Article Quote: Order in the Fossil Record

Excerpt from Order in the Fossil Record by Andrew Snelling:

The conventional explanation of the fossil order is progressive evolutionary changes over long periods of time. But this explanation runs into a huge challenge. Evolution predicts that new groups of creatures would have arisen in a specific order. But if you compare the order that these creatures first appear in the actual fossil record, as opposed to their theoretical first appearance in the predictions, then over 95% of the fossil record’s “order” can best be described as random.

On the other hand, if these organisms were buried by the Flood waters, the order of first appearance should be either random, due to the sorting effects of the Flood, or reflect the order of ecological burial. In other words, as the Flood waters rose, they would tend to bury organisms in the order that they were encountered, so the major groups should appear in the fossil record according to where they lived, and not when they lived. This is exactly what we find, including this fossil record within the Grand Canyon—Grand Staircase.

You can also see another interesting pattern that confirms what we would expect from a global Flood. You would expect many larger animals to survive the Flood waters initially, leaving their tracks in the accumulating sediment layers as they tried to escape the rising waters. But eventually they would become exhausted, die, and get buried.

What do we find? In the Tapeats Sandstone are fossilized tracks of trilobites scurrying across the sand, but fossilized remains of their bodies do not appear until higher up, at the transition into the Bright Angel Shale.

Similarly, we find fossilized footprints of amphibians and reptiles in places that are much lower (in the Supai Group, Hermit Shale, and Coconino Sandstone) than the fossils of their bodies (in the Moenkopi Formation).