Science Forums 2

[Shubee]

Originally Posted by Eclogite

The fudnamental dictum of geology - the present is the key to the past - is repeatedly validated.

I can't even imagine that to be correct. I think it's obvious that the fossil record is a record of catastrophes and that if we could map the extent of the geological layers, we would see that those catastrophes are on a fantastic scale.

I see the evidence in support of a global flood as truly marvelous, exquisite and compelling. Let's talk about the many enormous burial sites that consist of unimaginably large quantities of plant biomass residue and the graveyards of fantastically many, densely packed fossilized remains of assorted animals.

Fossil plant remains, such as coal, are almost 100 times more massive than living plant biomass (Poldervaart 1955; Ricklefs 1993). That's a highly relevant calculation. It's easy to conceptualize a pre-flood Eden-like world with 100 times the living plant biomass that exists today. The truly insurmountable problem is in trying to imagine a gradual, non-catastrophic process today that is on its way toward producing vast quantities of oil, gas and coal in highly concentrated pockets of the earth's crust.

The distribution of fantastic amounts of plant biomass residue in widely separated pockets on a continually changing planet is very strange. The existence of immense animal graveyards seems to be a remarkably similar phenomenon and equally mysterious. Can you explain the enormous graveyards of fossilized animals where the bones are found tightly packed and jumbled together?

For one such burial site, consider the Morrison Formation (Late Jurassic) in the western United States.

This formation has an average thickness of 100m (300 ft) and extends well over 1,000,000 square km (about 700,000 square miles), being found from Canada to Texas, the Dakotas to Idaho and Arizona to Oklahoma. It is known as one of the world’s richest sources of dinosaur fossils, but also contains fossil fish, frogs, salamanders, lizards, crocodiles, pterosaurs, dinosaur eggs, and shrew- to rat-sized mammals. The dinosaur bones occur in the middle green siltstone beds and in the lower sandstones of the Morrison Formation, often in graveyards composed of densely packed bones.

The Morrison Formation preserved the remains of millions of very large plant-eating dinosaurs as well as very large meat-eating dinosaurs ... but hardly any plant fossils.

It seems like such massive and concentrated burial grounds as are found in the Morrison Formation ... are best explained by very large catastrophic flooding events with massive sorting and transport ...--Sean D. Pitman, The Fossil Record.

There seems to be many unimaginably large animal graveyards that demonstrate that the rapid burial of large animal populations is widespread. How do theorists explain it? Robert Broom, the South African paleontologist, estimated there are eight hundred billion skeletons of vertebrate animals in the Karroo formation. --Adequacy of the Fossil Record, Norman D. Newall, Journal of Paleontology, vol. 33 (May 1959, p. 492).

Compared with any other fossil deposit in the world the Karroo must be regarded as phenomenally rich. Our fossil beds cover an area of about 200,000 square miles in almost any area of which fossils may be found. Some areas are rather poor; others are extremely rich. Great areas are covered by wind-blown dust, and vegetation; and as a rule it is only in water courses, and on slopes that fossils can be seen. I estimate that there are lying today exposed to view the fossil remains of five animals on average in every square mile. In some areas there are 100; in some none. For every fossil that is exposed to view there must be a 1,000 hidden by dust and talus. If there are the remains of 1,000 animals on the shale surface on an average in every square mile, there would be in the Karroo, if the wind-blown sand and dust could be removed, 200,000,000 fossil animals exposed to view. The fossiliferous beds are of great thickness. In some areas they must be 4,000-5,000 feet thick; in others perhaps only 2,000 feet. It would be a very conservative estimate that would put the average thickness at 2,000 feet, and at every few inches we have another page of the book, and another series of fossils to be revealed. I thus estimate that in the whole Karroo formation there are preserved the fossil remains of at least 800,000,000,000 animals. --Broom, R., The Mammal-like Reptiles of South Africa, H.F.G. Witherby, London, p. 309, 1932.

Broom is not the only person to remark upon the extraordinary abundance of fossils in the Karroo formation. The paleontologist Edwin H. Colbert, in his A Fossil-Hunter's Notebook [Dutton, 1980, pp.163-4], writes "...in the Karroo... it seemed that everywhere we went we found fossils. All of which is some indication as to the abundance of fossil reptiles in the Karroo beds. I have never seen anything to equal the numbers of fossil vertebrates in the Karroo, except perhaps the prolific occurrences of Oligocene mammals in the White River Badlands of South Dakota. Wherever one goes in the Karroo there is a feeling of fossil reptiles at one's feet — and more often than not the fossils are nearby..."

Where in the present do you see fantastic oil and coal deposits being created that compare in any way to the unimaginably huge and ancient oil and coal deposits that now exist? Also, please tell me where animal graveyards of immense size are currently forming. If fantastic numbers of animals were ever mysteriously drawn to specific locations that became immense graveyards of fossilized skeletons and densely packed bones, please explain the mechanism.