Dancing Dinosaurs?
Stony footprints point to something more serious
Photo by Roger Seiler, <www.unews.utah.edu>
Figure 1. University of Utah geologist Winston Seiler walks among
hundreds of dinosaur footprints in a ‘trample surface’
by Michael J. Oard
Published: 28 October 2008(GMT+10)
Geologists from the University of Utah recently announced finding a remarkable array
of dinosaur footprints on the Arizona-Utah border in the USA (figure 1).1 They described their find as ‘a dinosaur dance
floor’ and said it was located alongside an oasis in a sandy desert 190 million
years ago.
Dinosaur tracks in sedimentary rocks are no longer unusual. They are found all over
the world,2 especially in
the Rocky Mountains and High Plains of the western United States. Millions of tracks
are now known, some of them forming large areas with a huge amount of tracks. In
some cases, there are so many tracks, that the strata are greatly mixed up or ‘dinoturbated’.
Circular impressions interpreted as dinosaur tracks
Once in a while a new find will have some unusual features. This new dinosaur track
site, actually a new interpretation of an old site, displays a few unusual features.
Pothole-like impressions in the Navajo Sandstone had previous been interpreted as
weathering pits. Now, it is believed the circular depressions were made by dinosaurs.3 The impressions are located
within the Navajo Sandstone of the Paria Plateau of the USA at the Utah/Arizona
border.
Why are practically all the tracks going in the same direction? Animals usually
mill around a watering hole, making tracks in multiple directions.
The impressions, which range in size from 3 cm to 50 cm, do look like simple holes
in the ground, but they have features that lend themselves to having been formed
by walking vertebrates, assumed to be dinosaurs. For instance, there are claw and
toe impressions with rare tail drag marks (there are fewer than a dozen tail drag
marks in the world). One of the most conclusive evidences is that the tracks line
up to form straight trackways—practically all moving in a west-southwest direction.
The holes are of the correct size and are concentrated on one bedding plane at about
12 impressions per square metre. There are probably a few thousand impressions all
together. Because of the number of tracks, the authors referred to the surface as
a ‘dinosaur dance floor’. The dinosaurs would thus be ‘dancing
dinosaurs’, an obvious flight of imagination given the straight trackways.
But, the case is strong that the impressions are modified dinosaur tracks, although
one anonymous review of the Palaios paper still believed that the holes
are erosional features.1
Interesting dinosaur features
Besides the strongly preferred orientation and the rare tail drag marks, a few other
features are worthy of note. It is claimed that there were four types of dinosaurs
including carnivores and herbivores. It is interesting that such enemies traveled
the same path at probably near the same time. Also, the small tracks are interpreted
to be the tracks of babies, a most unusual discovery, if the small impressions are
really tracks, since tracks of babies are very rare.
Also of interest is the author’s contradictory interpretation. The tracks
are in the Navajo Sandstone, interpreted to be desert sand that lithified (hardened)
into rock. So, they postulate a ‘desert oasis’ or watering hole. If
this were the case, why are practically all the tracks going in the same direction?
Animals usually mill around a watering hole, making tracks in multiple directions.
What are dinosaurs doing in a monstrous desert?
Photo Michael J. Oard
Figure 2. Navajo Sandstone up to 600 m high above Kayenta Formation
in Zion National Park, Utah, as seen from the top of Angels Landing.
The most contradictory feature is that the tracks are found in what is believed
to have been a monstrous desert. The Navajo Sandstone and its equivalent deposits
occupy an area greater than 265,000 km2 and may have once been two and
a half times as large before erosion. The Navajo Sandstone is up to about 600 m
thick in south central Utah (figure 2). That makes this desert larger than the Sahara
Desert! What are dinosaurs doing in a huge desert, even at an oasis? Desert oases
are normally small and could hardly sustain dinosaurs in such large numbers.
Moreover, there are 60 other track sites in the Navajo Sandstone, mostly of carnivorous
dinosaurs. Just as mysterious from a uniformitarian point of view4 is that hardly any bones are found in the Navajo
Sandstone. One would think that with shifting sands, a huge number of dinosaurs
would easily be covered up, which is the first step in fossilization.
The Navajo Sandstone is not a desert deposit
The thousands if not millions of dinosaur tracks just in the Navajo Sandstone should
be a big hint to uniformitarian scientists that this Sandstone is not from a desert
environment. As we see with the Coconino Sandstone from Grand Canyon,5 there are several obvious features that strongly
suggest a water-laid deposit. First, the sandstone is flat or nearly flat at both
its lower and upper contacts. How many desert sands have such a property?6 To make matters worse, the
overlying Carmel Formation is a marine formation7
that should have torn up the top of the Jurassic Sandstone (as well as the thin
desert Temple Cap Formation), but the contact is very flat.
Photo Michael J. Oard
Figure 3. Navajo Sandstone with cross beds and multiple truncating
planation surfaces near Checkerboard Mesa, Zion National park, United States.
Second, within the thick Navajo Sandstone, the cross beds are truncated by flat
planation surfaces that can sometimes be traced for kilometers. Dozens of these
planation surfaces can be seen in tall vertical exposures of the Navajo Sandstone
(figure 3). What sort of desert process shears off sand dunes? Although uniformitarian
scientists have attempted to explain such anomalous features, the lack of any close
modern analog shows that they are grasping at straws.
Third, the sand grains that are well-rounded and frosted, providing evidence for
the desert interpretation, show that the frosting was not by wind abrasion. Scanning
electron micrographs show that the frosted surface is actually etched.8 In other words, the grains have been chemically
frosted, probably after deposition by water moving under pressure through the spaces
between grains.
Fourth, the direction of transport of the sand is the same as the general transport
of practically all the supposed eolian sandstones on the Colorado Plateau.9 The direction is from the
north to the northwest. A further problem is that the transport direction must be
maintained for hundreds if not thousands of kilometers, since there is no source
for the sand immediately to the north of the Colorado Plateau. Such consistent directions
over a supposedly 100-million-year period make little sense. In all that time, why
wouldn’t a significant change in wind direction, from the south for instance,
deposit some dunes with a different orientation?
What really happened?
These unusual dinosaur tracks and their strongly preferred orientation provide more
evidence for the ‘briefly exposed Flood sediment hypothesis’.10–12
Tracks, as well as dinosaur eggs, were made by dinosaurs during the Flood while
they were still alive, as the waters were rising. They would have perished later
on, at least by Day 150, when the entire earth was covered by water and every
lving thing perished (Genesis 7:20–24). Based on many unusual features of
dinosaur tracks, eggs, and bonebeds, freshly-laid Flood sediments must have become
briefly exposed during the first half of the Flood as the waters were rising. Such
an exposure can easily be accomplished after heavy sedimentation and a brief drop
in ‘sea level’ (and there are at least four mechanisms that could cause
this). Dinosaurs coming ashore onto this ‘land’ would of course make
tracks and lay eggs. Their death en masse would produce large bonebeds
as found in other parts of the fossil record, graveyards that sometimes contain
thousands of dinosaur remains.
Related articles
Related resources
References
- University of Utah, ‘A dinosaur dance floor’:
numerous tracks at Jurassic oasis on Arizona-Utah border.
http://www.physorg.com/news143692605.html, October 20, 2008.
Return to text.
- Oard, M. J., The extinction of
the dinosaurs, Journal of Creation 11(2):137–154,
1997. Return to text.
- Seiler, W.M. and Chan, M.A., A wet interdune dinosaur trampled
surface in the Jurassic Navajo Sandstone, Coyote Buttes, Arizona: rare preservation
of multiple track types and tail traces, Palaios 23:700–710,
2008. Return to text.
- Uniformitarian thinking assumes that the past can be explained
by the sorts of geological environments that we see on the earth today (such as
deserts, rivers, and volcanoes, and present-day processes such as slow sedimentation
and erosion) persisting over millions of years, and denies that the global Flood
described in the Bible ever occurred. Return to text.
- Austin, S.A., Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe,
Institute for Creation Research, Santee, CA, pp. 21–56, 75, 1994.
Return to text.
- Hamilton, W.L., The Sculpturing of Zion: guide to the Geology
of Zion National Park, Zion Natural History Association, Springdale, UT, 1992.
Return to text.
- Hamilton, ref. 6, p. 86. Return to text.
- Hamilton, ref. 6, p. 83. Return to text.
- Baars, D.L., The Colorado Plateau: A Geologic History,
University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2000. Return
to text.
- Oard, M.J., Polar dinosaurs and the Genesis Flood. Creation
Research Society Quarterly 32:47–56, 1995.
Return to text.
- Oard, ref. 2, pp. 144–147. Return
to text.
- Oard, M.J., Dinosaur tracks, eggs, and bonebeds; in: Oard,
M.J. and Reed J.K.(eds), Rock Solid Answers: Responses to Popular Objections to Biblical
Geology, Master Books, Green Forest, AR, 2009 (in press). Return
to text.
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