"At Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, a confused tangle of bones juts from a ridge of sandstone, chock-full of dinosaur fossils. The sandstone is part of the Morrison Formation, a body of sedimentary rock extending from New Mexico to Saskatchewan in the north and covering more than 400,000 square miles of the western US and Canada. Eleven different species of dinosaur have been dug from the quarry at Dinosaur National Monument, including one of the largest and most complete skeletons of a giant Apatosaurus ever found.
The dinosaur bones are concentrated in an extensive lens-shaped bed of rock and are an outstanding example of a ‘mass burial’ deposit.
Having abandoned a peaceful interpretation for Dinosaur National Monument, yet committed to rejecting the historical Flood recorded in the Bible, uniformitarian geologists stayed true to their worldview and retained an interpretation that needed millions of years of slow deposition. They now say that the dinosaurs were overwhelmed and buried by a series of floods. Not by the global Flood of Noah, but by much smaller local floods separated by long time periods. They believe that every time an area flooded, the dinosaur remains were deposited in the same location, slowly building up the sizable collection. Alternatively, some scientists speculate that the fossils represent the cumulative result of many droughts as the dinosaurs congregated and died around ever-diminishing waterholes. But this scenario also requires flooding to try to explain the subsequent burial.
However, a notable feature of the water-worked sandstone in which the dinosaur bones are entombed complicates the picture for uniformitarians—these rocks contain abundant grains of a rock called ‘tuff’. Tuff forms from the solidification of hot ash ejected from volcanoes. This, and layers of volcanic ash elsewhere in the formation, indicate that an explosive volcanic eruption occurred at
much the same time as all the dinosaur remains were buried by flooding. No volcano is known in the vicinity of the deposit, and geologists have placed the nearest source for the tuff to vents in southern California or Nevada. Ash clouds depositing over such considerable distances point to an extremely catastrophic volcanic event.
Also, if millions of years had indeed gone by as the uniformitarians assert, the geomorphology or ‘shape’ of the land surface would have changed in all that time. We know that rivers can alter their position and shape over the centuries, as their banks are eroded and sediment is deposited. For the multiple-flood/multiple-drought scenarios to be true it would mean that the drainage pattern over a very wide area would remain unchanged over eons of time, such that animal remains were accumulated in exactly the same location over and over again. This is unlikely.
Added to this, the fact that fossilization occurred at all indicates that the animals were quickly and deeply buried in sediment infused with mineral-rich fluids, either during death or not long afterwards. The bodies of dinosaurs that had drowned in localized floods would be scavenged and rot, bones and all, long before a sufficient thickness of sediment had covered them. After all, we do not today find the accumulated bones of herd animals such as cattle slowly fossilizing under the mud of river banks and floodplains emplaced by local floods. We do not even find small animals fossilizing. Fossilization today is a rare event, requiring special conditions.
The evidence gets even more problematic for uniformitarians. Some of the fossils at Dinosaur National Monument are found as nearly-complete skeletons, fully articulated, and still in the opisthotonic or ‘dead dinosaur’ posture. Others are found in a disarticulated (dismembered) state. The presence of near-perfect whole remains further detracts from the long-ages multiple-flood theory, as the chance of unfossilized dinosaur skeletons surviving in articulated condition over eons of time, while awaiting deep burial, is vanishingly small. Soft connective tissue joining bone to bone rapidly breaks down once rotting of the carcass begins.
The evidence indicates that the dinosaur remains were quickly and deeply entombed in sediments deposited by water. It is highly unlikely that either the multiple-flood or the multiple-drought interpretation would result in dinosaurs being fossilized in rock as we find them at Dinosaur National Monument. On the other hand, a global-scale flood, such as the Flood of Noah recorded in the book of Genesis, with its associated volcanic activity, is a likely candidate." CMI
Having abandoned a peaceful interpretation for Dinosaur National Monument, yet committed to rejecting the historical Flood recorded in the Bible, uniformitarian geologists stayed true to their worldview and retained an interpretation that needed millions of years of slow deposition. They now say that the dinosaurs were overwhelmed and buried by a series of floods. Not by the global Flood of Noah, but by much smaller local floods separated by long time periods. They believe that every time an area flooded, the dinosaur remains were deposited in the same location, slowly building up the sizable collection. Alternatively, some scientists speculate that the fossils represent the cumulative result of many droughts as the dinosaurs congregated and died around ever-diminishing waterholes. But this scenario also requires flooding to try to explain the subsequent burial.
However, a notable feature of the water-worked sandstone in which the dinosaur bones are entombed complicates the picture for uniformitarians—these rocks contain abundant grains of a rock called ‘tuff’. Tuff forms from the solidification of hot ash ejected from volcanoes. This, and layers of volcanic ash elsewhere in the formation, indicate that an explosive volcanic eruption occurred at
Also, if millions of years had indeed gone by as the uniformitarians assert, the geomorphology or ‘shape’ of the land surface would have changed in all that time. We know that rivers can alter their position and shape over the centuries, as their banks are eroded and sediment is deposited. For the multiple-flood/multiple-drought scenarios to be true it would mean that the drainage pattern over a very wide area would remain unchanged over eons of time, such that animal remains were accumulated in exactly the same location over and over again. This is unlikely.
Added to this, the fact that fossilization occurred at all indicates that the animals were quickly and deeply buried in sediment infused with mineral-rich fluids, either during death or not long afterwards. The bodies of dinosaurs that had drowned in localized floods would be scavenged and rot, bones and all, long before a sufficient thickness of sediment had covered them. After all, we do not today find the accumulated bones of herd animals such as cattle slowly fossilizing under the mud of river banks and floodplains emplaced by local floods. We do not even find small animals fossilizing. Fossilization today is a rare event, requiring special conditions.
The evidence gets even more problematic for uniformitarians. Some of the fossils at Dinosaur National Monument are found as nearly-complete skeletons, fully articulated, and still in the opisthotonic or ‘dead dinosaur’ posture. Others are found in a disarticulated (dismembered) state. The presence of near-perfect whole remains further detracts from the long-ages multiple-flood theory, as the chance of unfossilized dinosaur skeletons surviving in articulated condition over eons of time, while awaiting deep burial, is vanishingly small. Soft connective tissue joining bone to bone rapidly breaks down once rotting of the carcass begins.
The evidence indicates that the dinosaur remains were quickly and deeply entombed in sediments deposited by water. It is highly unlikely that either the multiple-flood or the multiple-drought interpretation would result in dinosaurs being fossilized in rock as we find them at Dinosaur National Monument. On the other hand, a global-scale flood, such as the Flood of Noah recorded in the book of Genesis, with its associated volcanic activity, is a likely candidate." CMI
There were giants in the earth in those days;
Genesis 6:4
in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
Genesis 7:11
