"Driving north of Bay City along State Route 23, skirting the shores of Lake Huron, one could easily
miss the turnoff to Partridge Point just south of Alpena if one didn’t know that it was there and that Partridge Point had some geological significance. However, at Partridge Point are outcrops of a fossil graveyard, one of many fossil deposits found around the world that are significant as examples of the catastrophism during the Flood.
The outcrops of interest belong to the Thunder Bay Limestone and are exposed along the shoreline. They represent what geologists call the type section of this rock formation—that is, the originally described outcrops of this rock unit that show its features and contents across its thickness, and that then serve as the representative or objective standard against which separated parts of this same rock unit elsewhere may be compared.
Of particular interest are the light-coloured shaly beds and limestone full of fossilized corals and shellfish. The remains include the skeletons of animals that once lived attached to the rocky bottom
of a shallow sea, such as colonial corals (bunches of corals connected to one another like apartments), solitary corals, bryozoans (‘lace corals’), crinoids (‘sea-lilies’), stromatoporoids (extinct sea creatures of uncertain identification, possibly related to the sponges and corals due to similarity of their limey skeletons), brachiopods (‘lamp shells,’ similar to clams, but with a ‘foot’ for attaching themselves permanently to the sea bottom), and blastoids (relatives of the crinoids and the sea urchins). There are also the fossilized remains of more mobile sea creatures, such as conodonts (extinct animals whose only remains are tiny jaw-like bones with serrations like teeth).
After death, crinoids fall apart very quickly, so it is common to find abundant fossilized columnals from broken stalks scattered and jumbled indiscriminately through limestones such as this Thunder Bay Limestone. However, here we also see, thrown together with these crinoid columnals, pieces of ‘lace coral’ (bryozoans), brachiopod shells, and solitary corals. The limestone that now entombs these remains cannot be where these creatures once lived, because they are not found here in their living positions. The solitary coral, for example, is not seen here attached to the sea bottom, with a distinct hard surface visible in the rock mass, but was completely enclosed in what originally was a soft lime mud which only became rock hard after burying the coral.
There is, therefore, only one conclusion which makes sense of the evidence—these sea creatures were buried together suddenly when overwhelmed, carried, and then dumped by moving water filled with lime muds. That’s why geologists call this a fossil graveyard. However, unlike a human graveyard today, where the individual graves are neatly arranged, these fossils in these graveyards are all jumbled—tossed together and buried haphazardly in sediments laid down by moving water.
But the scale is also impressive. Only a tiny portion of the Thunder Bay Limestone is exposed at Partridge Point, whereas these rock layers extend sideways for several hundred miles in each of two directions across what is known as the Michigan Basin. At Partridge Point one can see countless thousands of fossilized sea creatures’ remains. But one’s mind is quickly overwhelmed trying to comprehend the countless billions of fossils that must therefore have been buried in these rock layers underneath many hundreds of square miles of Michigan!
And this is only one of the fossil graveyards found in Michigan. In fact, similar fossil graveyards are found in many places on every continent all around the globe—‘billions of dead things (fossils) buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the Earth.’ This is exactly the evidence we would expect to find based on what the Bible says about the Genesis Flood. This fossil graveyard on the Lake Huron coastline of Michigan is thus just another example of the devastation resulting from that catastrophic global Flood." CMI
The outcrops of interest belong to the Thunder Bay Limestone and are exposed along the shoreline. They represent what geologists call the type section of this rock formation—that is, the originally described outcrops of this rock unit that show its features and contents across its thickness, and that then serve as the representative or objective standard against which separated parts of this same rock unit elsewhere may be compared.
Of particular interest are the light-coloured shaly beds and limestone full of fossilized corals and shellfish. The remains include the skeletons of animals that once lived attached to the rocky bottom
After death, crinoids fall apart very quickly, so it is common to find abundant fossilized columnals from broken stalks scattered and jumbled indiscriminately through limestones such as this Thunder Bay Limestone. However, here we also see, thrown together with these crinoid columnals, pieces of ‘lace coral’ (bryozoans), brachiopod shells, and solitary corals. The limestone that now entombs these remains cannot be where these creatures once lived, because they are not found here in their living positions. The solitary coral, for example, is not seen here attached to the sea bottom, with a distinct hard surface visible in the rock mass, but was completely enclosed in what originally was a soft lime mud which only became rock hard after burying the coral.
There is, therefore, only one conclusion which makes sense of the evidence—these sea creatures were buried together suddenly when overwhelmed, carried, and then dumped by moving water filled with lime muds. That’s why geologists call this a fossil graveyard. However, unlike a human graveyard today, where the individual graves are neatly arranged, these fossils in these graveyards are all jumbled—tossed together and buried haphazardly in sediments laid down by moving water.
But the scale is also impressive. Only a tiny portion of the Thunder Bay Limestone is exposed at Partridge Point, whereas these rock layers extend sideways for several hundred miles in each of two directions across what is known as the Michigan Basin. At Partridge Point one can see countless thousands of fossilized sea creatures’ remains. But one’s mind is quickly overwhelmed trying to comprehend the countless billions of fossils that must therefore have been buried in these rock layers underneath many hundreds of square miles of Michigan!
And this is only one of the fossil graveyards found in Michigan. In fact, similar fossil graveyards are found in many places on every continent all around the globe—‘billions of dead things (fossils) buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the Earth.’ This is exactly the evidence we would expect to find based on what the Bible says about the Genesis Flood. This fossil graveyard on the Lake Huron coastline of Michigan is thus just another example of the devastation resulting from that catastrophic global Flood." CMI
And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
Genesis 7:12
