Page 83 - Advanced Genesis - Creationism - Student Textbook

Study Section12: Let’s Now Examine the Fossil Record

12.1 Connect

Have you ever been to a Natural History Museum where they have the bones of a dinosaur
on display? Sometimes they even reconstruct the bones into a skeleton so the observer can
see what the dinosaur actually looked like. Of course, when they find the dinosaur skeleton,
it is not standing up nicely displayed, but rather is burried in tons of dirt. It has to be
carefully removed bone by bone, then reconstructed into the shape of the creature at the museum.
Most of the time, the bones are not like the bones in our living body, but rather are mineral copies of
the original bones. And most of the time, many of the bones are not all there. There is no skin or meat
on the skeleton fossil, so what the animal looks like is a total guess.

Today, let’s see what the fossils in the ground reveal to us about the age of the earth and the
catacylsmic flood.

12.2 Objectives

1. The student should be able to describe the various fossils that have been found demonstrate
that the evolutionary time scale is in serious error.

2. The student should be able to explain how the fossil record seems to indicate that a cataclysmic flood
was responsible for their formation.

3. The student should be able to explain how the fossil record demonstrates that evolution has not
occurred in the past.

12.3 Let’s now examine the Fossil record

To date, approximately 95.0% of all earth's fossil remains are marine invertebrates, 4.74%
are plants, 0.25% are land invertebrates (including insects), and 0.0125% are vertebrates. Of
the vertebrates, the majority are fish. Moreover, 95% of all land vertebrates found consist
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of less than one bone. However, billions of fossils have been found.

Up to as many as 1,200 dinosaur skeletons have been discovered thus far. Sedimentary rock
(sandstone, siltstone, shale, limestone, etc.), which composes between 75% to 82% of the Earth’s
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surface, is primarily laid down by moving water, layer upon layer, in a process known as hydrologic
sorting. Animals whose fossil remains are found must have been caught in this running water to have
been buried rapidly and preserved.

78 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/26495/do-marine-invertebrates-outnumber-plants-in-the-fossil-
record-191
79 Assuming half of the metamorphic rock (12%) base materials were sedimentary.
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