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Dinosaurs Buried More Rapidly Than Thought
BY TIM CLAREY, PH.D.*
Secular scientists
recently determined that most of the dinosaur fossils in the Morrison Formation
were buried quicker than commonly thought.
The Morrison
Formation is famous for its compositional consistency and massive extent across
the American West, covering nearly 700,000 square miles, and for its rich
dinosaur quarries.
The Morrison
Formation is remarkable for its dinosaur fossils and has yielded some of the
most important, voluminous, and diverse Late Jurassic dinosaur bone beds on
Earth, including assemblages of large herbivorous sauropods [i.e. Apatosaurus,
Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus].
The
conventional view is that the Morrison Formation was deposited over vast
periods of time by rivers that slowly meandered back and forth.
Secular
paleontologists assume that major flooding events of these “rivers” caused the
burial of the dinosaurs we find in the various quarries, including the one at
Dinosaur National Monument (DNM).
These
types of flood events are thought to be massive, on the scale of 1000-year
Floods or even greater.
In
addition, creation scientists have pointed out the common nature of the
dinosaur fossils in the many Morrison Formation dinosaur quarries and the lack
of any evidence of evolution.
The rock types in these
various quarries are quite variable, but the entombed dinosaur taxa are
incredibly similar, even though the Morrison Formation covers a
700-thousand-square-mile area.
So uniform are the taxa that frustrated evolutionists agree, “We failed to find any convincing evidence
of evolution at the generic level within the Morrison Formation.”
These massed
accumulations, of which DNM is the most famous example, remain a geologic
mystery.
However,
the deposition of at least 20 massive Morrison Formation dinosaur quarries over
such a vast area by individual river floods alone should have taken vast
amounts of time, even by secular time scales.
Kenneth
Galli from Boston College and his colleagues from Boston University, New Mexico
Museum of Natural History and Science, and Le Moyne College attempted to
resolve how long it took to deposit a major section of the Morrison Formation.
They
used U-Pb radioisotope techniques to date two ash-rock layers near the top and
base of the 320-foot thick Brushy Basin Member, a sub unit within the Morrison
Formation that contains roughly two-thirds of all of the dinosaur quarries in
the formation.
The
results surprised even these old-Earth secular scientists. They found out that
the majority of the Brushy Basin Member was deposited much faster than they
thought, all in a time frame of less than one million years.
They
added:
“If this is true,
these results have fundamental implications for dinosaur preservation and may
explain the limited evolution throughout Brushy Basin time. This is not to say
that such a short interval of time cannot be subdivided biostratigraphically,
but the taxonomy of Morrison Formation dinosaurs and extent of sampling do not
indicate significant evolutionary turnover during this short interval, so there
appears to be no basis for a valid biostratigraphic subdivision within the bulk
of the Comobluffian [the type quarry assemblage] vertebrate assemblage.”
Essentially,
what they are saying is there is no basis to divide the Brushy Basin Member by
any systematic changes in the fossils.
They
also admit there is little, if any, evidence for evolution in the dinosaurs in
the Morrison Formation in general.
We creation scientists wholeheartedly agree.
Furthermore, we see no evidence of evolution throughout
the entire fossil record.
All fossils appear quickly, fully-formed, remain the same,
and disappear upwards in the rock record.
The Morrison Formation is at the level in the global Flood
when the environments of the dinosaurs were being catastrophically inundated.
The dinosaurs themselves were swept up by the tsunami-like
waves into great masses of bones, like log jams, and buried as concentrated
assemblages — these became the quarries we see today.
We also agree with the short time frame for the deposition
of the Morrison Formation, except not nearly as long as the secular idea of a
million years.
The Bible talks about a Flood that covered the Earth just
4,500 years ago. This better explains the extent of the Morrison Formation and
the burial of the dinosaurs and the lack of evidence of any evolution.
There
were no meandering rivers slowly depositing the Morrison Formation like secular
scientists imagine.
Only
the massive volume of water of the global Flood would have been able to spread
these millions of dinosaur bones across nearly 700,000 square miles of the
American West in one thin layer a few hundred feet thick.
Multiple
rivers would never be that consistent. As with other examples of strata found
around the world, the Morrison is powerful evidence for the Flood.
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