Did bones actually become fossilized in the sediments of "ancient" epeiric (inland) seas on continents?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Most fossils do form under plain old ordinary sediment deposition. No flash flood or anything else drastic. If you go to a beach, many shells that you find are actually decades to centuries or more old. But most fossils are also not so impressive looking, at least without microscopy. Whale bones are not always broken down quickly. Bones and shells are hard and somewhat slow to break down, so it just depends on the relative speed of whatever is breaking things down versus how fast it’s getting buried. A geology paper reported finding an old chain about a meter down on a small island in the Bahamas. With visions of Spanish gold in their heads, they asked casually about the spot and found out that someone had put a chain their to anchor their boat a few decades ago. Areas close to large continents get lots of sand and mud eroding off the land. The North American interior seaway filled largely with sand and mud eroding off the mountains to either side, with a fair contribution from skeletal bits and some volcanic ash.

Storms and underwater landslides are relatively mundane events that produce fining upward packets of sediment. Coarsening upward sediment layers could be produced by water getting shallower, among other possible situations. Anywhere around the globe today, if any sediment is accumulating, you find sediment piling up on some days and not on others. That gives you layering. A global flood within one year, as proposed by modern young-earth claims cannot produce the layers that we see. The major sequence stratigraphic units are not explainable by a global flood. They have countless features that require slow deposition over huge amounts of time. For example, the Castille Formation in the Permian of the Delaware Basin in west Texas has alternating fine layers of salt minerals and organic-rich limestone. Salt deposition cannot occur during a global flood as envisioned in YEC models. If the water was salty enough to precipitate salt, it was salty enough to kill most aquatic life. Formation of each layer takes some time, and there are vast numbers of layers. The Castille alone has over 100,000 layers. The most likely explanation is that they reflect seasonal change - salt from the dry season and organic-rich in the wet season. And that’s just one unit with many deposits above and below. There are reefs occurring at many levels in the geologic sequence, which could not form during a YEC flood.

Giant waves as envisioned in the flood model you are proposing would not produce the observed patterns. (They would require enough energy that the earth would vaporize, though, making modeling their other effects somewhat pointless.) There are plenty of tsunami deposits that have been studied for comparison. The large-scale units of geologic layers are not tsunami deposits. The “Great Unconformity” below the Sauk transgression reflects erosion on the supercontinent of Rodinia, as well as the initial transgression of the succeeding ocean in some areas. In places, there are lake and glacier deposits. The unconformity could not possibly have been produced by a few catastrophic waves.

A tenable scientific model must carefully examine what it predicts and compare that to the evidence.

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Sounds good.
And it certainly wouldn’t hurt either if you would focus a bit more on “the only thing…”
Thanks!

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So, you have actually observed the formation of the fossils in the fossil record? And you saw that a slow and gradual–“plain old ordinary”–deposition of sediments on bones successfully fossilized them?

So, you have come across a “whale falls” study, where the bones were not consumed by bacteria in ocean sediments, over a few years’ time? If so, please give me the link to it.

And why do you think this?

Actually, they are only explainable by the dynamics of the biblical Flood. For example, the evolutionary model calls for a super slow rise in ocean levels–one source said, “.01/week.” Now think about that a minute… The Sauk megasequence alone deposited 3 million cubic kilometers of ocean sediments across North America. Do you, in all reality, believe that ocean waters rising at an imperceptible rate of .01 inch/week would have the hydrodynamics to pick up such a load of sediments and spread them out in layers (according to Walther’s Law) across 75% of North America?

In fact, the Tonto Group of sedimentary rock layers in the Grand Canyon are 1135 feet thick. And this group was deposited by the Sauk transgression. Would ocean waters rising at .01 in/week have the hydrodynamic power to have first picked up, then deposited, this load of sediment?

In fact, notice the distinct layering of these sedimentary rock layers, in accordance with Walther’s Law that calls for a “thinning up” of sediments in a transgressive flow: Muav LIMESTONE…on top of Bright Angel SHALE…on top of Tapeats SANDSTONE.

Yes, there are “vast numbers of layers”–of varying thicknesses. This is why sequence stratigraphy speaks of different “orders” of sequences. A first order sequence is the longest, down to 5th (and possibly even smaller) order sequences.

Such smaller, more frequent layers are what would be predicted by the numerous “pulses” of tsunami-like waves of the Flood. Scripture alludes to plate tectonics as a factor in the flooding as it describes seafloor rifting–rifting that would lead to seafloor spreading (contributing to the flooding of continents)…which would lead to ocean plates subducting beneath continental plates…which would not only produce numerous volcanoes (like the 452 volcanoes along the Pacific coast, called “the Ring of Fire”)…but would also set off numerous tsunamis–another product of subduction zones. And, there are over 30,000 miles of such zones…that’s a lot of tsunamis…which would explain the hydrodynamic power that transported the sediments. At least it would come much closer than “.01 inch/week”!

The Great Unconformity erosion zone–which includes even large boulders–can certainly be explained by the Sauk transgression. Such a transgression picked up, transported, and deposited 3 million cubic miles of ocean sediments across 75% of North America. So, it was plenty powerful enough to erode the basement granite, resulting in the Great Unconformity!

But I will tell you what definitely did not have the hydrodynamic power to erode basement granite–namely, ocean waters rising to flood the continent at .01 inch/week!

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How come flowering plants are only found late in geological time? Were they able to run for high ground when the flood waters rose?

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https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-marine-010213-135144
In deeper water, it takes many decades for the bones to be broken down completely. In shallower water, there is typically a higher supply of sediment, so they get buried quicker. Most fossil whale bones are random individual bones, scattered and buried after the death of the whale; skeletons are rather rarer. Yes, I have dozens of random fossil whale bones that I have collected. And you do sometimes find them on a beach, also. Sediment chemistry also plays a role - is it phosphate-rich? pH? oxygen levels?

Bacteria themselves are not so good at consuming bone - some can make tiny burrows in hard materials, and they will gobble up the organic material, but the break down of bone into pieces depends more on animals. Once the bone is buried, it is largely protected from further biological action.

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You are going to double down on this?. That is trivially false. Continent crossing tsunami’s are not just speeded up oceanic ingression and regression brought about by ice cap variation and continental subduction. I stand by what I said. What Clarey proposes is completely at odds with mainstream geology, in terms of process as well as age.

Chevron has hundreds of geologists and hydrologists on staff. That Clarey has such a background means he should know better. By the way, have you read the late Glenn Morton’s posts on this site. He was also YEC at the beginning of a oil geology career, but that became impossible to sustain as he worked in the field.

You say you researched this, and you do not realize that the inland sea was flanked by dry ground on either side?

The bumbling know-nothing nuclear physicists still managed to build nuclear weapons that worked. Hey, but what do they know? So what is your theory? Show the math for your decay modes. How does changing force constants alter stellar dynamics? What do you do with the vaporizing heat from conversion of mass to energy? Think that potassium dating might have speeded up for the flood? What happened to the potassium in Noah’s body, as well as all the animals, over that time?

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While I obviously have not personally watched processes taking place over more than a few decades, that is enough time for certain geologic settings to encase shells and bones into rock (particularly for carbonate settings). I have collected a huge number of fossils as well as recent shells and have seen the patterns of change through time. I have organized major museum fossil collections. I have seen the sediments that the fossils are in. I have studied geology. Thus, I do have some relevant observations. You have not observed tsunamis do any of the things that you claim that they do - think carefully whether you are being consistent in your standards.

The young-earth flood is not biblical. Genesis 2 indicates that the geography of Eden is recognizable today, whereas modern young-earth models have a flood supposedly depositing much of the geologic column (though they can’t figure out which parts are during versus before versus after). Flood geology arguments also do not honor God in their quality and are unbiblical in that sense as well.

Certainly a slow and gradual rise in oceans can deposit millions of cubic kilometers of ocean sediments across large parts of North America. Just think about how much sediment is deposited on our beaches today.

Deposition according to Walther’s Law is incompatible with giant tsunamis. The Tapeats Sandstone is coastal sand. At the same time, in deeper water, you have mud, which became the Bright Angel Shale. Further out, beyond where most of the mud and sand eroding off the land has accumulated, much of the sediment is carbonate skeleton bits form ocean life, which becomes the Muav Limestone. As the ocean gradually rises, the beach gradually moves inland, followed by the clay mud, followed by the lime mud. If the young-earth model were true, they should all be mixed together in a tsunami-style deposit, not side by side and gradually replacing each other. The types of fossil change as you go up in each of these layers, showing that each one was deposited over vast amounts of time.

If you go to a rocky coastline such as the west or northeastern coasts of the US, you may see basement granite eroding. Your claims that ordinary erosion could not do that are based on personal incredulity, not on actually investigating geological processes.

Speeding up plate tectonics to largely take place during a one year flood requires earth-vaporizing amounts of energy. The pattern of volcanoes is incompatible with a young earth - the series such as in the Hawaiian-Emperor chain each must have time to build up, then erode, as they slowly move over the hot spot.

Tsunamis cannot form the individual layers of the Castille Formation - tsunamis cannot deposit fine layers of gypsum and organic-rich limestone over a hundred miles. Even if they could, that would require 11.5 tsunamis per day for an entire year, just to form the Castille. You are not checking whether your explanations actually work; rather, you just trying to use “tsunami” as an explanation for everything while denying that conventional geology works. The reality, however, is that many things can happen in a few billion years - there is room for a lot of different processes in earth history, whereas there is not room in a young-earth model. God works miracles, but not ones that merely serve to make it look like the miracle didn’t happen. Old-earth geology works for finding resources and for matching what we actually observe in the geologic record. Young-earth geology is entirely an effort to make a particular interpretation of Genesis 1 seem more credible; it does not work if you actually want to find anything in the earth.

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You’re welcome! How much more should I focus on “the only thing” whatever that is?

And a better word than dissimulation is of course disingenuity. Although you have nailed your matters of religion to the mast now.

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Through starlight, we can see directly into the past for billions of years. If there was a change in the physical constants needed for faster decay times then we would see it in that starlight, but it isn’t there.

It is also worth pointing out that you also depend on these same assumptions. The physics of sedimentation are just as dependent on these physical constants as radioactive decay. What would you think if someone claimed the density of water could have been different in the past as a way of discounting your claims? When your only defense is to invent completely different laws of physics in order to explain away problematic evidence then you really don’t have a good argument.

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Another serious question I have, is if the flood deposited those thousands of feet deep sediments, where did the sediment come from? An ancient earth has an easy answer consistent with the types and amount of sediment layers, that is that the sediments have been ground down from basement rock and recycled basement rock over millions of years. The young earth model seems to only have sediment being created de novo and put in place at the time of creation, from what I can see. The problem is the same one of cosmology, geology, lake varves, tree rings, and ice layers, and that is that those layers of sediment speak to a history, a history that the young earth interpretation will tell you never existed. What then does that say of God? And of God’s word we read in Psalm 19 and Romans 1 that tells of creation telling us of who God is?

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Yeah but those billions of years aren’t real and six thousand years is because the Bible tells us so
or Jesus didn’t die for your sins THEREFORE the physical constants AREN’T.

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This is what the LORD says: If I have not established my covenant with the day and the night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth…
Jeremiah 33:25

 
This refutes the YEC argument about the Kaibab uplift and the Grand Canyon in 11 seconds:

 

 
The elapsed time clocks God engineered into the cosmos for us to discover and learn how to use validate and calibrate each other:

 
This is about extinct radioactive atoms, not radiometric dating:
Radioactive Atoms — Evidence about the Age of the Earth - Ken Wolgemuth
 

New evidence always supports the antiquity of the earth, and it continues to build:

 
Love it – bat breath testifies to an old earth: :grin:

 
And the evidence goes on and on.

 
It is reprehensible that YECism is so frequently so closely identified with Christianity in the U.S. as to be integral to it.

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Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis – GeoChristian

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At first, angiosperm fossils were found only as early as the Cretaceous, but then were discovered in layers thought to be over 100 million years earlier (250 mya).

Who knows if such fossils might not be found even earlier in the record? So it’s hard to tell just when they “could no longer run for high ground.”

In any case, in the Flood model, the fossil record is not the record of life as proposed by the evolutionary model, but the record of death–catastrophic death. It is not the record of organisms evolving into existence, but the record of them being suddenly–and overwhelmingly–taken out of existence.

While you try to poke fun at the Flood, the Apostle Peter warned that God’s judgment of the world in the Flood is the guarantee of His future judgment of the world by fire–and he assures us it will not be just a “local” fire. Remember 2 Peter 3?

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On the other hand, Paul warns that often the “wise, educated” world thinks us Christians to be fools for believing in the “foolish” gospel. But, in reality, they are the fools as they reject their only hope for salvation. “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1 Corinthians 1:20).

And Paul warns us fellow Christians that we must not sell out on biblical truth in order to be loved by the world, but instead must be willing to join him (a very educated man!) in being “fools for Christ’s sake,” 1 Corinthians 4:10.

And what fools Christians are who, to avoid being called fools by the world, join the world in its ignorance of the fossil record. Instead of leading the world in the truth, they are following the world in its proud ignorance of God and His Word.

2 Peter 3 identifies those who scoff at Christ’s 2nd Coming to judge the world as the same ones who are blind to God’s judgment of the world the first time, with the Flood–he says that the evidence for the Flood is “hiding” from these proud scoffers. In other words, this evidence of the Flood is playing “Hide and Seek” with scoffers–and it’s winning!

And it will continue to win, until they humble themselves before God’s truth–accepting the
ridicule of the world.

But how could the evidence of a worldwide Flood be clearer? Marine fossils (and over 95% of fossils are of ocean creatures)…packed in marine covering every continent…

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…except this is a rabbit trail. It’s for another thread.

Meanwhile, how do you account for the fact that the fossil record contains billions of fossilized bones (mostly marine) that evolutionary science claims were formed by bones falling into ancient inland seas–when empirical testing shows that bones are completely consumed by scavengers and bacteria when drifting down into sea sediments, thus preventing bones from becoming fossilized.

Address this please.

By the way, another example of such complete consumption of bones by scavengers and bacteria in seas: 1500 men went down with the Titanic in 1912. The Titanic wreckage has been discovered and explored. So, where are the bones of these 1500 men? Completely consumed. In fact, their trousers have even been found–but no bones inside!

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The truth revealed in the Bible and the truth revealed in God’s creation cannot conflict. If they appear to, then the interpretation of one or the other or both is in error. Did you read or even look at any of the articles that dealt with science that I posted? (I used to be a YEC btw, but thankfully I did not have to go through the trauma that many have when they came to understand the science.)

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Citation please. We have some real scientists here that can address that directly if they haven’t already. Oh, a few have… @paleomalacologist, @T_aquaticus and @Paraleptopecten.

You can cherry pick things here and there which may appear to support YECism in isolation, but the massive preponderance of evidence across multiple disciplines is the true global flood.

How about the Kaibab uplift, the Hawaiian island chain or the girdled rocks?

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I’m not sure.

However, what we all know is that massive loads of ocean sediments were, at some time in our past, deposited upon the continents. In fact, using Rockworks software, Dr. Tim Clarey (geologist and hydrologist) has figured that 55 million cubic kilometers of ocean sediments (with some eroded sediments mixed in) lie upon the North American craton.

And it lies 1 to 2 miles thick, not only on our continent, but on other continents as well.

So, this is something we know–we don’t have to hypothesize about.

We also know a certain amount of hydrodynamic power was required to pick up this load (in addition to the billions of marine organisms) from the ocean and beach…then transport and deposit it across the continents (over six megasequences). In fact, scientists should be able to do the math on this–figuring the needed hydrodynamics.

Then, we need to ask ourselves, "So how would such hydrodynamics be produced? Would it be by slowly, slowly rising sea levels over millions of years, that v e r y gradually spill over onto the continents (as currently proposed by evolutionary scientists)?

Or, wouldn’t much stronger, more powerful hydrodynamics be required? And, wouldn’t plate tectonics provide the energetic waters that could provide such power?

Again, something we know: there are over 30,000 miles of subduction zones, indirectly resulting from the 45,000 miles of seafloor rifting that occurred. And we know that such subduction zones, among other things, would produce a series of powerful tsunamis.

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(PDF) How not to become a fossil-Taphonomy of modern whale falls (researchgate.net)

Actually, there are several studies of this under the heading of “Whale Falls.” So, just Google it, and start reading.
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By the way, you might think also about what was not found when the Titanic wreckage was discovered. What was not found were the bones of the 1500 men who went down into the sea sediments with this wreckage. In fact, their trousers were found! But their bones had been completely consumed by bacteria.

More evidence that bones in the fossil record did not become fossilized by drifting down into the sediments of ancient inland seas…as is popularly taught by evolutionary scientists.

To become fossilized, bones do not fall into sediments, but the sediments must (massively!) fall upon the bones!