oldest around Snowdon, which are about550 my to those in the Vale of Thames (Tertiary) i.e. London at 50 my. It was another fifteen years before Sedgwick and Murchison began elucidating the Welsh rocks, first into the Cambrian and Silurian and later with Ordovician in between (the three names are based on ancient tribes in Wales.)

The usual (mythical?) history of geology puts the rise of geology down to two men, Hutton and Lyell. Lyell was a late comer in 1830 and Hutton,

though he grasped the concept of geological time due to the discovery of the unconformity at Siccar Point, he did not put the rocks of Scotland into a timeline. That was for reasons beyond his control in the actual geology as even the Southern Uplands were too complex as “starter” strata and as for the Highlands, which defied geologists for nearly a century. (Oldroyd) . To put it simply Hutton in Scotland and de Saussure around Chamonix had chosen the short straws as the strata were too folded and metamorphosed for straightforward elucidation in the early stages of geology. They could demonstrate that the strata were ancient but not put them in hisotorical order. What was needed was to be able to follow essentially almost flat lying strata over many miles. That is what Michell did in 1788 but never published.

That work was largely carried out in by English, and some French, geologists in the first half of the 19^th century. Before that, following Werner, rocks were seen as Primary, Secondary or Tertiary. This could lead to confusion as Primary were meant to be “original” rocks and thus not sedimentary, and, of course, granites can be of any age.

Who invented the Geological column?

Below is a table of the Geological Column showing who had actually worked on it and named the systems

As we see from the diagram below, most of the names setting up the column were British (Lyell and Murchison were Scots, and Sedgwick, Phillips, Conybeare and Lapworth were English) And at the bottom is the great Christian geologist J.D. Dana of Yale.

As the whole development of the Geological Column was empirical, piecemeal and observational, the result is more coherent than its unfolding. It was not sorted out after a few weeks in the field, but after several years, an immense amount of fieldwork and argument, at times acrimonious, between the geologists. The work on the Devonian has been exhaustively expounded by Martin Rudwick and the Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian by Jim Secord. For myself, apart from reading the literature, I went on a field trip looking at Murchison (and Lewis) on the Silurian in South Wales and traced out much of Sedgwick’s ramblings from his notebooks in North Wales. I particularly walked, yes walked, most of his routes from august to October 1831. That covered most of the country between Shrewsbury and Holyhead. That included several long mountain hikes in Snowdonia following his routes. The longest was 18 miles and involved 6000ft of climbing. My dog and I were knackered!! At the end of 1831 Sedgwick hadn’t got and had to return for several years before working out the Cambrian.

Let’s look at the major workers and consider how godless or godly they were!

The 3-fold division – Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cainozoic.

As each of the Systems were being worked out, it became clear that they fell into three groups, and in 1841 the geologist John Phillips (1800-1874) named them Palaeozoic (Old Life Trilobites and fish) Mesozoic (Middle Life – dinosaurs) and Cainozoic (new life – rise of Mammals). Phillips was the orphaned nephew of the founding geologist William Smith, who trained him up as a geologist. He had no formal education and never went to university. He worked for the British Geological Survey and published many technical papers and semi-popular books on geology. In 1856 he succeeded Strickland as Professor of Geology in Oxford, after Strickland was killed by a train while looking at the geology in a railway cutting. I think he’s the only non-graduate professor at Oxford.

So how godless was Phillips? He wasn’t! He was a lay member of the Anglican Church in contrast to others mentioned here. In his many popular books on geology he discussed the relation of geology and genesis. In the 1820s he accepted a deluge but moved to a Day-Age understanding of Genesis, to the annoyance of young earthers of his day like Dean Cockburn of York. Cockburn attacked many geologists including Murchison, Buckland and Sedgwick, as described here;

In 1860 Essays and Reviews was published which took a very liberal view of the faith, including denying miracles. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was furious  so he organised and edited Replies to Essays and Reviews and asked Phillips to write a chapter of genesis and geology. Wilberforce and Phillips held similar views on the subject. Phillips’ biographer, Jack Morrell, portrays Phillips as a liberal Anglican, but as his views on geology was that of most Anglicans – liberal or evangelical – I feel he overstated the case.

The Precambrian

After the 1840s when the order Cambrian to Pleistocene was elucidated , the non-fossiliferous strata older than the Cambrian were simply called Precambrian and then split into two by American Geologists. The newer was known as Proterzoic as life was suspected in it (and demonstrated in the last 70 years) and was named by Stuart Emmons of the USGS in 1888. I don’t know what his faith stance was.

The older Precambrian was termed Archaean by Prof James D Dana of Yale in 1872 (1813-95) .Dana wrote the standard textbook Manual of Mineralogy (1848) which went through 21 editions until 1999. Surely DeepTime for a book! Darwin sent him a copy of The Origin of species  in 1860 but he did not read it for several years due to a breakdown. When he did he was largely convinced by Darwin. In 1872 he advised the Princeton theologian, Charles Hodge, on creation for his Systematic Theology. So much so that several pages of Hodge’s Systematic Theology  were written by Dana. It would be fair to say Dana was a convinced evangelical on good terms with the Princeton theologians.

And now to work our way religiously up the column!

The  Palaeozoic

These represent strata from 250 my to 560my and simply means Old Life

Except for the Carboniferous, the main players were Rev Adam Sedgwick and (Sir) Roderick Murchison

The main deviser of the Carboniferous

was the Rev William Conybeare, an Anglican priest, who was educated at Oxford and was then ordained. He belonged to the liberal wing of evangelicals and served in the parish of Axminster in Devon and then Dean of Llandaff Cathedral. During the 1820s he advised the editor of The Christian Observor, an evangelical paper founded by Wilberforce, to combat the views of Anti-geologists like George Bugg. In 1822 with William Phillips he wrote Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales, an excellent (long) summary of geology at that time, where he put forward the Carboniferous (Mississippian and Pennsylvanian in the USA).

A major contribution  was his delineation of the Carboniferous (300-355my). These strata are particularly well- formed in northern England. At the base are massive limestones, best seen at Malham Cove. Above are a mixture of sandstones and shales, notably the Millstone or Pendle Grit. Above again are the Coal Measures, which both outcrop on either side of the Pennines and below surface resulting in deep mines.

So the Carboniferous was hardly atheistic but Christian!!

From 1831 Sedgwick and Murchison tried to sort out the geology of Wales, working in what we now call the Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian strata.

story of the geological challenges and relationship breakdowns are related in Jim Secord Controversy in Victorian Geology. (1986). Their work started amicably in 1831 with Sedgwick (and Darwin for a few weeks) going to North Wales and Murchison to the south. Their aim was to find a place where the Old Red Sandstone (Devonian) could be followed conformably down into the older rocks Sedgwick drew the short straw as the geology was against him as there was no ORS from Llangollen to Snowdonia.  Murchison soon struck gold as Rev Thomas Lewis, curate of Aymestry in Shropshire, and former student of Sedgwick, had already worked out the succession down from (what would be) Devonian to (what would be) Silurian. This effectively handed everything on a plate to Murchison, while Sedgwick was floundering in North Wales “climbing every mountain”. One may say Sedgwick worked up from the “Cambrian” and Murchison worked down from the Devonian to the “Silurian”. Let’s say there was conflict, geological and personal, when their geology met up. On top of that Murchison did not give enough recognition to Lewis.

There was no resolution in their lifetimes and in 1879 Charles Lapwoth, termed many of the middle strata of the then Silurian and Cambrian, Ordovician. This resolved nearly half a century of controversy. In fact the three systems are subtly different. The Cambrian contains more sandstones, the Ordovician lavas and the Silurian slates. (A gross over-simplication, but whenever I am in Wales or Northwest England, climbing or geologising, the differences are manifest.)

Towards the end of the 1830s a number of geologists carried of fieldwork in Devon and Cornwall trying to make sense of the confusing strata commonly called Culm. The comlex story has been unravelled by Martin Rudwick (a Christian) in The Great Devonian Controversy. The main players were Murchison and Sedgwick, with a fair number of clergy as part players eg Buckland, Conybeare and Williams and, more topically, the former slave-owner de la Beche.

And then to finish it off in 1841 Murchison went off on a campaign in Russia getting as far as the Urals in the Great Perm east of Moscow. As a result he termed the strata above the Carboniferous as Permian (250-295my)

Thus 300 my of strata were classified in 20 years. A fantastic achievement – by British geologists.

But what of their religious beliefs?

Charles Lapworth. I know little about him, but he did go to a church teachers training college. From the silence we can say he was no active atheist, but little more.

Sir Roderick Murchison. He seems to have made no public comment about his faith. However he opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution and supported a successive or progressive creation of species. He never fully subscribed to Lyell’s Uniformitarianism. I suggest he was like John Phillips.

Adam Sedgwick, William Conybeare, Thomas Lewis. All three were Anglican priests and devout. They were evangelically inclined, Sedgwick more so. Sedgwick was the only one to see Darwin’s Origin of Species published– which he opposed strongly, even though Darwin was his pupil. Conybeare opposed Lyell’s Uniformitarianism and argued vociferously against him! Sedgwick was more sympathetic. If they were alive today they’d be seen as conservative Christians in the Church of England and very conservative in the American Episcopal Church and untouched by “liberalism”

Mesozoic (strata from 65 to 250 my)

I am afraid I know nothing about the religious views of the three mentioned

That is not to say there was no British involvement. In 1780 the Rev John Michell had worked out an outline of Mesozoic strata and then from 1790 William Smith worked out the strata in detail giving them delightful local names, some of which are still used for stages today. Michell was for many years vicar of a parish and quite diligent. There is no evidence that he was evangelical, but no reasonable question would doubt he was a Christian.

William Smith was a canal engineer working near Bath (near Bristol) in the 1790s

involved in the digging of two parallel canals. He observed the same succession of strata and the same succession of fossils, some of which he used as markers elsewhere. As he travelled the country he could observe the geology either where he was working on looking out from a coach. From this he produced the first geological map of England and Wales in 1815, giving the strata in order (see the cross-section above) but not our familiar names. The map is remarkably accurate even by today’s standards. Smith did much to clarify and understand what came to be called Jurassic strata.

What about Smith’s faith? The evidence is extremely poor. The little I can say is that before 1800 he thought the earth was only 6,000 years old. He then changed his mind because of his advisers! These were three local vicars the Revs Richard Warner, Benjamin Richardson and Joseph Townsend. Townsend was fiery evangelical preacher, who in 1813 wrote The Character of Moses established for Veracity as a Historian. Though it contained some material of Genesis and adopted the old Chaos-Restitution interpretation, recently popularised by Thomas Chalmers, allowing for considerable geological time. It was also a good summary of the state of geology in 1810, though it looked more to the Christian Swiss geologist Jean Andre de Luc, rather than William Hutton.

Smith has a copy of George Faber’s A Dissertation on the Prophecies relative to the Great Period of 1,200 Years, the Papal and Mahomedan Apostasies, the Reign of Antichrist, and the Restoration of the Jews,’ 2 vols. 1807 in his small library. Faber, an evangelical was fascinated and supportive of geology and friendly with Rev William Buckland of Oxford. In his  A Treatise on the Genius and Object of the Patriarchal, the Levitical, and the Christian Dispensations,’ 2 vols. 1823, he devoted one chapter to Genesis and geology and had learnt his geology from Buckland.

Cainozoic – strata from 65 my to now

The crucial person here is Charles Lyell who put forward a threefold division – Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene in 1833, working out the boundaries from the fossil content.

Lyell extended Hutton’s Uniformitarianism – though he did allow some catastrophe.

Relgiously he was Unitarian and thus no atheist. Like Sedgwwick , Buckland and others he objected to trying to argue that all strata were laid down in the Deluge and sometimes made scathing comments on that. They are often quoted in a way to make Lyell seem atheistic.

Further in his Principles of Geology he rejected any kind of evolution and did not accept evolution until the 1860s, several years after The Origin.

The names Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene were coined by Rev William Whewell of Cambridge, a man in the religious mould of Sedgwick and Conybeare.

To include the Ice Ages Lyell proposed the Pleistocene in 1839, after Agassiz (a Unitarian) and Charpentier discovered an ice age some years before. The idea was brought to Britain the year before by the Rev William Buckland of Oxford. In 1840 Lyell, Buckland and Agassiz travelled from the south of England to Scotland to find evidence of glaciation. That they did, but the first evidence were the drumlins near Lancaster a few miles from my home.  In 1841 Buckland worked out that Snowdonia had been glaciated, a fact which Darwin confirmed in 1842.

Religiously Buckland was devout and very similar to Whewell, Conybeare and Sedgwick, except that he was a total eccentric. He became Dean of Westminster in 1846 at the height of cholera outbreaks. As an elite scientist (as were the other three) he became a scientific adviser. Part of this was descending into the sewers of London. In a sermon at Westminster Abbey he later expounded the Christian duty of providing decent sewerage and for illustration graphically described what he saw and smelt in the sewers. Queen Victoria was in the congregation.

Is the Geological Column ungodly?

As a scientific concept it makes no judgement on what is godly and what is not.

However it is a historical fact that a high proportion of those developing the Geological Column were Christian  – and not those only in name. Having read many of the writings of Sedgwick, Buckland, Whewell, Conybeare and Townsend, I found they were not time-serving clerics and their aim may be summed up in the memorial to Sedgwick at Dent Church in the Yorkshire Dales.

Further there is no evidence that there was any atheistic and antichristian purpose behind the development of geology. Even Hutton, who is often accused of this, was not anti-Christian but deist and had good relations with many Christian clergy like Playfair and Robertson, a Moderator of the Kirk.

On this score the Geological Column is no more godly or ungodly than the Periodic Table, Newton’s Laws of motion  or the structure of DNA. It is simply good science, which in the execution included the work of many Christians.

As for the Geological Column being evolutionary, that can be swiftly dealt with. Darwin only began to develop his evolutionary ideas in 1838, by which time the Geological Column was well and truly sorted. I’m quite sure Darwin who was born in 1809 did not influence the Rev John Michell in 1788, or Smith in the 1790s, or Conybeare in 1822.

To say the Geological Column is based on evolution is just plain silly, as much was worked out before Darwin was out of diapers..

As for it being Uniformitarian the case is nearly as feeble, as none of the British geologists, bar Lyell of course, were Uniformitarian. They were either Catastrophists or partial converts to Uniformitarianism as was Sedgwick. However though until the 1840s they reckoned the Deluge could have deposited the top 30 ft of strata, all rejected any idea that all the strata were laid down while Noah was on a cruise.

Perhaps the watercolour of de la Beche (and a recent re-enactment) sums up their views.

The sooner the popular idea that the Geological Column is based on a circular argument from evolution  and a result of godless Uniformitarianism is ditched the better.

It would help if devout Christians could also accept that many early geologists and workers of the geological column were devout Christians – even if some weren’t.

2 Corinthians 11 vs1

Books

J. Secord Controversy in Victorian Geology 1986

M Rudwick The Great Devonian contoversy 1985

M Rudwick Bursting the Limits of Time 2005

M. Roberts Evangelicals and Science 2008

Just before the Beagle, Darwin in Wales, 1831

1831 was an eventful year for Charles Darwin. In the first half of the year he graduated from Cambridge with an adequate degree. He had plans for the future; first an expedition to Teneriffe and then a life as a clergyman, when he’d have time for plenty of natural history. Had this happened he would have been one of the last of people without much Christian conviction to be ordained. Even Darwin noticed that clergy were more devout when he returned from the Beagle voyage in 1835.

Many make much of the fact that his degree was in theology and philosophy rather than science. But then you couldn’t do a degree in science, but Darwin did the next best thing, or was it the best thing. For much of his time at Cambridge he attached himself to Rev John Henslow, who was then prfessor of Botany. He had been professor of mineralogy and in the early 1820s produced memoirs on the geology of the Isle of Man and Anglesey. Have been round Anglesey with Henslow’s map and memoir I found found it an incredible piece of geology.

The second half of the year was so different. He had returned to Shrewsbury and tried to teach himself geology with limited success. For the most of August he was in North Wales with Adam Sedgwick as be begand his pioneering work on the Cambrian. After trekking from Capel Curig to Barmouth, he went home to find a letter inviting him on the Beagle.  He managed to get his uncle – a Wedgwood – to persiade his father  and on 27th December set sail from Plymouth.

Things were never the same again.

As you read this you will see how well qualified Darwin was to go on the Beagle. He was already recognised as one of the best of the young naturalists.

For the future Dawin the scientist, or rather Darwin the geologist, July and August were the most crucial. During July he tried to carry on the geology he’d learnt from Henslow and Sedgwick with limited success. He visted Llanymynech quarry and tried to produced a geological map of his home ares.

Then Sedgwick arrived in early August to stay at the Mount. From there Darwin joined Sedgwick on two day trips from Shrewsbury and on 6th August the set of for Llangollen in Sedgwick’s gig. Sedgwick was trying to work out the strata below the Old Red Sandstone (Devonian) and thus gradually sorting it out going down the succession. Ironically he got within 2 miles of this on Long Mountain near Shrewsbury, but turned back – possibly because the horse was knackered! It is a long pull-up and one many cyclists today would avoind or regard it as a hard climb.

As there is no Devonian in North Wales from Llangollen to the Great Orme, Sedgwick got nowhere, beyond teaching Darwin geology. A trip to Anglesey didn’t help and so Darwin left him to travel home to go shooting. As it was Sedgwick started to work around Llanberis and he had not stratigraphic markers to work on. But that is another story.

To go back to early July, Darwin received a parcel of a clinometer, and hammer and so started measuring angles all round the house. To test out his skills he rode the 15 miles to Llanymynech Hill,

which I describe in this paper along with Cwm Idwal

Darwin at Llanymynech

Darwin at Llanym

Also that July he took some local maps of Shropshire by John Baugh, traced then tried to make a geological map.

Both south of Shrewsbury and at Ness he found New Red Sandstone – Permotrias.

I ..coloured a map 

A paper on Darwin’s attempts of geological mapping around Shrewsbury, published in Archives of natural History  1999

Coloured a map

These are two papers one co-authored with Sandra Herbert.

and so we come to the main partof his geological journeys, this time with Sedgwick.

On 2nd August 1831 Sedgwick arrived at the mount in his gig. Dr Darwin thought him a hypochondriac. The next two days were spent looking for Old Red sandstone to the east of Shrewsbury and on the 6th Sedgwick and Darwin set off to north wales as described in this paper published in Endeavour in 2000.

During his visit to Anglesey Sedgwick and Darwin found some serpentinite. He later identified the same rock on St Paul’s Rocks, a tiny island in the Atlantic  early on while on the Beagle

Open and read

just-before-the-beagle

Darwin wanted to get home for some shooting and left Sedgwick near Bangor.After Darwin left Sedgwick he went to Cwm Idwal ,

And Sedgwick’s sketch of Devil’s Kitchen drawn a few weeks later.

then onto Plas y Brenin at Capel Curig, climbed Moel siabod and walked south to Barmouth

Darwin’s route as a mountain expedition, written for a mountain magazine

welshgal

And now more scholarly!!

Darwin never took a compass bearing from Capel Curig to Barmouth. I don’t recommend you try it!! It would cross incredibly rough pathless ground. However I am willing to follow anyone who wishes to try it – especially if they are not used to british hills.  My sadism is coming out here.

As it was he went in a roundabout route and you can visit the localities he described.

Darwin’s Dogleg

This from Archives of Natural History describes the route Darwin took from Capel Curig to Barmouth

Darwin’s dog-leg

Carreg y Fran

And so after a few days with his mates he went home and found the famous letter!

Six months later he carried out his first geology on the voyage at Cape Verde and here I refer to Paul Pearson.

‘Marks of extreme violence’: Charles Darwin’s geological observations at St Jago (São Tiago), Cape Verde islands

P. N. Pearson and C. J. Nicholas

Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 287, 239-253, 1 January 2007, https://doi.org/10.1144/SP287.19

Abstract

The first stop on Charles Darwin’s famous voyage around the world in HMS Beagle was at Porto Praya (Praia), the principal town on the island of St Jago (São Tiago) in the Cape Verde archipelago. From 16 January to 8 February 1832, Darwin enjoyed his first substantive opportunity to study the natural history of an exotic place. Darwin himself regarded this occasion as a significant turning point in his life because, according to his autobiography, it was here that he decided to research and publish a book on the geology of the places visited on the voyage. He also recalled that it was here, the very first port call, that convinced him of the ‘wonderful superiority’ of Charles Lyell’s uniformitarian geology over the doctrine of successive cataclysms that he had been taught in England. Later commentators have generally accepted this account, which is significant for understanding the intellectual background to the Origin of Species, at face value. In this paper we reconstruct some of Darwin’s observations at St Jago based on his contemporaneous notes and diary, and in the light of our own visit made in January 2002. We find little evidence to substantiate the claim that he interpreted the geology in Lyellian terms at the time. Instead, he formulated a theory involving a great cataclysm to explain the dramatic scenery in the island’s interior. He speculated that a torrent of water had carved the main valleys of the island, leaving deposits of diluvium in their beds. It is indisputable that Darwin came to embrace gradualist thinking enthusiastically during the voyage. Some of his observations made on St Jago, especially relating to uplift of the coast, were instrumental in this change of view, but the conversion was gradual, not sudden. His later published works make no mention of his original catastrophist interpretations.

• © The Geological Society of London 2007

https://sp.lyellcollection.org/content/287/1/239/tab-figures-data

And so Darwin went round the world studying the geology.

His last geological trip was to look for glaciation in Shropshire and Wales culminating in Snowdonia in 1842 as this paper on William buckland in 1841 and Darwin in 1842 shows.

BucklandDarwinWalesIce

Geology and Genesis Unearthed; or Why there was no punch up between geology and Genesis

Recently, I found my first paper on Genesis and Geology is now on-line as most of the volumes of The Churchman have been digitised. I wrote this back in 1997, but apart from a few minor errors I still regard it as giving a good account of the early 19th century.

My main thesis stands; that most educated Christians had no issue with geology AND, most importantly, Christians- and particularly Anglican clergy – were often at the forefront of geological advances

Many focus too much on the controversy between Uniformitarians (Lyell) and Catastrophists, with the latter often being presented as biblical literalists. They were not.

That would give another paper in itself but was summed up by de la Beche’s watercolour skit. This could be the Nant Francon and the little boy is being a little boy – Frank Buckland – and nanny comments “Bless the baby. What a walley he have a made.”  This goes to the heart of the matter  – and Buckland Sr was a catastrophist par excellence.

This is myself and ANO doing a (photo-shopped) re-enactment. Perhaps I’ve also done that on the Genesis vs geology myth!

???????????????????????????????

gh

Have fun with this mosaic and identify the following; John Henslow, William Hutton; Adam Sedgwick, William Buckland, Samuel Wilberforce, Charles Lyell,Arthur Holmes, William Smith

 

Michael B. Roberts, “Geology and Genesis,” Churchman 112.3 (Autumn 1998): 225-255

The challenge of geology to Genesis is often perceived to be one of the
issues of the ‘Victorian Crisis of Faith’. Geologists had, since Charles Lyell
published his Principles of Geology in 1831, been demonstrating that the
earth was somewhat older than Archbishop Ussher’s 6,000 years. Thus
Richard Dawkins wrote: ‘in 1862 the eminent physicist Lord Kelvin
greatly worried Darwin by “proving” that the sun and therefore the earth,
could not possibly be more than 24 million years. Although this estimate
was considerably better than the 4004 BC date for the creation then
favoured by churchmen .. .’ 1 The historian Josef Altholz argued in 1976:
‘The great majority of religious spokesmen condemned the doctrine of
evolution, without regard to its scientific merits, on the ground of its
repugnance to the text of the Bible and its tendency to degrade man to the
level of beasts … Both sides (ie clergy and scientists) seemed to identify
the substance of Christianity with the text of Genesis.’2 Both assume that
most clergy in mid-century were biblical literalists.
Neither Dawkins nor Altholz identified any of these literalists. Most
would assume that Samuel Wilberforce would have been a leading
literalist, as someone who damned doubters and attacked Huxley at the
British Association in Oxford. However Wilberforce was no literalist, and
had been on the committees of the Geological and Linnaean Societies, and
had attended Buckland’s lectures in geology at Oxford in the 1820s.3 In
fact, very few churchmen in the 1860s were biblical literalists.

carry on reading;

https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/churchman/112-03_225.pdf

I hope you enjoyed the paper

Buckland in the hyena’s den at Kirkland, Yorkshire

Robert Falcon Scott’s final letters

Here is a good blog on Robert Falcon Scott’s farewell letters to his wife while dying in Antarctica in 1912.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

My parents read this part to me at the age of about 13

“I have written letters on odd pages of this book — will you manage to get them sent? You see I am anxious for you and the boy’s future — make the boy interested in natural history if you can, it is better than games — they encourage it at some schools — I know you will keep him out in the open air — try and make him believe in a God, it is comforting.”

they were laughing about it as they read it to me as I loathed games – rugby, football Cricket etc and always skived off them.

However I loved the outdoors and at about this time I took up serious cycling and was wanting to climb mountains as we had pictures of Khanchenjunga in our dining room. We also had Peter Scott prints in the house.

Thus RF Scott’s last words meant much to me and helped as my school didn’t like non-games players.

I have never been very good at natural history but love it as an ancillary to exploring the countryside, (wilder the better) on foot and bike.

My parents never gave me encouragement to believe in a God. That came later and in part triggered off by being filled with awe for the natural world – with an event in the mountains looking over to Snowdonia.

 

And so begins Jerry Coyne’s blog

Why Evolution Is True

Many of you know of Captain Robert Falcon Scott‘s final entry in his diary, written as he lay freezing to death in his tent on his return from the South Pole. He had made it to the Pole with five companions, only to find that Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian team had beaten him to the prize by about a month.

Here’s the famous picture of Scott’s team at the Pole, presumably taken with a self timer. The caption: “Party at the South Pole, 18 January 1912. L to R: (standing) Wilson, Scott, Oates; (seated) Bowers, Edgar Evans“.  They certainly don’t look happy.

On the return, one of Scott’s men, Edgar Evans, died of a concussion. Another, Titus Oates, frostbitten and near death, walked out of their tent into a blizzard to his demise after famously remarking, “I am going outside. I may be some time.”…

View original post 2,043 more words

The Welsh Dragon—sorry the Welsh Dinosaur. Yr Draig Goch; or yr deinosor gwirion

As I lived in Wales for many years we got used to flying the Welsh flag  – a red dragon. It now seems that it was not a dragon but a dinosaur as Dr  Brian Thomas. who has a Ph.D. in paleobiochemistry from Liverpool University demonstrates in this blog for the Institute for Creation Research.

He had visited St David’s cathedral in west Wales and found a carving of a dinosaur Brachytrachelopan mesai  on a misericord as he describes below. (I lifted the blog to save you the effort of opening it!)  As befits a Ph D from one of our leading universities with a great geology department (where I gave lectures on the glories of creationism many years ago) Thomas discusses the possibility of it being a dinosaur in a very scientific way (nagadi) and considers whether it could have been the imagination of the woodcarver. However he shows that was not the case and that there were dinosaurs in wales at that time. Unfortunately the welsh velociraptors (known in welsh as diogyn – the fastest animal on earth) had died out before 1280, otherwise  Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, would have used them with great effect against Edward I of England. Not even his longshanks would has escaped them! This is a great pity, although we would not have Conwy or Caernarfon castles today.

 

If they had survived and Edward paid homage to LLywelyn, other dinos could have helped to build the castles as the had Stonehenge just after Noah’s flood

The welsh have an excellent term to describe this high quality intellectual reasoning;

cachu rwtsh

The more I read this article, the more I am convinced by it and support his last sentence

This remarkable art forces a rethink of secular dinosaur doctrines but happens to fit perfectly with a biblical view of dinosaurs.

There is more too this, as  Phillip Bell of Creation ministries Internation found representations of dinosaurs in Carlisle cathedral.  These show that in the Lake District dinos were still alive and well in the 15th century. I am convinced that the then Bishop of Carlisle had a pet dinosaur  and thus it was put on his tomb to remind subsequent generations of his love of dinosaurs.

These two episcopal examples show conclusively that dinosaurs were roaming Britain less than a thousand years ago. Wales has been better at keeping the memories alive, but the Church of England and the Church of England have hopelessly compromised themselves on the truth of biblical creation.

I call upon the Archbishop of Wales, and his counterparts in York and Canterbury, to repent and publicise and preach the truth of Biblical Creation and to lead the Anglican Churches away from heresy.

This would be a much belated recognition of the wonderful work of Henry Morris, whose name indicates his Welsh ancestry

 

Source: St. Davids Dragon—Fantasy or Reality?

From The Institute of Creation Research, San Diego

My early memories of dinosaur teachings reflected the doctrine of their extinction 65 million years ago and the evolution of mankind only several million years ago. If that really happened, then our ancestors who lived before the scientific study of fossils should have had no knowledge of dinosaurs or similar creatures like pterosaurs and ichthyosaurs.

Certain pieces of ancient artwork appear to show just the opposite. I grabbed an opportunity to examine one such piece—a carved wooden dragon—found in St. Davids Cathedral in Wales. The ICR Discovery Center for Science & Earth History in Dallas displays a picture of this intriguing dragon art.

St. Davids Cathedral, Wales

Image credit: Brian Thomas

My wife and I visited the cathedral situated in picturesque Pembrokeshire, a far western headland of Wales. Religious buildings have occupied the site for a millennium. The current cathedral had its last big refurbishment in the 1800s, about 400 years after a major late-medieval upgrade, when the dragon-art piece was crafted. We ascended the slope-floored main area to several smaller chapels in the back.

One chapel featured folding seats called misericords. Each one is attached to a tall, straight-backed, dark, ornately carved wooden slot. They line three walls like a series of serene sentinels. Whereas medieval artists represented ecclesiastical themes with reverence, they brought a measure of whimsy to scenes, faces, and animals carved on the underside of each solid oak seat. When the seats are folded up, each carving is visible.

Image credit: Brian Thomas

One misericord shows a dinosaur look-alike. Its overall anatomy resembles the sauropod dinosaurs known from fossils, with longer hind legs than front legs. These long-necked, extinct reptiles typify Jurassic rock layers. This one’s neck is not nearly as long in proportion to its main body as the more familiar sauropods like Diplodocus. Lest someone say its neck looks too short for the carving to represent any real sauropod, its neck length closely matches that of a dinosaur fossil found in Argentina in 2005 named Brachytrachelopan mesai.¹

Two of the carving’s body details—small wings and ears—don’t match what fossils suggest.² Like some modern cartoon dragons, these wings make no biological sense. The creature’s body would be far too massive for such tiny wings to support it in flight. Do these misfit features disqualify the piece from representing a real animal? It depends.

Brachytrachelopan

Image credit: Copyright © M. Hattori. Used in accordance with federal copyright (fair use doctrine) law. Usage by ICR does not imply endorsement of copyright holder.

We first must ask if the unknown artist could have imagined by chance this particular animal form. The pure imagination hypothesis would explain the wacky wings, but it wouldn’t explain the long neck, long tail, legs positioned beneath a barrel-shaped body instead of straddle-legged like modern lizards, small head with sauropod-shaped mouth, and reptilian frills along its spine. When placed on a biology balance, the weight of creature features favors the idea that the artist somehow knew what sauropods looked like. If so, then he or she knew this centuries before scientists began to describe them from fossils.

This eyewitness hypothesis would benefit from an explanation of the ears and especially the wings. Until someone uncovers an ancient artist’s notebook that explains particular stylistic choices, we must reason it out. Medieval dragon depictions across Europe very often include wings. Perhaps artists placed wings on their large reptilian forms to identify them as dragons. In medieval Europe, the word dragon referred to reptiles. The St. Davids sauropod may represent a real, though extinct, reptile with imaginary body parts added on purpose. How could this happen?

If flying dragons were more widely known than fen-dwelling (wetland) dragons, then the artist could have added the flying serpent’s familiar wings to a lesser-known land dragon body just to make sure the viewer knew the creature was a reptile. Evidence that ancient inhabitants of the United Kingdom were familiar with flying dragons that we know today as pterosaurs would bolster this supposition. One sober 18th-century Scottish account reads:

In the end of November and beginning of December last, many of the country people observed…dragons…appearing in the north and flying rapidly towards the east, from which they concluded, and their conjectures were right, that…boisterous weather would follow.³

And according to an approximately 19th-century Welsh anecdote, “the woods around Penllyne Castle, Glamorgan, had the reputation of being frequented by winged serpents, and these were the terror of old and young alike.”⁴ If flying dragons hadn’t yet been eradicated from the UK by the 1700s, then the animals must have been around to terrorize old and young long before then—for example, in medieval times when the St. Davids carvers lived.

Whoever would reject the wings-equal-dragon hypothesis still needs to explain the wealth of short-necked sauropod-specific anatomy on the St. Davids misericord. The larger weight of evidence lies on the side of artists who had some measure of eyewitness knowledge of their subject matter. This remarkable art forces a rethink of secular dinosaur doctrines but happens to fit perfectly with a biblical view of dinosaurs.⁵

References

1. Creation researcher Vance Nelson connected the carving to this fossil in his book Dire Dragons. Nelson, V. 2012. Dire Dragons. Red Deer, Canada: Untold Secrets of Planet Earth Publishing Co.
2. A third detail—webbed feet—could have represented a wetland habitat.
3. Flying Dragons at Aberdeen. 1793. A Statistical Account of Scotland. 6: 467. Quoted in Cooper, B. 1995. After the Flood. Chichester, UK: New Wine Press, 141.
4. Trevelyan, M. 1973. Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales. Yorkshire, UK: EP Publishing Limited, 169. The passage adds on page 170: “An aged inhabitant of Penllyne, who died a few years ago, said that in his boyhood the winged serpents were described as very beautiful….This old man attributed the extinction of winged serpents to the fact that they were ‘terrors in the farmyards and coverts.’”
5. God created dinosaurs when He “made the beast of the earth according to its kind” (Genesis 1:25). Noah’s Flood fossilized many of them, when “all flesh died that moved on the earth: birds and cattle and beasts and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Genesis 7:21). Some dinosaurs presumably survived the Flood on board Noah’s Ark, where “they went into the ark to Noah, two by two, of all flesh in which is the breath of life” (Genesis 7:15). Centuries later, God told Job, “Look now at the behemoth….He moves his tail like a cedar,” probably indicating a sauropod living near where “the Jordan [River] gushes” (Job 40:15-23). These and many other historical records challenge evolutionary beliefs about dinosaur extinction.

* Dr. Thomas is Research Associate at the Institute for Creation Research and earned his Ph.D. in paleobiochemistry from the University of Liverpool.

Cite this article: Brian Thomas, Ph.D. 2019. St. Davids Dragon—Fantasy or Reality?. Acts & Facts. 48 (11).

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