Fossilizing - Rapid Burial

By Dr. Joseph Kezele

Let’s turn our attention to the fossil record found all over the earth. The four requirements for fossil formation are a soon to be dead plant or animal, catastrophic burial, mineral laden water and heat and pressure, but not much time.

We have been taught that fossils form as the result of dead animals or plants slowly being buried over many thousands of years and then compressed by the weight of overlying sediment. The problem with this is that a dead plant or animal does not wait to decompose or somehow ward off scavengers while it is being slowly covered. Burial must be very rapid, as in Noah’s Flood, which also provided the dissolved minerals necessary for petrification.

There is much evidence that confirms extremely rapid burial. Fossils of fish in the act of swallowing fish, an Ichthyosaur in the process of giving birth, even fossilized jellies (jellyfish), in spite of consisting of 98% water, as well as many fragile plant species, all testify to catastrophic burial. Clam fossils are virtually always found in the closed position. You may have noticed that clamshells on the beach wash up in the open position. An especially interesting type of fossil is the polystrate tree, buried in a vertical position, extending through many rocks layers that represent many thousands of years according to conventional geology.

The widespread distribution of fossils all around the world in stacks of rock layers thousands of feet thick is mute testimony to the extent of the catastrophe of Noah’s Flood. Even more impressive are fossil “graveyards”, where millions of fossils of many species that do not live in the same ecological zones are found with marine organisms, land creatures and bird fossils jammed together in dense tangles. These cannot be the product of local floods, as the evolutionary model would have us believe.

Other problems for the evolutionary model range from the existence of clam fossils at the peaks of all the world’s highest mountains to the lack of transitional fossils from one kind of organism to another. In spite of sensational headlines when, for example, claims of feathered dinosaurs are first made, careful examination by subsequent secular researchers results in a retraction of the initial claims, but with much less publicity.

Archaeopteryx, taught to us as the transition from bird to reptile, turns out to be a bird with teeth. Other examples of birds with teeth are also known. An additional problem is that Protoavis (first bird) has been found in layers lower than Archaeopteryx. Coelacanth was touted as a 375-million-year-old fossil that became extinct more than 65 million years ago. However, it was found in 1938, unchanged, and has been swimming ever since rather than walking on the ocean floor as evolutionists told us.

More recently, Tiktaalik, another fish fossil that was proclaimed the transition from swimming to walking fish, was found in northern Canada in 2006. Unfortunately, for the evolutionary scenario, the announcement in January of this year of finding quadruped (four-footed) fossil tracks in Poland in rock layers that are considered to be 18 million years older removes Tiktaalik from contention as an evolutionary ancestor in the supposed transition from swimming to walking creatures.

Most stunning are multiple unfossilized dinosaur soft tissue specimens in various locations. T Rex thigh bone in Montana with flexible stretchy blood vessels and intact red blood cells, announced in 1997, and Hadrosaur unfossilized muscle tissue found in Spain in 2009 confirm recent burial, only hundreds or a few thousand years ago. There is simply no way these specimens could have been preserved for 65 million years!

Therefore, the fossil record demonstrates billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth, just as a global flood would bring about. The lack of transitional fossils, conservation of form, seen by comparing fossils to modern organisms, fossilized man-made artifacts and fossil production in the laboratory in a few weeks all testify against evolution and for the creation account.

The paucity of human fossils confirms God’s success in wiping man off the earth, except for those on the ark. We will discuss Noah’s ark in the next issue.

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