Page 81 - Genesis: Book of Beginnings and Science Behind it

Chapter 12: Let’s Now Examine the Fossil Record

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 buried 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
cataclysmic flood.

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.

The Lesson ...

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. lxxix Moreover, 95% of all land vertebrates are found to 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.), which composes between 75% to 82% lxxx of the earth's
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