Men have searched for fossils since the beginning of the 19th century, and the facts are now available: There is no evidence of evolution in the fossil record.

In our own day, a great catastrophe has inundated evolutionary theory. No less an authority than a Smithsonian paleontologist describes the basis of the problem:

*David Raup, head paleontologist of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, describes the heart of the problem:

Where are the bison today? As we just read, most were slain by buffalo hunters in the Plains States of America over a hundred years ago. But where are their fossils? None are to be found. Millions of bison died, but there are no fossil remains. They rotted, were eaten by scavengers, decayed, and slowly returned back to the earth.

The sheer immensity of these fossil graveyards is fantastic. And to think that it never happens today! Speaking about sedimentary deposits that he found in the Geiseltal, in central Germany, *Newell says:

It would be impossible for vast numbers of plants and animals to be suddenly buried under normal circumstances. Yet we find that the fossils were buried so quickly that the food could be seen in many of their stomachs. Even the delicate soft parts of their bodies are visible, so rapid had been the burial. Quick, high compression adds to the evidence for extremely rapid burial. All of the life forms were suddenly flattened out. Sharks have been found flattened to ¼ inch [1.27 cm] in thickness with the tail still upright, suggesting sudden catastrophic burial. It took rapid action to do that.

Describing herring fossils in the Miocene shales of California, a U.S. Geological Survey expert tells us:

Obviously, this required a very sudden event to capture and kill a fish swallowing a fish! Nothing like this happens today.

In the Hall of Paleontology, at Kansas State University, can be seen a 14-foot fish that has swallowed a 6-foot fish. The fish that was swallowed was not digested,—and then both had been suddenly entombed.

Comparing it all, they came up with some surprising conclusions:

That second discovery is rather astounding. If long ages had occurred during each strata, then the footprints and bodies should be found together. But if a worldwide single Flood was responsible for all the strata, then we would expect to find large numbers of amphibians, reptiles, and dinosaurs walking around earlier in the Flood, yet buried later in it!

You will find further data and charts on the Brand and Florence article referenced below:

But in reality, it is only rarely that we find plants and animals together in the fossil beds! That is why "Minium’s Dead Cow Quarry" in Kansas is so very much appreciated by paleontologists: It is an exception to the rule and does have plants and plant seeds in the same rock with animals (*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution 1990, p. 307).

(1) Hard parts (the bones and shells) of some plants and animals were preserved.

(2) Carbon alone was preserved. This is where our coal beds came from.

(3) The original form is preserved only in casts and molds. The original material dissolved away and a cast of its shape was preserved. This would also require sudden burial.

(4) Sometimes petrification of wood occurred. An excellent example of this would be the Petrified Forest in Arizona, where we find entire tree trunks that have turned to stone. After sudden burial, each cell in the wood was gradually replaced by minerals from an underground flow of water.

(5) There are prints of animal tracks. Thousands of animal tracks have been found preserved in stone, and the prints are always shown running away from something. In Glen Rose, Texas, and several other places, prints of giant humans have been found. In the same bed with the human footprints have been found dinosaur tracks! This shows that the dinosaurs lived when man did, and not millions of years earlier, as the evolutionists claim. (Much more information on this will be found in chapter 13, Ancient Man.)

(6) Ripple marks and rain drop splashes. Ancient hail imprints (which are quite different from raindrops) have never been found. The weather must have been consistently warm when the Flood began (*W.H. Twenhofel, Principles of Sedimentation (1950), p. 621).

(7) Worm trails, droppings, feathers, chemicals, and even fish odor were preserved by sudden burial!

In 1910, a pack train loaded with supplies was struggling over a mountain path high in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, near the Burgess Pass, when a horse kicked a dark rock and stumbled. One of the men examined the rock and found that it had fine, exquisitely detailed fossil markings. Later, the Smithsonian Institute sent out paleontologists and workmen who quarried out tons of rock from the side of that and nearby mountains, and sent 35,000 fossils to be analyzed and housed in our national museum in Washington, D.C.

These specimens were primarily bottom-dwellers from ancient seas, such as worms, trilobites, brachiopods, lampshells, and more. Here, in these very high mountains, the soft parts of these creatures from Cambrian deposits (the lowest of all strata) were clearly visible. Even delicate internal organs were traced on the stone. The transitional species leading up to those common Cambrian specimens ought to have been found, but they were not. Yet Burgess Pass, and nearby digging sites (such as Mount Stephen), ultimately yielded almost copious amounts of fossils of nearly every major type of life form.

Coal beds, of course, are one such example of buried forests. They will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

One of the best places to see buried forests is Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone Park, in Montana. You will there find a succession of petrified tree layers. The uniformitarian evolutionists claim that the trees grew there, died, and were gradually covered by soil deposits over oncoming ages as the dead trees stood there. Gradually, after tens of thousands of years, additional trees died and were covered over by more millennia of soil deposits!

But careful analysis of the entire ridge reveals a unity of age, burial conditions, and surrounding deposits. A succession of strong currents, interspersed with flows and volcanic showers from another direction, washed the sedimentary strata into place.

(Both later in this chapter, in chapter 14, and somewhat in chapter 6, we give more attention to the implications of these fossil upright trees, also called polystrate trees.)

(Later in this chapter, under the section, "Mixed-up Fossils," we will learn that the fossils are not neatly contained in certain strata; they are often far above or below their assigned strata.)

Here are some of the thousands of creatures alive today that are totally identical to what they supposedly looked like "millions of years" ago: Cockroach (250 million years); starfish (500 million years); shark (181 million years); sea urchin (100 million years); ginkgo tree (200 million years); dragonfly (170 million years); bacteria (600 million years).

Consider the bat: All the fossil bats look just like the ones that fly around now. It was reported that *Jepsen had found the oldest fossil bat ever! (*G.L. Jepsen reported in Science, for December 9, 1966). A photograph of its skeleton, plus an accompanying sketch are shown in the article. That oldest-known bat is supposedly 50 million years old, and yet it is just like a modern bat skeleton. And below it? not one transitional fossil anywhere that leads us from "lower forms of life" to the bat. When the bat first appears, it is all bat, and nothing but bat!

There are species found only in rock strata, and supposedly millions of years old, which have been declared "extinct for millions of years." This has been considered another "proof" of evolution, although extinction is no evidence of evolution; evolving into new life forms is.

So many of these "living fossils" have been found that scientists have given a name to the study: Cryptozoology, the study of "hidden animals." According to evolutionary theory, they were once alive, then got hidden for millions of years, and continue living today. Here are some of these "living fossils," all of which are alive today:

(1) Coelacanth fish: The crossopterygian fish—"extinct" since Cretaceous. It has not been found in the strata for the past "50 million years"—yet is alive today.

(2) Metasequoia: The "dawn redwood"—"extinct" since Miocene; not in the strata for the past "60 million years," yet it is alive today.

(3) Tuatara: A beakheaded reptile—"extinct" since Cretaceous; not found in the strata for the past "135 million years"—but today is alive.

(4) Neopilina: A segmented deep-sea mollusk— "extinct" since Devonian. Although missing from the strata for the past "500 million years," it is alive now.

(5) Lingula: A brachiopod shellfish—"extinct" since Ordovician; not in the strata for the past "500 million years," yet it is happily living today.

The now-famous Coelacanth was a large fish known only from its fossil and allegedly extinct for 50 million years. Extinct, that is, until several specimens were found in the ocean! The first was found in a fisherman’s net off the coast of Madagascar on December 25, 1938. Since then eight more specimens have been found alive.

It only requires a moment’s thought to arrive at a startling fact: How could the Coelacanth have become extinct 50 million years ago, and then be found now? In order to be declared "extinct" such a long time ago, the creature would obviously have had to have been found by paleontologists in older strata—and then not found at all in more recent strata. Why is the Coelacanth not in those more recent strata? Did it decide to hibernate for 50 million years?

This is clear-cut evidence that the sedimentary strata was the result of a rapid laying down of sediments during the Flood,—rather than the tortuously slow "one hundred years per inch" deposition pattern theorized by the evolutionists.

Interestingly enough, some of these "living fossils" formerly were used by evolutionists as "index fossils" to prove the ancientness of certain rock strata! As you will recall, most index fossils are small marine organisms. They live so deep in the ocean that many of them (trilobites, graptolites, ammonites, etc.) may still have living representatives alive today, since we have but only slightly explored the ocean bottoms.

There are scientists who believe they will find living trilobites before long (see "Start Search for Living Trilobites," Science Digest, September 1959); and one living fossil, very close to the trilobite has already been discovered (see "Living Fossil Resembles Long-extinct Trilobite," Science Digest, December 1957).

Many other examples could be cited. Here are two:

The existence of "living fossils" is a serious one for the evolutionist. Evolutionary theory is based on several concepts, two of which are violated here: (1) If a species becomes extinct, it cannot come back to life. (2) Species evolve upward, and can never return back to an earlier form. If that particular species has not existed for the past 15 million years, how then could it exist today?

In April 1977, a Japanese fishing vessel caught a 4,000 pound [1814 kg] dead creature in its nets off the east coast of New Zealand. It was photographed, sketched, carefully measured, and flipper samples were kept for tissue analysis. It has every appearance of being a Plesiosaur, or sea-dwelling dinosaur—which prior to 1977 had only been found in fossil form! Japanese scientists are convinced it was indeed a Plesiosaur. Japan even printed a postage stamp of the creature, in honor of the find. (A photograph and sketch of one is shown on page 107 of Ian Taylor’s excellent book, In the Minds of Men.)

But there are other living creatures which answer to the description of "dinosaurs." What is a dinosaur? Very simply, it is a large reptile. Crocodiles, alligators, and caiman are large reptiles.

We have both small and large alligator-type creatures alive today. Some extinct dinosaurs were as small as a chicken, but some modern alligator-type creatures are quite large. Some crocodiles alive today (Crocodylus porosus) can reach a length of 33 feet [100.6 dm]; all are large, heavy, fierce reptiles.

The komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) is another large reptile and looks very much like a dinosaur. It was discovered in 1912; and, although evolutionists tried to explain it away by calling the komodo a "lizard," it surely is more than that! Consider the following description:

The komodo dragon, truly a reptilian giant that attacks and kills large hogs, has a life span of 25 years, is 10 feet [30 dm] long, and has a weight of 350 pounds [158.76 kg]! It is decidedly larger than some of the extinct reptiles, called "dinosaurs." (There was a wide variety of extinct dinosaurs: Some of the extinct ones were quite small; some ran rapidly like ostriches and caught birds with their front paws, and some flew like birds.)

The komodo dragon is the biggest of the monitors, of which there are 31 species. Some are quite large. Most live in the islands north of Australia. One of these, the Papua monitor (Varanus salvadori) is longer than the komodo dragon—over 13 feet in length—although it is not as bulky.

In addition to the dinosaurs, a number of other animal and plant species became extinct also. Interestingly enough, the extinct species were generally more complex than plants and animals now living!

Shells from as far back as the Jurassic strata, which is supposed to be 135-180 million years old, have been found to have amino acids still locked into protein structures. The amino acid residues came from inside those shells—so the shells cannot be more than a few thousand years old!

Amino acid studies in the fossil-bearing sediments reveal that there are no ancient fossil strata!

Evidence from chapter 4, Age of the Earth, and the last part of chapter 13, Ancient Man, reveals that both the planet and mankind are quite young—and have not been here over 6,000-10,000 years.

Here is a summary of some of the data found near the end of the Ancient Man chapter:

(1) Guadaloupe Woman: The almost-complete skeleton of a woman was found in limestone which is supposed to be 28 million years old. The limestone sheet, in which the skeleton was encased, was hard, thick, and over a mile [1.609 km] in length.

(3) Human footprints: Human footprints have been found in various sites in the United States, as well as in Laetoli, Africa. These would include:

[1] Glen Rose tracks: Children’s and adult footprints, up to 15 and 21½ inches [38-54.6 cm] in length, have been regularly found in Early Cretaceous rock throughout most of this century on the former riverbed of the Pulaxy River in Texas. Children’s tracks always accompany those of adults, tracks go across very large dinosaur tracks and have been found above them, and all tracks are running. These tracks are in Early Cretaceous formations, which date to "120 million" years ago.

[2] Antelope Springs tracks: William Meister and others have found sandaled human tracks stepping on trilobites in Cambrian strata (570 million years old), in Utah.

(4) Evidence in coal: Human remains and relics of various kinds have been found in coal, dating to millions of years ago. This includes a human skull, two giant human teeth, a gold chain, gold thread, steel nail, metal screw, wedge-shaped object, and an iron pot.

A related puzzle is the great amount of petroleum and coal in our world. It is generally acknowledged by experts that petroleum comes from ancient animals, and coal from ancient plants. Rapidly buried plant and animal life at some earlier time in earth’s history produced both petroleum and coal. But neither of them is being formed today. This is a great mystery to the scientists.

Coal forms less than one percent of the sedimentary rock strata, yet it is of special significance to those seeking to understand the geologic record.

The rock strata known as Carboniferous contains the most coal, but it is also found in other strata. Coal results when plant remains are compressed and heated by the weight of overlying sediments. Around the edges of coal seams is frequently seen the identifiable plants it came from. Enormous forests must have been rapidly buried in order to produce coal.

The uniformitarian theory (called the autochthonous theory), held by evolutionists, teaches that coal has been regularly made for millions of years (even though it is admitted that it is not being made now). According to this theory, peat bogs were the source of the immense coal beds we now have. It is said that plants which compose the coal accumulated in large freshwater swamps or peat bogs during many thousands of years.

But this theory does not square with the facts: (1) Much of the coal is obviously from types of plants and trees (such as the pine) which do not grow in swampy areas. (2) No coal is being made today in swamps. (3) No locality is known, anywhere in the world, where the bottoms of peat beds are forming typical coal beds. (4) Some coal seams are up to 30 or 40 feet [91-122 dm] in thickness, representing 300 to 400 feet [122 m] of plant remains for one seam; therefore some astounding conditions were required to produce all that coal!

The second theory is called the allochthonous theory, and suggests that coal strata accumulated from plants which had been rapidly transported and laid down during a massive flood that inundated entire continents and suddenly stripped them of their trees.

Here is some evidence favoring this second view: (1) The immense quantity of vegetation that was buried to produce this coal. (2) The way that vegetation was so suddenly laid down and buried. (3) The fact that marine fossils such as fish, mollusks, and brachiopods are commonly found in coal.

One doctoral thesis detailed how coal could have been rapidly formed as, under conditions imposed by a worldwide flood, floating mats of trees and vegetation sank, producing our present coal beds (S.A. Austin, "Depositional Environment of the Kentucky No. 12 Coal Bed, et al.," Geology Ph.D. dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 1979).

(5) Sometimes these upright trees are upside down, and sometimes so much vegetation was poured in by the flood waters, that tree trunks will be found interspersed at different levels in relation to one another. (Just after the big volcanic explosion of Mount St. Helens occurred in May 1980, analysis of nearby Spirit Lake revealed large amounts of vegetation with many vertical floating trees among them. The weight of their roots and girth of their lower trunks caused some of them to float in a vertical or near-vertical position. Yet, even then, conditions in Spirit Lake still did not match those of the worldwide Flood, for rapid burial did not take place—so fossils and coal were not formed.)

(7) Stigmaria is the name given to the roots of these trees. Studies by *Rupke in 1969 revealed that these tree roots were carried in from elsewhere (*N.A. Rupke, "Sedimentary Evidence for the Allochthonous Origin of Stigmaria," in Geological Society of America Bulletin, Vol. 80, 1969, pp. 2109-2114.)

(8) Coal is found in layers, called cyclothem. Between each layer of coal will be some washed-in material: sandstone, shale, limestone, clay, etc.

(10) Large rocks, not native to the area, have frequently been found in coal beds all over the world for over a hundred years. Their average weight is 12 pounds [5 kg], with the largest 161 pounds [73 kg]. (See *P.H. Price, "Erratic Boulders in Sewell Coal of West Virginia," in Journal of Geology, Vol. 40, 1932, pp. 62-73.)

(11) Lastly, analysis of the structure of coal itself reveals particle orientation, sorted texture, and microlamination,—all of which indicate transportation to the site rather than growth-in-place.

(12) Both petroleum and coal can be made in a comparatively short period of time. Research scientists find that it is not difficult to make, and could be made by nature just as quickly. The key is immense pressure.