[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Is the detailed record of successive fossil species, from simple to more complex, from general to special, from fish to man, entirely an artifact of Noah's Flood? Not one human being, or horse, or cow, or fox, or deer, or hippopotamus, or tortoise, or monkey, was so slow, or so stupid, or so crippled, that it lagged behind the others, and thus got caught down at the bottom of the hill. Not one! Conversely, there was not one dinosaur, or trilobite, or mammoth, that was lucky enough, or clever enough, or fast enough, to climb up to the top of the hill, and thus escape the fate of its fellows. Not one! And this is sound science? [Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the Evolution Controversies][/FONT] [FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] A flood strong enough to move all the sediments of the earth would tend to mix the different types of animals and plants into one big mishmash... The fossils are in the right order for evolution but not for hydraulic selection. The light animals refuse to stay in the shallow rocks, and the dense animals refuse to stay in the deep rocks, where they belong according to creationism. For instance, trilobites, light, fragile creatures resembling pill bugs, tend to be found only in the deepest rocks... The rocks show that each distinct species usually has its own horizon absolutely distinct from the horizons of other species of the same size, shape, and weight. [Christopher Gregory Weber, Common Creationist Attacks on Geology, Creation/Evolution, Issue 2, Fall 1980][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Flowering plants don't occur in the fossil record until early in the Cretaceous era. A forest of magnolias (a primitive tree) heading for the hills, only to be overwhelmed with the early mammals by the Flood, is unconvincing. [Robert J. Schadewald, Six Flood' Arguments Creationists Can't answer, Creation/Evolution, Issue 9, Summer 1982][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Flood geology doesn't explain why characteristic pollens and spores are found alongside animal fossils of each age (stratum), or why large, slow-moving mammals are invariably found in strata above flying pterodactyls and early birds like archaeopteryx. Flood geology also fails to explain the fossil pattern for trees. [Ken Nahigian][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Can creationists seriously believe that their Flood geology accounts for the numerous macro-evolutionary trends so well documented in the fossil record? Is it really possible that horses, humans, cows, and rats were true contemporaries of the primitive mammals known from Mesozoic deposits, but somehow only small noneutherian, apparently transitional (and small primitive eutherian mammals) managed to be buried beside the giants of the reptile world? [Laurie R. Godfrey][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] If the worldwide sequence of fossils are the products of Noah's flood and its resultant fallout, why, then - at no place on this vast earth - do we find dinosaurs and large mammals in the same strata; why are trilobites never with mammals (not even marine mammals), but always in strata below? Surely some retarded elephant would be keeping company with dinosaurs, some valiant trilobite swimming hard for thirty-nine days and winning an exalted upper berth with mammals. [Stephen J. Gould, An Urchin in the Storm][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Why are whales and dolphins only found at high levels, while marine reptiles of similar size are found only much lower?... Why were not most of the birds exhausted far sooner, since perching places would have been hard to find in the raging Deluge?... Sardines and swordfish (teleostean fish), appeared in late Triassic times (200 million years ago) and show up in the fossil record more frequently with the passage of time. This contradicts predictions of Flood geology: these deep sea fish ought to be found in the lowest strata. Besides, these fish had no special hydraulic features and they were not especially fast swimmers. Yet all these lucky teleostean fish managed to resist the flood waters for a long time, while large numbers of speedy fish are buried beneath them. [Kitcher][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] We might well ask whether the impressively huge carnivorous dinosaurs and other reptiles of the Mesozoic were weaker and less agile than the sheep and other grazing mammals that lay in the Cenozoic layers above them. Were the Mesozoic fish somehow less capable of avoiding burial in the hydraulic cataclysm than the Cenozoic corals and snails that are found above them in stratigraphic succession? We must conclude that the similarity between the known distribution of fossils and the prediction of the creationist model is insufficient to provide a basis for serious comparison. [Brian F. Glenister & Brian J. Witzke][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Remember that Flood geologists emphasize the violence of the Flood and its global scale. Dead plants and animals would have been very thoroughly mixed and transported large distances. How, then, could the sequence in which they settled out possibly be related to the original elevations of their habitats, or their running abilities? And why would man be a special case? His running and climbing ability is inferior to that of many animals. In any case, all the animals, including man, would have been killed long before the Flood finally ended, so that their ability to temporarily escape death (not burial) would have been irrelevant in the long run. [Willard Young, Fallacies of Creationism][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Creationists like to dismiss evolution as only a theory. My favorite rejoinder is that creationism isn't even a theory. When examined in the light of well-known and thoroughly researched scientific phenomena, creationist flood geology fails the most basic and simple test known to forensic science: bodies don't pile up the way creationists insist they must. [Walter F. Rowe, Bobbing for Dinosaurs: A Forensic Scientist Looks at the Genesis Flood, Creation/Evolution, Issue 28, Winter 1990-91][/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Creationist Flood geologists are well aware of the second law of thermodynamics as it relates to the origin of life, but typically oblivious to it regarding the unlikely odds of so many fossils being segregated so perfectly in the geologic record... Like it or not, the association of certain types of fossils with certain strata, and the existence of trace fossils - like neatly laid eggs, tidy nests, rodent burrows and the footprints of air-breathing animals found deep within the strata - can only be explained by different types of animals and plants living at completely different times in the past. [Neil Slater][/FONT]
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