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Gday Gday Gday from the Creation Guy John Mackay with good news.

Following Joseph’s  find at Weeley bridge UK earlier this year of a very large stalactite dripping on to a ‘large ground stalagmite’ with ‘fossilised’ leaves in it. (see report 4) Weeley Bridge UK was built in 1930, so we have attempted to duplicate the situation in order to see how leaves blowing under a railway bridge could be trapped fast enough to be entrapped, encased and even replaced by a limestone from a drip a source above the leaf. The report below was compiled Thursday 24th November 2016.

We modified our stalactite machine number 2 by including an inclined orange pvc ½ drain pipe (see pic below) to catch all tite drips of limestone rich solution, and channel them in  one direction. Then I placed leaves under the drip locations as well as along the flow path. Light brown flowstone soon began to appear along the orange pipe base. Leaves placed in this soon began to gain a covering of carbonate. The pipe was fully open to the environment, so wind was our biggest problem particularly on one day of 70-100km per hour (45-60mph) winds, when up to 90 % of leaves ‘left’ the experiment…never to be seen again. Never the less, success has been gained by persistence and replacement, and enclosing the tite machine on the worst wind side. We have also observed that winds not only remove the ‘officially’ emplaced specimens, but bring in new leafs on an irregular basis. See first results below

One leaf calcified after 8 weeks sitting in the inclined orange drip tray on tite machine 2, fully open to the environment. There are others but this was the easiest to extract and test. This is a good result showing how the Weeley railway bridge deposit would have had not problem forming in a short time in the open and how process is the key, not time.

One of Josephs leafs ..extracted with leaf preserved and limestone impressions peeled off.

The leaf (above) is the original material and the thin limestone encasing layer reacts rapidly with 3%HCl, yet apart from minor effervescence on sections where the limestone casing has been removed, the leaf shows only very minor effervescence at the cellular surface, and we have yet to find any major evidence of the leaf being infiltrated by CaCO3.

Note clear drops of 3% HCl with only minor bubbling and leaf bottom end effervescence where layer still adhered. Then compare this to original fern material collected from Australian Permian rock in NSW coal deposits.

BELOW ENTRAPPED WHOLE LEAF original leaf in Permian Coal Sediments Terrigal NSW Australia, found by this author and now in our Australian collection.

It is obvious that we have established it is possible to  ‘naturally’ entrap a leaf and seal it away from decomposition processes rapidly enough to preserve it, both above and below ground, in strata or in stalagmite formation. In our case a max of 8 weeks elapsed.  As all our experimentation are showing, time is actually the enemy of preservation of any sort including preservation of the original material by ‘negative image’ (a mold),  by positive infilling of that mold (a cast)  by impression replacement/mineralization of the original. Yet again this series of experiments show  that time is not the issue, but process is.

Historic note: as the author Rider Haggard used the placement of the ruthless evil King Twala’s body under a dripping stalactite to encase and preserve Twalas body in a glassy layer of limestone  (see King Solomon’s Mines 1885),  perhaps we should call this rapid entrapment process be named Twalation or Haggation?

And thank you Jesus for such good results.

PS for those who query still is this a real fossil below is pic of fossil leaf mould from tufa /liimestone deposits, to show that its not time that make a fossil but process. Most people think ..fossil = petrified ..wrong! Peterified is when the original material has been replaced by stone. Material actually becomes a fossil as soon as its shape is preserved in any rock type that wlll endure. Later it can become a petrified fossil if hard settingn material can enter the space.

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TO VIEW all strata reports from 2016 to the present click 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 (April 2022 USA Conference Video Lecture), 14.