Welcome to all of the new subscribers!
This is the "When I get a round tooit" Creation/Evolution newsletter from Ian Juby and the traveling Creation Science Museum of Canada.

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In this newsletter:
1) 750 people needed to....
2) Ooops!
3) It's pretty hard to bury fossils you already dug up...
4) Bilingual vid with Ian Juby
5) The Mailbag

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1) 750 people needed to...
One proposed layout for the portable museum

What you see above is two shipping containers, modified and joined together into a portable museum.  This is the next step I'm taking towards building a permanent creation museum in Ottawa, Ontario.

Please pray for me and this project - and the souls who will visit this museum!

You'll remember in this back issue of CrEvo news, I pointed out an Angus Reid poll that was spurned by the opening of the Big Valley Creation Science Museum in 2007.  AR had polled Canada to get a feel for the opinion of the public on the creation/evolution debate.  In their poll, the majority believed in evolution when BVCSM opened, but one year later (while the rest of the country remained of the same opinion), Alberta had taken a complete reversal of opinion, becoming the only province in Canada to have the majority taking the young earth creationist position!

I want to repeat this right across Canada.

Watch this video to get the scoop. (10.5 meg FLV file; you'll need a flash video player like the free Riva FLV player)
(Alternatively, you can watch the same vid on youtube)

So here's how I wanna do it:
I want to modify two 40 foot shipping containers into a modular, portable creation museum.  The goal is to take it across the country, especially focusing on rural Canadian towns and cities - not just the big cities.  Slide-outs are built into the containers, effectively doubling the interior size - roughly 1,200 square feet.  It'll contain many of the exhibits already in my collection (tens of thousands of dollars worth), plus several new exhibits which I build as production models for other museums.  I'll also build at least one very realistic animatronic (robotic) dinosaur.  Make no mistake: This will be a world-class museum in two transportable shipping containers, dropped in place in mall parking lots, schools playgrounds, church parking lots - whereever.

750 people?

I estimate that the entire museum can be built for $75,000.  So if 750 people give $100 each, the project should be completely paid for and hopefully on the road in one to two years. Want to be one of the 750?  Click here to make a donation on line.

Also, this museum will be operated as a "for profit" entity.  There are a number of reasons for this. So while it means I cannot give tax-deductable receipts, it does open the door for business investments, loans, or corporate sponsorship.  Contact me if you or your business want national exposure and wants to sponsor or get involved.

All the needs (like model railroad boxcars) are listed on the Creation Museum project page.  Please pray!  And if you can, please donate!  I'll keep y'all updated on the progress in future newsletters.

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2) Oooops!

After my last "special edition on Ardi" newsletter was sent out, an error was pointed out to me.  Funny thing is, though I have many anti-creationists who scour my newsletters, desperately looking for something with which to criticize me, not one of them spotted this rather significant error.  Once again, it was a creationist (thanks David Willis) who caught it and set me straight.
In the past, many bold and brazen claims were made by evolutionists which were later retracted, shall we say, rather quietly?  So I thought I would make a retraction/correction in the style that National Geographic would after running a multi-page spread with full-colour photos and an artist's reconstruction of an "intermediate fossil," only to find out the fossil they modeled it after was a fake:

In my last newsletter, I showed the above image of Dikika's foot bones and referred to this as the joint where the great toe diverges.  It is not, it is the ankle bones where the tibia and fibula connect to the ankle.
I apologize for this error.


So what does this change in what I wrote in the last newsletter?  Nothing!  In fact, it's an excellent example of just how consistent the evidence is.  That's right, even though I was completely wrong in my interpretation of the bones, (and it was a doozer of a mistake, to be sure) it doesn't take away one bit from the ultimate conclusions.

For example, everything that we do know about Dikika says it's ape-like.  The technical word for this is "Pongid" so when you read Walter W. Ferguson's very technical article, you'll have an idea of what he's talking about.

Further to that, the jury is still out on the "Little foot" fossil - they can't even figure out what age it is!  Of course, this will not be determined until the entire fossil is examined and they come to a consensus on where it fits in the evolutionary tree.  Only at this point will they tie an age to it.  So far, the different dating methods have returned "absolute ages" of between 2.2 and 4 million years old.  (so much for accuracy)  Just watch part 21 of "The Complete Creation" video series for the case study of the "absolute dating" of the 1470 skull, and then read the Wikipedia entry of the "Little Foot" (STW 573) where you'll read comments like:

"Further to this, there has been considerable debate in the scientific literature as to how old Stw 573 is. Estimates range from almost 4 Ma based on cosmogenic 26Al and 10Be radiometric dating [4] to 2.2 Ma [5] based on Uranium-lead dating. A magnetochronology estimate places the fossil at about 3.3 Ma"

But mark my words: Once the fossil is examined, and it's "place" in the evolutionary tree of life is 'scientifically deduced,' then, and only then, will they assign an age to this fossil.  After all - they have a wide range of ages they can choose from!  :)

I asked my good friend, Dr. Aaron Judkins, to give me his analysis of these fossil finds.  He had this to say about the Dikika and "Little Lucy finds:"
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=447155236
(again, you'll probably wanna put on your thinking cap before you read this - and maybe a hard-hat too; this stuff's hard on the head!)

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3) It's pretty hard to bury fossils you already dug up...

It has been an unbelievable couple of weeks here.  I have sat here, stunned at the articles getting handed to me.  First, as you saw in the "special edition" CrEvo news article on Ardi, Lucy got tossed out of the evolutionary tree.  This alone is staggering.  But then, in the past two weeks, I've watched - wide-eyed - as Ida, and Archaeopteryx also got turfed!


Give that tree a gooood shake!
Do you remember Ida?  If not, you can go back and read this past issue of CrEvo news, where I commented on the fanfare of this fossil.  Ida thought the evidence would've been better, but hey what do I know?
At the time I said it was nothing more than a lemur "kind." (shown right, courtesy of Wikipedia)

My good friend, Brock Lee, actually went out and bought the book on Ida (the fossil was presented with much fanfare, it's own TV show, and it's own book! Who'da thought a dead thing could be so famous?)

I won't say what Brock said after he spent good money on this book, but he did send me some excerpts from the book. I thought I'd throw some emphasis on a few things:

"She [Ida] has some features in common with lemurs, but none of the
extreme specializations of modern lemurs…Overall, she is the size of a
large squirrel; or, in primate terms, the same size as an Eastern woolly
lemur…As an adult, she probably would have weighed about the same as an
Eastern woolly lemur: almost three pounds (up to 1.3 kilograms) – although
that would be a big one…She had a wide-eyed, monkey-like face…Ida had
shortish arms and much longer hind legs – the classic shape of a clinger
and leaper. Tarsiers are clingers and leapers [as are lemurs]…Clearly,
although she has much in common with lemurs, she is not herself a lemur."
Colin Tudge, The Link, p. 218-221

Well, it would appear that several scientists, publishing in Nature magazine, would both agree and disagree with Tudge.  They would agree that Ida had much in common with the lemurs, but would disagree with his comment that Ida was not a lemur. In fact, the Nature authors concluded that Ida was an extinct lemur, and has absolutely nothing to do with human lineage!  Gee, isn't' that what the creationists said?
Now, Nature magazine is expensive, not many people have access to it, and if you think Dr. Judkins' article was a tough read - pffft - that was a daily newspaper by comparison!  Fortunately, there's lots of layman articles reporting on the article, so here's a couple to read:

http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2009/10/so-idas-not-the-missing-link-questions-and-answers-with-erik-seiffert.html

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/10/21/ida-primate-fossil.html

In fact, the discovery article warrants a brief visit.  The author writes:
"The scientists who formally announced the finding said they weren't claiming Darwinius [Ida] was a direct ancestor of monkeys, apes and humans. But they did argue that it belongs in the same major evolutionary grouping, and that it showed what an actual ancestor of that era might have looked like."

Really? If y'all head on over to my original article, you'll see some quotes I pulled from a Sky news article. This is what the "scientists who formally announced the finding" had to say about Ida at the time:
"This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of the mammals," he said.
"This is the one that connects us directly with them"
"Now people can say "okay we are primates, show us the link'"
"The link they would have said up to now is missing - well it’s no longer missing."

There's no mistake - the "scientists who formally announced the finding" most certainly did say that Ida was our ancestor! 
In fact, in the two-hour History channel special on Ida, "The Link," Ida's discoverer, Jørn H. Hurum, said "This fossil will probably be the one pictured in all textbooks for the next 100 years."

He was close.  It lasted for a few months at least, though  I'm not sure if it was around long enough to make into any textbooks!  However, Brock Lee assured me that Ida most certainly will be in the creationary text book that he's writing. :)

As I said at the time, and will reiterate here, this was nothing more than propaganda.  And yet - I can pretty much guarantee you that I will have people asking me about Ida for many years to come.  Why?  Because the "scientists who formally announced the finding" went to great lengths to put it in front of the public as proof of evolution - and except for the few who may read Nature, or perhaps newsletters like this one, no one will ever know any different.


Well let's chop off a few branches...
So now we come to the famed Archaeopteryx (pronounced "ark-ee-op-trix", we'll call him Archie), the supposed half-lizard, half-bird - the size of a chicken and now the thickness of a chicken burger.  Anyone who's attended my talks already knows what I think about this fossil (assuming it's not a forgery - more to come on that in a future CrEvo newsletter). As we creationists have been saying for years, even if it is genuine, so what? Its features do not make it half-bird, half-lizard.

Some evolutionists and creationists have argued that Archie is, in fact, a forgery - a small dinosaur to which someone added feather impressions.  Whether or not that is true, some evolutionary researchers are now saying Archie is not a precursor to the birds, but rather the claim that it is the ancestor to the birds is for the birds. It has nothing to do with bird evolution.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125624463802402117.html#

Archie has been one of the evolutionary mainstays - arguably *the* most famous fossil ever!  So for the evolutionists to now turn around and concede that it has nothing to do with bird evolution is, indeed, staggering.


Aw, heck - just chop the entire tree down!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091009-dinosaur-species-never-existed.html

And you think I'm finished? Once again, the evolutionists are finally catching up with what the creationists have been saying for years.  I'm certainly not the only creationist out there who's been arguing that many of our dinosaur "species" may, in fact, be of the same kind of dinosaur. ("kind" - that's a biblical word, see? Read Genesis chapter 1, pay close attention to that word.)

That's right - many kinds of famous dinosaur "species" (more on that evolutionary word in a second) never existed.  In the pursuit of both fame and fortune in the dino-digging world, many dinosaur discoverers claimed a dinosaur was a new type of "species" on some vague difference between their dino skeleton and someone else's dino skeleton.
Well, take a look at the people around you: There are skeletal differences between men and women, adults and children, sick and healthy.  They are all still very human, are they not?
Take a look at the variation within the dog kind - they are all dogs, but the diversity is incredible.  It's the same with the dinosaurs.

This diversity of species has been parroted occasionally as "evidence" of evolution.  Heck - dog variations have been parroted as evolution.  At best, it can be interpreted as weak evidence for evolution, when it is in fact good evidence for creation.  Why? Because we see things reproducing after their kind, exactly as the Bible said.  The dogs are still dogs - and extinction in the fossil record is of no help to evolution, as extinction is a loss of variation when evolution requires a gain of variation.

In fact, it is interesting to note that the word "species" was originally coined by a creationist, Karl Von Linne (aka Linnaeus), who believed that the lifeforms were speci-ally created kinds.  This term species was then later hijacked by the evolutionary camp to be used to claim that diversity within a kind is somehow proof of evolution.  (Special thanks to Vance Nelson)

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4) Bilingual Vid With Ian Juby
Laurence Tisdall and the fine folks over at the Creation Science Association of Quebec put together a last-minute tour for me on my way back from Nova Scotia last month.  One of those talks, which Laurence translated into french, is posted on their website. 

"Le déluge universel et les dinosaures" is an almost 2-hour long, bilingual presentation.   You can play it by visiting the webpage here and making use of their website player, or you can download it directly:

http://www.creationnisme.com/video/ascq_ian_juby.wmv
(Watch out  - it's like, a 120 meg download!)

In this video, we talk about the profound evidence for Noah's flood provided by the dinosaurs.

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5) The Mailbag

Welp, for this edition, you'll be happy to know that the only "hate mail" I have to share was in the form of a phone call....which doesn't get sent very easily by email.  Don't worry, it was nothing that hitting the "off" button on the phone couldn't fix...  Again, thank you to all of you who wrote in with such kind words and encouragement.
Here's some random samplings from the mailbag:

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Great web site. Thanks for your ministry!

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Hey Brother. I just wanted to say thank you for your simplicity and honest
approach to the find of the delk footprint. thank you for your humility.
Because of that i understood everything you said about ct scans etc and
learning all about the print. i am impressed with your KINDness. I want to
say that i am so grateful today to have been able to see the delk
footprint. And that i am more than convinced,
that it is what it is.

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I was in town today so I was able to watch some of your videos with a fast
internet connection.  From the bit I saw, you did a good job - very
detailed, and no fluff.  In the past, I had bought a lot of material from
the ICR (and others), but it is not as informative as yours.  I may order
a set of the DVDs.

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Just to say keep up the good work . This is the best and most informative
site dealing with creation I've come across yet .

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Hi Ian

I have just (last night) sat through everyone of your videos (22) in all
that I found on both YouTube and Tangle and I was amazed, thrilled and
fascinated all at once. Thanks so much for this wonderful video series and
God bless for the hard work you put into them. I could not tear myself
away from them.

I.J. After responding and asking him if he meant he watched all 22 at once, he informed me that he had, in fact, done just that - until something like six in the morning.  I then asked him how many fingers I was holding up....  Yup, I still remember doing that when I first heard a creation speaker - I was hooked!  Thanks for the kind words brother, I'm glad my humble efforts are of use to you.

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