Saturday, February 17, 2024

A Paleontological Memorial

"The unusual biodiversity of fossils doesn’t make sense if one
assumes evolutionary stories. Rather, the physical evidence provides many provenance details for paleontologists to speculate and quarrel about.


It’s also amazing that certain oceanic creatures, like stingrays, were buried in Wyoming so quickly and tightly that their body shapes didn’t disintegrate before fossilization.

"Like sharks, sting rays have a skeleton composed of cartilage. Normally, cartilage is not preserved as a fossil as it disintegrates
readily. The excellent skeletons of Xiphotrygon are good evidence of how well the shales of the
Green River Formation preserve the fossils.
Fossils are found as billions of dead things, buried in rock layers, laid down by water, all over the earth. All scientists agree that floods are the ideal conditions for forming fossils. When a plant or animal is rapidly and deeply buried in cement-rich sediment, the deep burial keeps the specimen from being totally destroyed by things like scavengers or wind or water currents, and the mineral cement hardens the material to preserve.…Dead things are broken down so fast [think vultures] that most fossils must have formed rapidly or they wouldn’t have formed [as recognizable fossils] at all."

The multifarious mix of fossilized “graveyard” remains at the Fossil
Butte National Monument consists of more oceanic animals than just
stingrays and is jumbled together with terrestrial animals such as insects (dragonflies, damselflies, beetles, crickets, flies, bees, ants); various spiders; birds (frigatebirds, ground fowl, roller birds); finfish and shellfish (penaeid shrimp, ostracod shrimp, crayfish or lobsters, oceanic stingrays, sandfish, catfish, perches, paddlefish, shads, oceanic herrings, sardines); mammals (bats, squirrels, horses, tapirs); reptiles (alligators, anoles, other lizards, snakes, various turtles); amphibians (salamanders, frogs); gastropods (Turritella sea snails, freshwater snails); bivalves (mussels, clams); and more.

Aside from their great preservation, 
Q: how can so many oceanic animals like stingrays get buried with
land animals inside the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming instead of along some ocean beach? “It’s an oceanic stingray! It shouldn’t be there.


*Only the worldwide Genesis Flood makes sense of these fossils. 
*If there had been no global Flood, those animal fossils shouldn’t exist at all, much less be recognizable animals. 

So, just as a cairn of stones once served as a memorial monument
(
And command ye them, saying, Take you hence out of the midst of Jordan, out of the place where the priests' feet stood firm, twelve stones, and ye shall carry them over with you, and leave them in the lodging place, where ye shall lodge this night. Joshua 4:3), the fossils of Wyoming’s Fossil Butte National Monument now comprise a paleontological memorial to the fossil-forming Genesis Flood." 
ICR