Page 67 - Creationism - Student Textbook w videos short

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. 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 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.) 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.

Here is what we observe as we examine the fossil record….

1. Abrupt appearance of animals.

All the different, basic kinds of animals appear abruptly and fully functional in
the strata - with no proof of ancestors. This is often referred to as the
Cambrian Explosion, which refers to the great quantity and diversity of life
found in what is called the Cambrian layer of the geologic column. The
Cambrian age in the geologic time scale is dated by scientists as being about
530 million years old. What is really interesting is not just what is found in

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