Lily of the sea
A common fossil tells a story of Noah’s Flood.
The beautifully preserved fossil shown (available in
Creation magazine) is of a crinoid, or sea-lily. Fossil crinoids are
very widespread, and well known. Most living crinoids do not have a stem, and are
known as the feather-stars. Those with a stem are known as sea-lilies. They are
like a feathery starfish perched on top of a stem, which floats above a holdfast
(or ‘root’) attached to, e.g., a rock surface.1
The stem (or stalk) of fossil crinoids consisted of a columnar stack of disks (or
columnals). Such columnals, parts of a once-living crinoid, are extremely common
fossils (see photo, right).
Compared to what we find in the fossil record, today’s crinoids are fewer
in number, significance and variety.
Crinoid fossils, though common, can result in attractive specimens like the one
pictured here. They usually consist only of the leftover columnals (disks) from
the stem of the sea-lily. |
However, when we look at living crinoids, something interesting emerges. After death,
the head of the creature almost immediately disintegrates. That is why crinoid fossils
are mostly found as fragments. Where one finds a crinoid as beautifully preserved
as the one shown, it indicates very rapid burial of the live creature. A crinoid
which died and then lay on the ocean floor waiting to be slowly covered would not
look like this.
In other places, such as the Redwall Limestone of the Grand Canyon, many crinoid
heads are found ‘in a matrix of broken and sorted columnals. Rapid burial
by an ocean current is indicated, because the same water that sorted the columnals
also must have buried the crinoid heads before decomposition.’2
Such rock layers containing catastrophically deposited crinoids are often massive
in extent.
In a complex worldwide watery cataclysm such as Noah’s Flood, a fundamental
expectation (apart from billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down
by water all over the earth) is that most fossils would be of marine creatures.
Only a very small proportion of land creatures would be covered by sediment to form
fossils—the rest would rot and disintegrate. This superbly preserved fossil
of a delicate sea-lily is just one of the many instances in which fossils give testimony
to fast processes, not millions of years of slow burial.
References and notes
- S. Austin (Ed.), Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, Institute for Creation
Research, Santee, California, p. 143, 1994.
- The Redwall Limestone, for example, varies from 150–250 metres (500–800
feet) thick and occurs right through the Grand Canyon across northern Arizona and
southwards across central Arizona, covering more than 130,000 sq. km (50,000 sq.
miles). Remains of fossil crinoids are found throughout the Thunder Springs and
Mooney Falls Members, which make up more than half the Redwall Limestone. (S.S.
Beus, ‘Redwall Limestone and Surprise Canyon Formation’, in Grand Canyon
Geology, S.S. Beus and M. Morales (eds), Oxford University Press and Museum
of Arizona Press, pp. 119–145, 1990.)
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