- Series:Animals, Fossils, Transcript English
Psalm 104:6
“Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment: the waters stood above the mountains.”
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the large dinosaur book that I had as a child was the large number of pictures showing large sauropods walking through forests of giant ferns, eating their leaves. My child-like trust in the abilities of scientists led me to assume that there must have been some way for these clever adults to know what the habitat and living conditions of these dinosaurs were.
A lot of the images that I had seen had to be guesswork and imagination. Nevertheless, there was actually some solid scientific foundation to their storytelling. That is that fossils of dinosaurs are very often found in the same rock layers as fossils of gymnosperms – non-flowering plants, such as ferns, and including giant ferns. The evolutionary explanation for this is that dinosaurs and gymnosperms lived in the same era and therefore were fossilized into the rock layers at similar times.
But what if there is an alternative explanation for the layers of rocks and the signature fossils found within them?
Our best Flood model suggests that the rising floodwaters washed on to the land of the pre-Flood continent in waves. Therefore, the regions around the coast would get deluged before inland areas, which would presumably be higher ground. If the coasts were forested by large gymnosperms, and if the sauropods preferred living in such forests, then they would have been fossilized together and would be physically lower than areas inland, which perhaps housed mammals and flowering plants. So the rock layers could be indicative of environments rather than evolutionary eras.
We trust everything about Your word, Lord God – even when we struggle to understand it. Help us to trust You more and more. Amen.
Author: Paul F. Taylor
Ref: Wise, K. (2008), Sinking a Floating Forest, , accessed 9/20/2017. Image: Adobe Stock Image, licensed to author.
