I believe I committed to addressing some addtional points from this post of otseng's.
otseng wrote:
If we did have a "mud slide" type of event (I assume this is caused by water rushing away from the subterranean vents), this should still mix up all the life that existed at one time, in some places probably more than the "slow sinking" of dead bodies through many feet of water.
The water also eroded the sides of the crack and so was a mixture of water and eroded rock. So, it was not simply only water.
It seems to me quite inconceivable that we would have layers and layers of trilobite like life with no starfish or lobsters or crabs or sea anemones or fish or even turtles, etc.
Just as life now, plants and animals could've had different habitats prior to the flood. There did not have to be a homogenous animal population across the globe. Also, we don't know the exact habitat of the trilobites, though we know they lived underwater. But, would lobsters, sea anemones, fish, etc also live there? I'm not sure how this can be determined.
Granted, different organisms would live in different habitats. For marine life, the location could vary both geographically and by depth. The best we could do conclusively is to rule out certain habitats. Trilobites, for example, cannot live on land. Humans cannot live deep under water.
However, if trilobites did exist at the same time as marine species of similar size and mobility and habitat type (live at approximately the same depth, etc.) it would be very strange to have them exist in isolation from any of these other types.
As far as habitats:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobite#Fossil_distribution wrote:Trilobites appear to have been exclusively marine organisms, since the fossilized remains of trilobites are always found in rocks containing fossils of other salt-water animals such as brachiopods, crinoids, and corals. Within the marine paleoenvironment, trilobites were found in a broad range from extremely shallow water to very deep water. Trilobites, like brachiopods, crinoids, and corals, are found on all modern continents, and occupied every ancient ocean from which Paleozoic fossils have been collected. The remnants of trilobites can range from the preserved body to pieces of the exoskeleton, which it sheds in the process known as ecdysis. In addition, the tracks left behind by trilobites living on the sea floor are often preserved as trace fossils.
Also
Trilobites finally disappeared in the mass extinction at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago.
Dating issues aside, we find no trilobites above layers that SG designates Permian.
So, trilobites existed all over the world and at a wide variety of ocean depths, but only in layers designated older than 250 MYA. How did modern marine species avoid all these habitats????????
For example, some trilobites were bottom dwellers.
Another bottom dweller is a sea urchin, part of the
echinoidea. However, we have the following:
Because most echinoids have rigid tests, their ability to fossilize is greater than that of more delicate echinoderms such as starfish, and they are common fossils in many deposits. The oldest echinoids, belonging to an extinct regular taxon called the Echinocystitoidea, appear in the fossil record in the late Ordovician. Cidaroids or pencil urchins appear in the Mississippian (Early Carboniferous) and were the only echinoids to survive the mass extinction at the Permo-Triassic boundary. Echinoids did not become particularly diverse until well after the Permo- Triassic mass extinction. True sea urchins first appear in the late Triassic, cassiduloids in the Jurassic, and spatangoids or heart urchins in the Cretaceous. Sand dollars, a common and diverse group today, do not even appear in the fossil record at all until the Paleocene.
So, echinoidea are common in the fossil record, but there are no sand dollars in layers designated older than 65 MYA, and no true sea urchins older than the late Triassic. The Triassic runs from about 250 MYA to around 206 MYA.
Now, trilobites were at least mobile. How is that ALL the trilobites, the bottom dwellers and the non-bottom dwellers, ended up BELOW the less mobile bottom dwellers like sea urchins and sand dollars??
If we find dinosaurs at a particular location, we should find everything else that lived in that area as well mixed up together.
For the more mobile animals, this does not have to be the case. Prior to catastrophic events (earthquake, tidal wave, volcano), animals have a sense of impending danger and will try to escape.
Are there not dinosaurs that would have similar, or even better mobility than humans or other modern species?
If we find all kinds of dinosaurs in the lower layers and then in higher layers find humans and other modern mammals, but they are never mixed even though they are found at the same location, this to me is very very compelling evidence against the flood.
It would be nice to have a 3 dimensional graph of fossil finds and locations and depth. We would be able to then more objectively analyze this.
This would be nice. I have not found a comprehensive map, but some of the material I cited above does provide sufficient information to at least address the issue.
As I recall, we DO find this in isolated locations, like the Karoo formation in Africa.
Could you provide some references on this?
http://www.religioustolerance.org/oldearth2.htm
Creation scientists teach that the fossil remains of land animals which have been found trapped in the many rock layers were all actually alive at the time of Noah's flood. These few generations of animals all drowned. Some turned into fossils and were trapped in the layers of sedimentary rock which were laid down during the 150 days of the flood.
With our present knowledge, it appears impossible to harmonize this belief with the actual number of fossils in existence.
Robert Schadewald wrote: "Robert E. Sloan, a paleontologist at the University of Minnesota, has studied the Karroo Formation [in Africa]. He asserts that the animals fossilized there range from the size of a small lizard to the size of a cow, with the average animal perhaps the size of a fox. A minute's work with a calculator shows that, if the 800 billion animals in the Karoo formation could be resurrected, there would be twenty-one of them for every acre of land on earth." 1 That is, if all of the fossils of animals in the Karroo Formation had been alive at one time, were drowned during the flood of Noah, and ended up evenly spaced around the entire land surface of the earth, there would be 21 animals per acre. 2 A very conservative estimate is that there are about 100 fossils elsewhere on earth for each fossil in the Karroo Formation in Africa. Thus, assuming that all of these animals were evenly distributed, there would have been over 2,100 living animals per acre of land - "ranging from tiny shrews to immense dinosaurs" when the flood hit. This is clearly impossible.
To make the creation science story even more unlikely, only a small percentage of animals ever form fossils when they die. Assuming that 1 of each 1,000 land animals is fossilized, (an outrageously high number) then there would have been about 50 land animals per square feet of land wandering around at the time of Noah. The Earth would have been packed "wall-to-wall" with creatures. Animals would have been stacked on other animals to form multiple layers. Even if, as many creation scientists believe, the land area on earth Earth was much greater than it is today -- that is, closer to 100% than to 25% -- the number of animals alive at the time of Noah would have had to be enormous -- massively beyond the ability of the Earth to support.
Now, even if you spread out the fossils uniformly over, say, 10,000 years (which if I am understanding the FM would not at all be the case) and assume an average life span of only a few years, I still think you get way too many organisms per square foot to be feasible at the time of the flood.
" . . . the line separating good and evil passes, not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart . . . ." Alexander Solzhenitsyn
