Fast fossils
Billions of well-preserved fossil fish clash with popular belief.
by Carl Wieland
For most people, the two words ‘fast fossils’ don’t seem to go
together. Say ‘fossils’, and they think ‘slow and gradual processes;
millions of years’. Unfortunately, even though many leading evolutionists
are now conceding that catastrophic, rapid processes are needed to explain many
fossils, the average person is still left with this deeply-ingrained belief.
If the fossil record did take millions of years to form, then the Bible is wrong
about the history of the earth and life on it. Fossils show death; there are also
many instances of disease (see T-rex with gout,
e.g.), violence and bloodshed evidenced in the fossil record. So, if these existed
millions of years before there were people, then the Bible is wrong when it indicates
that these ‘bad’ things are part of the Curse on creation, which only
came about because of the rebellion of the first man, Adam, against his Creator.
However, the Bible is the very Word of God, affirmed as absolutely true by the Lord
Jesus Christ (e.g.
John 10:35). Thus, we can expect the evidence to be consistent
with what the Bible teaches, regardless of how many people believe otherwise.
According to the book of Genesis, there was a global catastrophe—a world flood
which by implication was capable of burying billions of creatures rapidly in sedimentary
layers.
So, reasoning from Scripture, we would expect that most fossils were formed by rapid
processes. What does the evidence show?
The fish fossil shown here [Ed. note: Please see
Creation 19(4):24–25, September 1997; due to
copyright restrictions.] is a wonderfully preserved specimen. Though not all are
as beautifully preserved as this one, there are literally billions of fish fossils
in rocks around the world, so well preserved that they still show details such as
scales, fin structure, etc. In fact, most people would have seen such fossil fish
at one time or another.1
What do these billions of well-preserved fossils fit—the common belief in
slow and gradual processes, or the biblical implications of fast burial?
The easiest way to answer this is to imagine what happens to a fish when it dies.
After (for most) floating on the surface while being attacked by various scavengers,
what is left (if anything) sinks to the bottom. Here, rather than lying quietly
for thousands of years being gradually covered up by slowly settling sediment, it
will be attacked further by fish, crabs, and many other creatures.
Bacterial attack will also contribute to the process of disintegration. Even in
a sterile, low oxygen environment, the flesh rapidly becomes soggy and falls apart,2 leaving no trace of the beautiful
structures which the fossil illustrated, for example, shows. That is why, when snorkelling
on the sea floor, one does not see thousands of dead fish resting quietly on the
ocean bottom in part-way stages of fossilization!
To preserve such features, it is obvious that the creature needs to be buried quickly.
Not just that, but the enclosing sediment needs to harden fairly quickly. If it
stayed soft and unconsolidated for years, the fact that oxygen, moisture and bacteria
could easily access the carcass means that one would very quickly have a disintegrated,
stinking mess. To try to imitate how such features as scales and fins can possibly
be preserved, the best experimental analogy would be to bury a fish rapidly in wet
cement!
How would hordes of fish be buried during the Flood? The upheavals necessarily associated
with a year-long global Flood would generate ideal conditions for rapid sedimentation.
Today, for example, localized earthquakes can trigger large submarine avalanches
(called ‘turbidity currents’) which have been clocked as carrying millions
of tonnes of sediment at over 50 kph (30 mph) underwater.3
The silent testimony of the billions of well-preserved fossil fish around the world
is, by the most obvious common sense, to rapid processes—rapid burial and
rapid hardening (of the encasing sediment). Sadly, the mindset of our culture is
such that most people miss the obvious, and continue to think ‘slow and gradual’
when they see fossils—even beautifully preserved ones like this.
Related articles
References and notes
- Since marine creatures would be the most likely ones buried—land
creatures would tend to disintegrate and rot—we would expect that most fossils
would be marine. Marine fossils do indeed represent more than 95% of the fossil
record (see J. Morris, The Young Earth, Master Books, p. 70, 1994).
Return to text.
- This has been shown by experiment—see R. Zangerl and
E. Richardson, The paleoecological history of two Pennsylvanian black shales, Fieldiana:
Geology Memoirs 4, 1963. Return to text.
- F. Press and R. Siever, Earth (4th Edition),
W.H. Freeman and Company, New York, p. 284, 1986. Return to text.
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