Chapter 12c:
Fossils & Strata
Why the Fossil Strata Theory is a remarkable Hoax
13 - THE FOSSILS
IMMENSE NUMBER OF FOSSILS—One of the most startling facts about the sedimentary strata around the world is the vast quantities of fossils they contain. Without a worldwide Flood, it would be impossible for such huge amounts of plants and animals to have been rapidly buried. And without rapid burial they could not have fossilized.
Yes, there are immense numbers of rapidly buried fossils; read this:
About one-seventh of the earth’s surface is tundra—frozen mud,—containing the fossil remains of millions of mammoths and other large and smaller animals. Then there are the log jams of dinosaur bones found in many places in the world. Over 300 different kinds of dinosaurs have been excavated from one place in Utah. Vast fossil beds of plants exist in various places. We today call them coal beds. In Geiseltal, Germany, were found the remains of 6,000 vertebrates. Great masses of amphibians have been found in the Permian beds of Texas. Elsewhere in Texas huge masses of fossil clams have been unearthed—yet never are living clams so tightly packed together as we find here. Examining them, we find clamshells that are closed! When a clam dies, its shell opens—unless before death it is quickly buried under the pressure of many feet of soil and pebbles. In one area alone in South Africa, there are about 800 billion fossils of amphibians and reptiles in an area 200,000 miles square [517,980 km2].
Old Red Sandstone in England has billions upon billions of fish, spread over 10,000 square miles [25,899 km2], with as many as a thousand fish fossils in one square yard. Trilobites are among the smallest of the fossils. They are found at the bottom of the strata, in the Cambrian. And the Cambrian—with its trilobites—is also found 7,000 feet high in the mountains. Yet trilobites were small shallow-sea creatures! What flood of waters carried them up there?
These vast beds of sedimentary fossil-bearing strata cover about three-fourths of the earth’s surface, and are as much as 40,000 feet thick.
COLLECTED HEAPS—There are heaps and heaps of fossil specimens in the collections of paleontologists and museums.
Men have searched for fossils since the beginning of the 19th century, and the facts are now available: There is no evidence of evolution in the fossil record.
Forty-three hundred years ago, a great catastrophe, the Flood, overspread the world.
In our own day, a great catastrophe has inundated evolutionary theory. No less an authority than a Smithsonian paleontologist describes the basis of the problem:
"There are a hundred million fossils, all catalogued and identified, in museums around the world."—*Porter Kier, quoted in New Scientist, January 15, 1981, p. 129 [Smithsonian scientist].
*David Raup, head paleontologist of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, describes the heart of the problem:
"So the geological time scale and the basic facts of biological change over time are totally independent of evolutionary theory. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found—yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks."—*David M. Raup, "Evolution and the Fossil Record," in Science, July 17, 1981, p. 289.
NOT MADE NOW—Several years ago, two scientists tried to make some fossils. According to the school textbooks, it should not be hard to do. *Rainer Zangerl and *Eugene S. Richardson, Jr., placed dead fish in wire cages and dropped them into several Louisiana lagoons and bayous. When the men returned six and a half days later, they found that bacteria and scavengers had consumed all the soft parts of the fish and had scattered the bones in the cages.
Sedimentary strata are filled with fish fossils; yet when a fish dies today, it never fossilizes. It bloats, floats, and then is eaten by scavengers and other small creatures.
"When a fish dies its body floats on the surface or sinks to the bottom and is devoured rather quickly, actually in a matter of hours, by other fish. However, the fossil fish found in sedimentary rocks is very often preserved with all its bones intact. Entire shoals of fish over large areas, numbering billions of specimens, are found in a state of agony, but with no mark of a scavenger’s attack."—*lmmanuel Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (1955), p. 222.
The strata have lots of animals in them; but, when an animal dies today, it never fossilizes. It rots if the buzzards do not find it first. Dead animals do not normally produce fossils.
"The buffalo carcasses strewn over the plains in uncounted millions two generations ago have left hardly a present trace. The flesh was devoured by wolves or vultures within hours or days after death, and even the skeletons have now largely disappeared, the bones dissolving and crumbling into dust under the attack of weather."—*Carl O. Dunbar, Historical Geology (1949), p. 39.
There is an abundance of fossilized plant life in the strata; yet, when a weed, bush, or tree dies, it turns back to soil. It does not harden into a fossil.
It requires some very special conditions to produce fossils. Those conditions occurred one time in history. The evidence is clear that it was a worldwide phenomenom, and that it happened very, very quickly.
RAPID BURIAL—A striking fact about the fossils is that they were obviously all laid down at the same time—and very, very rapidly!
Where are the bison today? As we just read, most were slain by buffalo hunters in the Plains States of America over a hundred years ago. But where are their fossils? None are to be found. Millions of bison died, but there are no fossil remains. They rotted, were eaten by scavengers, decayed, and slowly returned back to the earth.
The fact is that fossils never form at the present time; yet, in the sedimentary strata, we find literally billions of them! Examination of the strata bearing them reveals it was obviously laid down by a massive flood of water.
The sheer immensity of these fossil graveyards is fantastic. And to think that it never happens today! Speaking about sedimentary deposits that he found in the Geiseltal, in central Germany, *Newell says:
"More than six thousand remains of vertebrate animals and a great number of insects, molluscs, and plants were found in these deposits. The compressed remains of soft tissues of many of these animals showed details of cellular structure [with] well-preserved bits of hair, feathers and scales . . The stomach contents of beetles, amphibia, fishes, birds and mammals provided direct evidence about eating habits."—*N.O. Newell "Adequacy of the Fossil Record," in Journal of Paleontology, May 1959, p. 496.
It would be impossible for vast numbers of plants and animals to be suddenly buried under normal circumstances. Yet we find that the fossils were buried so quickly that the food could be seen in many of their stomachs. Even the delicate soft parts of their bodies are visible, so rapid had been the burial. Quick, high compression adds to the evidence for extremely rapid burial. All of the life forms were suddenly flattened out. Sharks have been found flattened to ¼ inch [1.27 cm] in thickness with the tail still upright, suggesting sudden catastrophic burial. It took rapid action to do that.
"Robert Broom, the South African paleontologist, estimated that there are eight hundred thousand million skeletons of vertebrate animals in the Karro formation."—*Op. cit., p. 492.
Describing herring fossils in the Miocene shales of California, a U.S. Geological Survey expert tells us:
"More than a billion fish, averaging 6 to 8 inches [15.24-20.32 cm] in length, died on 4 square miles [10.36 km2] of bay bottom."—*Harry S. Ladd, "Ecology, Paleontology, and Stratigraphy," in Science, January 9, 1959, p. 72.
What happened? Some terrible catastrophe occurred that suddenly overwhelmed the earth! Fossil seashells have been found in the highest mountains of the planet, including the highest range of them all, the Himalayas, which reaches in an arc across central Asia.
FISH SWALLOWING FISH—Princeton University scientists were working in Fossil Lake, Wyoming, when they found a fossil fish that was swallowing another fish. Because both fish had been pressed flat by the sudden burial, the paleontologists could see one fish inside the other with only the tail sticking out of the larger one’s throat. It was a perch swallowing a herring.
Obviously, this required a very sudden event to capture and kill a fish swallowing a fish! Nothing like this happens today.
In the Hall of Paleontology, at Kansas State University, can be seen a 14-foot fish that has swallowed a 6-foot fish. The fish that was swallowed was not digested,—and then both had been suddenly entombed.
FOSSIL FOOTPRINTS—Leonard Brand and James Florence did some excellent research! They gathered together the great majority of fossil footprint records from approximately 800 published papers, as well as from data in five major paleontological museums. This information was then correlated with burial records on the fossils themselves.
Comparing it all, they came up with some surprising conclusions:
(1) Birds and mammals were buried on about the same levels as the footprints of their species were found. This was in the Quaternary and Tertiary at the very end of the Flood.
(2) But, below these top strata, the footprints of amphibians, non-dinosaur reptiles, and dinosaurs were made well below the levels where the bulk of their bodies were buried!
That second discovery is rather astounding. If long ages had occurred during each strata, then the footprints and bodies should be found together. But if a worldwide single Flood was responsible for all the strata, then we would expect to find large numbers of amphibians, reptiles, and dinosaurs walking around earlier in the Flood, yet buried later in it!
You will find further data and charts on the Brand and Florence article referenced below:
"During the early to middle part of the Flood large numbers of amphibians and reptiles were moving about, and thus producing footprints. Later as the Flood progressed (upper Jurassic and Cretaceous) there were very few live amphibians or reptiles to produce footprints, except for the large dinosaurs. During the Cretaceous when the only footprints preserved were the large dinosaur tracks, there were many amphibian and reptile bodies that were being buried to produce the abundant Cretaceous body fossils. During the Cenozoic almost no amphibian or reptile footprints were preserved.
". . During the flood the birds and mammals were in the uplands, away from the depositional basins, because of ecological differences and/or more adaptable behavioral responses to the unusual biological crisis caused by the flood."—Leonard Brand and James Florence, "Stratigraphic Distribution of Vertebrate Fossil Footprints Compared with Body Fossils" in Origins, Vol 9, no. 2 (1982), p. 71.
PLANTS AND ANIMALS NOT TOGETHER—According to the theory, over a period of millions of years, plants and animals died, dropped to the ground and changed into fossils (even though such fossilization never occurs today). Gradually, they were covered with dirt as, over the centuries, falling leaves turned into dirt.
But in reality, it is only rarely that we find plants and animals together in the fossil beds! That is why "Minium’s Dead Cow Quarry" in Kansas is so very much appreciated by paleontologists: It is an exception to the rule and does have plants and plant seeds in the same rock with animals (*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution 1990, p. 307).
Why would plants and animals normally not be found together in the fossil strata? The reason is simple enough. They were all washed into place by the worldwide Flood. The water tended to sort them out, resulting in rafts of vegetation being floated into place, which became our present coal beds, while other pockets in the strata became filled with "fossil graveyards" as animals were washed into other locations.
IN WHAT FORM ARE THE FOSSILS?—There are millions upon millions of fossils. You may wonder what those fossils are like. Here are the seven primary types of fossils:
(1) Hard parts (the bones and shells) of some plants and animals were preserved.
(2) Carbon alone was preserved. This is where our coal beds came from.
(3) The original form is preserved only in casts and molds. The original material dissolved away and a cast of its shape was preserved. This would also require sudden burial.
(4) Sometimes petrification of wood occurred. An excellent example of this would be the Petrified Forest in Arizona, where we find entire tree trunks that have turned to stone. After sudden burial, each cell in the wood was gradually replaced by minerals from an underground flow of water.
(5) There are prints of animal tracks. Thousands of animal tracks have been found preserved in stone, and the prints are always shown running away from something. In Glen Rose, Texas, and several other places, prints of giant humans have been found. In the same bed with the human footprints have been found dinosaur tracks! This shows that the dinosaurs lived when man did, and not millions of years earlier, as the evolutionists claim. (Much more information on this will be found in chapter 13, Ancient Man.)
(6) Ripple marks and rain drop splashes. Ancient hail imprints (which are quite different from raindrops) have never been found. The weather must have been consistently warm when the Flood began (*W.H. Twenhofel, Principles of Sedimentation (1950), p. 621).
(7) Worm trails, droppings, feathers, chemicals, and even fish odor were preserved by sudden burial!
CAMBRIAN FOSSILS IN FINE DETAIL—Before concluding this section on what is included in "fossils," we should mention that the soft parts of the plants and animals are at times clearly traced in the rocks. One excellent example of this is the Burgess Pass fossils.
In 1910, a pack train loaded with supplies was struggling over a mountain path high in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, near the Burgess Pass, when a horse kicked a dark rock and stumbled. One of the men examined the rock and found that it had fine, exquisitely detailed fossil markings. Later, the Smithsonian Institute sent out paleontologists and workmen who quarried out tons of rock from the side of that and nearby mountains, and sent 35,000 fossils to be analyzed and housed in our national museum in Washington, D.C.
These specimens were primarily bottom-dwellers from ancient seas, such as worms, trilobites, brachiopods, lampshells, and more. Here, in these very high mountains, the soft parts of these creatures from Cambrian deposits (the lowest of all strata) were clearly visible. Even delicate internal organs were traced on the stone. The transitional species leading up to those common Cambrian specimens ought to have been found, but they were not. Yet Burgess Pass, and nearby digging sites (such as Mount Stephen), ultimately yielded almost copious amounts of fossils of nearly every major type of life form.
"These went further [than merely including fossil bones]—with the outline of the body, even the soft internal organs were often traceable like miniature X-ray films. Among the many fossils found are a wide range of major kinds. I already referred to three main kinds—brachiopods, worms and arthropods (the trilobites). Almost every major kind of animal has been found there, except those with backbones."—Harold O. Coffin, "Famous Fossils from a Mountaintop," in Origins, January 1, 1974, p. 46.
BURIED FORESTS—Another dramatic evidence of a catastrophic flood of massive proportions—as the cause of the sedimentary strata—is the buried forests.
Coal beds, of course, are one such example of buried forests. They will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter.
One of the best places to see buried forests is Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone Park, in Montana. You will there find a succession of petrified tree layers. The uniformitarian evolutionists claim that the trees grew there, died, and were gradually covered by soil deposits over oncoming ages as the dead trees stood there. Gradually, after tens of thousands of years, additional trees died and were covered over by more millennia of soil deposits!
But careful analysis of the entire ridge reveals a unity of age, burial conditions, and surrounding deposits. A succession of strong currents, interspersed with flows and volcanic showers from another direction, washed the sedimentary strata into place.
(Both later in this chapter, in chapter 14, and somewhat in chapter 6, we give more attention to the implications of these fossil upright trees, also called polystrate trees.)
Stop and think of it a minute: Would a vertical tree die and stand there for half a million years while rock strata gradually covered it? Yet we find polystrate trees in the strata and even in coal beds.
NON-EXTINCT FOSSILS—The great majority of animals and plants that lived long ago were just like those alive today, with the exception of some extinct species. Here is a sampling of what you will find in the complete strata of the "geologic column"—but remember that this "complete" strata is to be found in its entirety nowhere in the world. Beginning at the bottom, and proceeding to the top, this is what we find:
Precambrian . . . . . . algae, bacteria, fungi
Cambrian . . . . . . . .
sponges, snails, jellyfishOrdovician . . . . . . . . clams, starfish, worms
Silurian . . . . . . . . . . . scorpions, corals
Devonian . . . . . . . . . sharks, lungfish
Carboniferous . . . . . ferns, cockroaches
Permian . . . . . . . . . . beetles, dragonflies
Triassic . . . . . . . . . . pines, palms
Jurassic . . . . . . . . . . crocodiles, turtles
Cretaceous . . . . . . . . ducks, pelicans
Paleocene . . . . . . . . . rats, hedgehogs
Eocene . . . . . . . . . . . lemurs, rhinoceroses
Oligocene . . . . . . . . . beavers, squirrels, ants
Miocene . . . . . . . . . . camels, birds
Pliocene . . . . . . . . . . horses, elephants
Pleistocene . . . . . . . . man
(Later in this chapter, under the section, "Mixed-up Fossils," we will learn that the fossils are not neatly contained in certain strata; they are often far above or below their assigned strata.)
It is obvious from the above list, that the species we had before, we have now. Those fossils are just like their counterparts living today. Yes, there are some extinct species, for some kinds have died out. But it is of interest that even a number of the anciently extinct species—have in recent years been found to be still living!
Here are some of the thousands of creatures alive today that are totally identical to what they supposedly looked like "millions of years" ago: Cockroach (250 million years); starfish (500 million years); shark (181 million years); sea urchin (100 million years); ginkgo tree (200 million years); dragonfly (170 million years); bacteria (600 million years).
Consider the bat: All the fossil bats look just like the ones that fly around now. It was reported that *Jepsen had found the oldest fossil bat ever! (*G.L. Jepsen reported in Science, for December 9, 1966). A photograph of its skeleton, plus an accompanying sketch are shown in the article. That oldest-known bat is supposedly 50 million years old, and yet it is just like a modern bat skeleton. And below it? not one transitional fossil anywhere that leads us from "lower forms of life" to the bat. When the bat first appears, it is all bat, and nothing but bat!
LIVING FOSSILS—(*#17 Living Fossils [coelacanth and plesiosaur]*) [Appendix 17 on our website has stories, four photographs, and more, but no quotations.]
There are species found only in rock strata, and supposedly millions of years old, which have been declared "extinct for millions of years." This has been considered another "proof" of evolution, although extinction is no evidence of evolution; evolving into new life forms is.
Yet in recent decades a number of these "extinct for millions of years" species have been found to not be extinct after all!
The BIG question is this: Where then were they all those "millions of years" they were missing from the upper rock strata?
"Long before I began to research the subject in any detail, I had brooded about a number of puzzling features—things which didn’t seem to fit the [evolutionary] argument—which the textbooks largely ignored.
"There is, for example, the fact that some creatures fail to evolve yet continue on quite successfully as ‘living fossils.’ Bees preserved in amber from the Tertiary period are almost identical with living bees. And everyone has heard of the coelacanth, supposed to have been extinct since the beginning of the Cretaceous period. The plant world also offers living fossils, such as the gingko, with a leaf unlike that of any modern tree."—*G.R. Taylor, Great Evolution Mystery (1983), pp. 25-26.
So many of these "living fossils" have been found that scientists have given a name to the study: Cryptozoology, the study of "hidden animals." According to evolutionary theory, they were once alive, then got hidden for millions of years, and continue living today. Here are some of these "living fossils," all of which are alive today:
(1) Coelacanth fish: The crossopterygian fish—"extinct" since Cretaceous. It has not been found in the strata for the past "50 million years"—yet is alive today.
(2) Metasequoia: The "dawn redwood"—"extinct" since Miocene; not in the strata for the past "60 million years," yet it is alive today.
(3) Tuatara: A beakheaded reptile—"extinct" since Cretaceous; not found in the strata for the past "135 million years"—but today is alive.
(4) Neopilina: A segmented deep-sea mollusk— "extinct" since Devonian. Although missing from the strata for the past "500 million years," it is alive now.
(5) Lingula: A brachiopod shellfish—"extinct" since Ordovician; not in the strata for the past "500 million years," yet it is happily living today.
The now-famous Coelacanth was a large fish known only from its fossil and allegedly extinct for 50 million years. Extinct, that is, until several specimens were found in the ocean! The first was found in a fisherman’s net off the coast of Madagascar on December 25, 1938. Since then eight more specimens have been found alive.
It only requires a moment’s thought to arrive at a startling fact: How could the Coelacanth have become extinct 50 million years ago, and then be found now? In order to be declared "extinct" such a long time ago, the creature would obviously have had to have been found by paleontologists in older strata—and then not found at all in more recent strata. Why is the Coelacanth not in those more recent strata? Did it decide to hibernate for 50 million years?
This is clear-cut evidence that the sedimentary strata was the result of a rapid laying down of sediments during the Flood,—rather than the tortuously slow "one hundred years per inch" deposition pattern theorized by the evolutionists.
Interestingly enough, some of these "living fossils" formerly were used by evolutionists as "index fossils" to prove the ancientness of certain rock strata! As you will recall, most index fossils are small marine organisms. They live so deep in the ocean that many of them (trilobites, graptolites, ammonites, etc.) may still have living representatives alive today, since we have but only slightly explored the ocean bottoms.
There are scientists who believe they will find living trilobites before long (see "Start Search for Living Trilobites," Science Digest, September 1959); and one living fossil, very close to the trilobite has already been discovered (see "Living Fossil Resembles Long-extinct Trilobite," Science Digest, December 1957).
Many other examples could be cited. Here are two:
"In the 19th century, hunters reported tales among Congo tribesmen of a large, cloven-hoofed animal with a giraffe-like head and zebra stripes on its hindquarters and legs. Most zoologists dismissed it as a local legend, but Sir Harry H. Johnston was fascinated when he read about this unknown beast of the deep forest. Years later, he launched an expedition in search of the creature, which the natives called okapi (o-CAP-ee).
"After a nearly disastrous series of misadventures, he finally captured an okapi in 1906. One of the few large mammals discovered in the 20th century, the okapi turned out to be a living representative of a genus (Palaeofragus) known from fossils and believed by zoologists to have been extinct for 30 million years."—*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 102.
"According to Science News (June 9, 1990, p. 359), a species of dogwood tree, the Diplopanax stachyanthus, was believed by botanists to have died out about 4 million years ago. Apparently only fossil records remained of this tree.
"But now a botanist at Washington State University has examined the fossil fruit of trees believed to be 15 million years old and found them to be essentially identical to the fruit of a dogwood family discovered in China in 1928.
"But wait a minute. If evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest, then I would expect older and inferior species to die out and be replaced by newer and better evolved species. If that be the case, what is a 15 million year old tree doing hanging around today? It should have died out long ago. Or else the figure of 15 million years is grossly wrong. In either case, something is evidently wrong with the theory of evolution."—Bob Vun Kannon, "A Living Fossil," The Adventure, September 1990.
The existence of "living fossils" is a serious one for the evolutionist. Evolutionary theory is based on several concepts, two of which are violated here: (1) If a species becomes extinct, it cannot come back to life. (2) Species evolve upward, and can never return back to an earlier form. If that particular species has not existed for the past 15 million years, how then could it exist today?
THE EXTINCT DINOSAUR—Ever since *Charles Lyell, the extinct dinosaur has been considered an outstanding example of evolution. Yet all that it proves is that animals can become extinct; there are no facts related to dinosaurs which prove evolution (species change) in life forms. That which extinct dinosaurs do prove is that the uniformitarian theory (which is the basis of evolution) is incorrect. Some massive catastrophe overwhelmed and destroyed the dinosaurs.
In order for the dinosaur to prove evolution, there would have to be transitional forms leading up to them. But the dinosaurs are like everything else: distinct species.
LIVING DINOSAURS—Evolutionists are anxious that it be thought that no dinosaurs are alive today. According to their theory, dinosaurs lived during the Mesozoic era—from about 225 million years ago to 65 million years ago. If some of them were to be found alive today, then evolutionists think this would weaken their theory. But actually that would neither prove nor weaken their theory, since dinosaurs—past or present—present no evidence of the evolutionary process.
In museums all over the world, dinosaur-bone displays are exhibited as a proof of evolution. Their very extinction is supposed to establish it. —But did you know that a living dinosaur has been found?
In April 1977, a Japanese fishing vessel caught a 4,000 pound [1814 kg] dead creature in its nets off the east coast of New Zealand. It was photographed, sketched, carefully measured, and flipper samples were kept for tissue analysis. It has every appearance of being a Plesiosaur, or sea-dwelling dinosaur—which prior to 1977 had only been found in fossil form! Japanese scientists are convinced it was indeed a Plesiosaur. Japan even printed a postage stamp of the creature, in honor of the find. (A photograph and sketch of one is shown on page 107 of Ian Taylor’s excellent book, In the Minds of Men.)
But there are other living creatures which answer to the description of "dinosaurs." What is a dinosaur? Very simply, it is a large reptile. Crocodiles, alligators, and caiman are large reptiles.
"Although they are now 99 percent extinct and seldom exceed twelve feet in length, the American alligator attained lengths of nearly twenty feet as recently as the turn of the century (see National Geographic Magazine, January 1967, p. 137). Only about 500 years ago the aepyornis, a dinosaur bird nearly ten feet [30 cm] tall and weighing half a ton [456 kg], still lived on the island of Madagascar (see National Geographic Magazine, October 1967, p. 493)."—John C. Whitcomb, World that Perished (1988), p. 30.
"Because the huge skeletons that were built up out of fossilized remnants were clearly reptilian in nature, they were called ‘terrible lizards,’ which in Greek is dinosauria, by the nineteenth-century zoologist Sir Richard Owen. But the ancient giant reptiles are more closely related to alligators than to lizards, and should have been named dinocrocodilia."—*Asimov’s Book of Facts (1979), p. 136.
We have both small and large alligator-type creatures alive today. Some extinct dinosaurs were as small as a chicken, but some modern alligator-type creatures are quite large. Some crocodiles alive today (Crocodylus porosus) can reach a length of 33 feet [100.6 dm]; all are large, heavy, fierce reptiles.
The komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) is another large reptile and looks very much like a dinosaur. It was discovered in 1912; and, although evolutionists tried to explain it away by calling the komodo a "lizard," it surely is more than that! Consider the following description:
"The body is covered with small scales; the neck is thick and the head broad and elongated. The huge mouth contains teeth ½ in [1 cm] long and deeply cleft tongue 12-16 in [30-40 cm] long. The legs are well developed and there are long claws on the toes. The muscular tail has no fracture planes and is somewhat laterally compressed.
"The Komodo dragon is the biggest predator on the islands [in Indonesia] where it lives. It hunts hog, deer, wild pig, macaques, and rats, and digs up the eggs of mound birds . . It can run as fast as a man for short stretches. Smaller specimens are said to lurk in trees above tracks used by game and jump onto the backs of deer or pigs."—*Great Book of the Animal Kingdom (1988), p. 152.
The komodo dragon, truly a reptilian giant that attacks and kills large hogs, has a life span of 25 years, is 10 feet [30 dm] long, and has a weight of 350 pounds [158.76 kg]! It is decidedly larger than some of the extinct reptiles, called "dinosaurs." (There was a wide variety of extinct dinosaurs: Some of the extinct ones were quite small; some ran rapidly like ostriches and caught birds with their front paws, and some flew like birds.)
The komodo dragon is the biggest of the monitors, of which there are 31 species. Some are quite large. Most live in the islands north of Australia. One of these, the Papua monitor (Varanus salvadori) is longer than the komodo dragon—over 13 feet in length—although it is not as bulky.
A number of prominent scientists, including *Myer, consider crocodiles and alligators to be "living fossils."
"Nile crocodiles and American alligators belong to a group of reptiles called broad-nosed crocodilians. In the warmer parts of the world, broad-nosed crocodilians are the largest predators to walk on land. They are living fossils in the sense that they resemble ancient forms in the shapes and the ruggedness of their heads and bodies."—*Ernst Myer, "Crocodilians as Living Fossils," in Living Fossils (1984), p. 105.
EXTINCT FOSSILS—What about the fossilized creatures which are now extinct? All that extinct fossils—such as dinosaurs—prove is that animals can die out. Extinction is not evolution, and provides no evidence of evolution.
In addition to the dinosaurs, a number of other animal and plant species became extinct also. Interestingly enough, the extinct species were generally more complex than plants and animals now living!
NONE OF THE FOSSILS OR STRATA ARE ANCIENT—Fossils from every level of sedimentary strata have been analyzed by amino acid dating methods (see chapter 6, Inaccurate Dating Methods.)
Scientists have been shocked to discover that both the "youngest" as well as the "oldest" fossils (even those of the Cambrian!) reveal traces of amino acids! This is astounding news, and runs counter to evolutionary theory. This means that, instead of being hundreds of millions of years apart, ALL of the fossil-bearing strata were laid down fairly recently at about the same time! In order to "save the fossils" as a trophy of evolution, there has been speculation that amino acids in the "oldest" fossils are merely contaminants that somehow got there at some recent time.
Shells from as far back as the Jurassic strata, which is supposed to be 135-180 million years old, have been found to have amino acids still locked into protein structures. The amino acid residues came from inside those shells—so the shells cannot be more than a few thousand years old!
Amino acid studies in the fossil-bearing sediments reveal that there are no ancient fossil strata!
HUMAN REMAINS IN ANCIENT DEPOSITS— Near the end of chapter 13, Ancient Man, we will describe a number of instances in which evidences of human beings have been found in what evolutionists consider to be extremely ancient rocks and coal. That information clearly disproves the geologic column dating theories, so we will summarize some of that information here. For more detailed coverage, we refer you to the chapter on Ancient Man.
Modern men and women are supposed to have existed on this earth for only the past 2 million years; whereas the great majority of the sedimentary strata are supposed to extend from 25 million to 570 million years in the past. But there are evidences that people were alive at the time when those strata were laid down. This would either mean that people are billions of years old or that the strata is quite young.
Evidence from chapter 4, Age of the Earth, and the last part of chapter 13, Ancient Man, reveals that both the planet and mankind are quite young—and have not been here over 6,000-10,000 years.
Here is a summary of some of the data found near the end of the Ancient Man chapter:
(1) Guadaloupe Woman: The almost-complete skeleton of a woman was found in limestone which is supposed to be 28 million years old. The limestone sheet, in which the skeleton was encased, was hard, thick, and over a mile [1.609 km] in length.
(2) Calaveras Skull: A completely mineralized human skull was found in Pliocene stratum which supposedly dates to "over 2 million years old."
(3) Human footprints: Human footprints have been found in various sites in the United States, as well as in Laetoli, Africa. These would include:
[1] Glen Rose tracks: Children’s and adult footprints, up to 15 and 21½ inches [38-54.6 cm] in length, have been regularly found in Early Cretaceous rock throughout most of this century on the former riverbed of the Pulaxy River in Texas. Children’s tracks always accompany those of adults, tracks go across very large dinosaur tracks and have been found above them, and all tracks are running. These tracks are in Early Cretaceous formations, which date to "120 million" years ago.
[2] Antelope Springs tracks: William Meister and others have found sandaled human tracks stepping on trilobites in Cambrian strata (570 million years old), in Utah.
(4) Evidence in coal: Human remains and relics of various kinds have been found in coal, dating to millions of years ago. This includes a human skull, two giant human teeth, a gold chain, gold thread, steel nail, metal screw, wedge-shaped object, and an iron pot.
14 - COAL
WHY IS IT NOT BEING MADE NOW?—(*#20-21/13 Considering Coal / Making Petroleum and Coal*)
A related puzzle is the great amount of petroleum and coal in our world. It is generally acknowledged by experts that petroleum comes from ancient animals, and coal from ancient plants. Rapidly buried plant and animal life at some earlier time in earth’s history produced both petroleum and coal. But neither of them is being formed today. This is a great mystery to the scientists.
Coal forms less than one percent of the sedimentary rock strata, yet it is of special significance to those seeking to understand the geologic record.
The rock strata known as Carboniferous contains the most coal, but it is also found in other strata. Coal results when plant remains are compressed and heated by the weight of overlying sediments. Around the edges of coal seams is frequently seen the identifiable plants it came from. Enormous forests must have been rapidly buried in order to produce coal.
The uniformitarian theory (called the autochthonous theory), held by evolutionists, teaches that coal has been regularly made for millions of years (even though it is admitted that it is not being made now). According to this theory, peat bogs were the source of the immense coal beds we now have. It is said that plants which compose the coal accumulated in large freshwater swamps or peat bogs during many thousands of years.
But this theory does not square with the facts: (1) Much of the coal is obviously from types of plants and trees (such as the pine) which do not grow in swampy areas. (2) No coal is being made today in swamps. (3) No locality is known, anywhere in the world, where the bottoms of peat beds are forming typical coal beds. (4) Some coal seams are up to 30 or 40 feet [91-122 dm] in thickness, representing 300 to 400 feet [122 m] of plant remains for one seam; therefore some astounding conditions were required to produce all that coal!
"Though a peat-bog may serve to demonstrate how vegetal matter accumulates in considerable quantities, it is in no way comparable in extent to the great bodies of vegetation which must have given rise to our important coal seams . . No single bog or marsh [today] would supply sufficient peat to make a large coal seam."—*E.S. Moore, "Coal: Its Properties, Analysis, Classification, Geology, Extraction, Uses and Distribution" (1940), p. 146.
The second theory is called the allochthonous theory, and suggests that coal strata accumulated from plants which had been rapidly transported and laid down during a massive flood that inundated entire continents and suddenly stripped them of their trees.
Here is some evidence favoring this second view: (1) The immense quantity of vegetation that was buried to produce this coal. (2) The way that vegetation was so suddenly laid down and buried. (3) The fact that marine fossils such as fish, mollusks, and brachiopods are commonly found in coal.
"The small marine tubeworm Spirobis is commonly attached to plants in Carboniferous coals of Europe and North America. Since there is little anatomical evidence suggesting that coal plants were adapted to marine swamps, the occurrence of marine animals with nonmarine plants suggests mixing during transport, thus favoring the allochthonous model."—Stuart E. Nevins, "The Origin of Coal," in Up With Creation (1978), p. 241.
One doctoral thesis detailed how coal could have been rapidly formed as, under conditions imposed by a worldwide flood, floating mats of trees and vegetation sank, producing our present coal beds (S.A. Austin, "Depositional Environment of the Kentucky No. 12 Coal Bed, et al.," Geology Ph.D. dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 1979).
(4) Upright tree trunks (polystrate trees), 10 to 30 feet [30.5-91.4 dm] or more in height, are often found in the strata associated with coal or in the coal itself. The sediments forming the coal had to form rapidly in order to solidify before the tree trunks could rot and fall over.
"Figure 24 shows a tree that was buried to a depth of 4.6 m [15 ft]. Because the tree is in growth position and shows no root regeneration, it probably was buried very quickly, certainly before it could decay."—*R.C. Milici, et al., "The Mississippian and Pennsylvanian [Carboniferous] Systems in the United States: Tennessee," United States Geological Survey Professional Paper 111O-G32-4.
(5) Sometimes these upright trees are upside down, and sometimes so much vegetation was poured in by the flood waters, that tree trunks will be found interspersed at different levels in relation to one another. (Just after the big volcanic explosion of Mount St. Helens occurred in May 1980, analysis of nearby Spirit Lake revealed large amounts of vegetation with many vertical floating trees among them. The weight of their roots and girth of their lower trunks caused some of them to float in a vertical or near-vertical position. Yet, even then, conditions in Spirit Lake still did not match those of the worldwide Flood, for rapid burial did not take place—so fossils and coal were not formed.)
(6) The hollow trunks of trees in coal seams will be filled with material not native to the coal—showing that the trees or the coal were carried there from somewhere else.
(7) Stigmaria is the name given to the roots of these trees. Studies by *Rupke in 1969 revealed that these tree roots were carried in from elsewhere (*N.A. Rupke, "Sedimentary Evidence for the Allochthonous Origin of Stigmaria," in Geological Society of America Bulletin, Vol. 80, 1969, pp. 2109-2114.)
(8) Coal is found in layers, called cyclothem. Between each layer of coal will be some washed-in material: sandstone, shale, limestone, clay, etc.
Each of these layers of coal may be thin,—but it can be amazingly wide in area. Modern stratigraphic research has shown that just one of these coal seams reaches from Oklahoma, Missouri, and Iowa, eastward through Indiana to Ohio to Pennsylvania, and southward through Kentucky. This one coal seam alone comprises 100,000 square miles [258,990 km2] in central and eastern United States. There are no modern conditions that could duplicate such coal production, yet evolutionist geologists routinely tell us that "the present is the key to the past"; i.e., the way things are happening now is the way they happened in past ages.
(9) Under and over the coal seams is frequently found underclays which are not natural soil for swamps or forests. In addition, there is an absence of the necessary soil for the luxuriant vegetation which turned to coal. It is clear that the clay was washed in, then the vegetation, and then more clay.
(10) Large rocks, not native to the area, have frequently been found in coal beds all over the world for over a hundred years. Their average weight is 12 pounds [5 kg], with the largest 161 pounds [73 kg]. (See *P.H. Price, "Erratic Boulders in Sewell Coal of West Virginia," in Journal of Geology, Vol. 40, 1932, pp. 62-73.)
(11) Lastly, analysis of the structure of coal itself reveals particle orientation, sorted texture, and microlamination,—all of which indicate transportation to the site rather than growth-in-place.
Coal and petroleum are only found in sedimentary strata. Fossils are only found in sedimentary strata. All the evidence for a careful study of coal points to a worldwide Flood as the event that laid down those strata!
(12) Both petroleum and coal can be made in a comparatively short period of time. Research scientists find that it is not difficult to make, and could be made by nature just as quickly. The key is immense pressure.