A Walk on the Beach Preserved in Stone–How Fossilized Turtle Tracks Refute Young-Earth Fossil Dogma 

Baby sea turtles emerge from their sandy nest and quickly make their way down the beach and into the sea. As they do so they leave tiny footprints in the sand, but the tracks are short-lived.  Blown away or destroyed by the next large wave, they are lost forever. Imagine the footprints you leave during walks on a beach. Of the thousands of tracks you have left, how many do you think remain a year, a month or even 24-hours later?

Now imagine finding the footprints of sea turtles preserved in stone. That is just what some hunters of ichnites (fossil footprints) have discovered in rocks above the coastline of South Africa. The same group of ichnologists who made this discovery have also identified thousands of footprints from other animals such as lions, elephants, rhinos, giraffes, horses, buffalo, various birds and numerous other smaller vertebrates. They have even found human footprints preserved in the roof of a sandstone cave. Yes, you read that right, preserved in the roof of a cave (I’ve written about these before: Fossils Footprints found on the Roof of a South African Cave).

While millions of fossil footprints have been described from the fossil record (A Fossil Paradox:  Footprints are Rarely Preserved in Stone and yet are very Common), this is the first report of preserved sea turtle tracks formed on land.

What is the origin of these tracks?

There are three observations regarding these tracks that must be accounted for in any origins model:

1. The tracks are found on sandstone blocks formed from an ancient beach which lay adjacent to a large terrestrial dune-field that spread inland for many miles.
2. Those sandstone blocks of that ancient beach are as much as 100 feet above today’s sea level.
3. Sea turtle tracks from at least two different species have been found at four locations along the coast, one of which is nearly 100 km away from the other three.

In the image above a large block of sandstone has fallen from the cliffs above the South African coast.  Here one of the sea turtle track discoverers is looking at them as they run vertically up this rock. Looking at the side of the large block, it is evident that the block was originally oriented 90-degrees clockwise such that the layers of sand were deposited horizontally.

Conventional geological explanations for the material upon which these trackways were originally made includes multiple lines of evidence that 100,000 years ago sea levels were much higher than today. Sea turtles must have bred here (today, similar species breed over 500 miles further north). Their young hatched from underground nests–there is even some possible fossil evidence of this at one of the trackway sites–and headed out to sea.  A thin layer of fine sand laid down on the tracks suggests that wind blowing dry sand in from the nearby dune field may have covered the tracks and possibly laid down additional sandy layers preserving the tracks. Eventually tens of feet of sediment were deposited on top of the trackways and the sediments gradually cemented together to form the weak sandstone rock we have today.

Over the millennia, sea levels were lowered by hundreds of feet and after the last Ice Age rose again  to their current location d. Erosion from the sea has caused blocks of rack to break from the cliffs above, which  resulted in the present position of the sandstone blocks. These blocks now reveal trackways, as the blocks have fractured along lines of thin sand deposits such as the ones laid on top of the tracks.

You would be right to assume that the chance that any single trackway becoming preserved in rock is infinitesimally small, just like having any one of your own footsteps preserved (for more see: A Fossil Paradox:  Footprints are Rarely Preserved in Stone and yet are very Common). Nonetheless, finding out that such trackways have been preserved is not surprising. In fact. one could say that we expect to find preserved footprints of most types of animals that have ever walked on the surface of the earth.

Why? Because even though the chance of any individual footprint being preserved is incredibly small there are fantastically large numbers of opportunities resulting in high probabilities of some footprints being preserved. In this case let’s assume that a beach 100 miles long existed next to a dune field in South Africa for just 5000 years. Let’s suppose 10,000 female sea turtles used this stretch of beach for breeding during this time and each female laid a clutch of 100 eggs each year (species similar to those proposed to have made these tracks lay about this many). That would be one million eggs each year. Over 5000 years that would be five billion eggs. Many of these would be predated on.  If we were to assume that only one-half end up hatching, that is still 2.5 billion sea turtle trackways produced over a 5000 year period. If these ten total trackways at four sites were all that had every been preserved that would mean only 0.000000004 of the tracks ever made were preserved. There are almost certainly many others hiding between layers of sandstone on those cliffs and many others that used to exist in rock but have eroded into the sea. Even so, the chances of any individual sea turtle track fossilizing is surely only one in hundreds of millions, which is not surprising.

A young earth model of sea-turtle tracks?

The young-earth advocate will cry foul of my description above. They will say, the earth is only 6000 years old and so your estimate of total tracks made by sea turtles and the rate of fossilization must be wrong.  So how then can the young-earth creation apologist explain the existence of these fossil turtle tracks? 

Their first inclination will be to say that trace fossils like footprints can’t be preserved by any processes that we see today (see footnote 1 for a fuller treatment) and that we must seek our answer in a global flood 4350 years ago to provide the mechanism for footprints to be preserved.  They will point to dinosaur tracks that could only have been preserved by dinosaurs running on temporary sand bars away from the rising waters. 

For example, the idea that footprints aren’t expected by conventional geology to be found in the fossil record is even promoted by the top YECs geologist, Dr. Snelling, at Answers in Genesis. Here he addresses dinosaur footprints:

Biblical geologists, on the other hand, say it is the conventional geologists who, in fact, face a dilemma. If geologic change takes place slowly, surely footprints made in mud would be obliterated by wind and rain long before the prints were covered by new sediments and hardened into rock.

But these sea turtle tracks directly contradict Dr. Snelling hypothesis.  His explanation runs afoul of the geological context of this site and even the YEC accounting of the post-flood world. For example:

1. These rocks are very young. They are not likely to be more than 100,000 years old. Obviously that is far older than would be allowed by YECs.  But even in YEC model of earth’s history rocks such as these were not formed during a global flood but rather in the time after the Flood until present (see Footnote 2).  As a result these fossils cannot have been formed during the flood, but rather through post-flood events.
2.  For YECs the most important post-flood event was a singular Ice Age. They propose this happened just a few hundred years after the flood and lasted no more than a few hundred years.  During this time they also agree that world-wide sea levels were much lower than they are today.

Given these two young-earth constrictions on earth’s history, when did these tracks fossilize? Since the rocks containing these fossils are found far above current sea levels and YECs believe that sea levels have been either lower or the same since the onset of the Ice Age, that leaves them only 100 to 200 years after the flood for this dune-fields and beaches to have formed and the sea turtles to have nested. It also requires that these 4300 year-old dunes and  beaches became rock within a few hundred years and ultimately formed cliffs in the post-Ice Age period.

This raises an interesting problem for the young earth creationist. How could these fossils have formed in such a small window of time? They claim that conventional geology has a problem explaining the fossil record because of how unlikely it is for footprints to be preserved. How much more unlikely then is it for the creationist who must find a way for fossil footprints to be preserved in non-flood rocks and given only a few hundred years?

Let’s do the calculation again but this time with the YEC parameters. The beach sands preserved in these rocks must have formed when sea levels were much higher. The only time that could happen within the 4350 year chronology would have been within a hundred years  after the Flood. This limit is in place because the beach would only have existed at this location before the Ice Age kicked off which drastically lowered the sea to well below current levels. Let’s grant there was 100 miles of beach available and 10,000 female sea turtles (though this seems wildly optimistic given that most would probably have died during a chaotic global flood.)  If each laid 100 eggs each year then that would be one million eggs per year but, remember, this only would have occurred over a 100 year period. So we have a total of 100 million eggs of which 50% hatched. Therefore, in the YEC chronology of earth history there could be 50 million opportunities for tracks to be preserved. My calculations are optimistic (more time and more sea turtles than could be expected in the YEC model) but result in each track having a predicted preservation rate of 0.0000002. That sounds extremely unlikely but is still 50 times (0.000000004 compared to 0.0000002) the preservation rate that we calculated if the beach had existed for 5000 years.  

In conclusion, creationists have to propose that in their model of earth history footprints like this are minimally 50 times more likely (and probably 100s of times more likely) to be preserved as in the old earth model. This is not what you hear YECs preaching to their devotees. They say that footprints are too hard to form via today’s geological processes but surely could be explained by the animals running from the flood. But these would be “post flood” rocks. So, how can it be that the footprints are too challenging to form, and yet they are found in what would be the most amazing set of circumstances: within 100 years after the flood, before the onset of a singular Ice Age, on a brand new beach, with huge new dunes, covered quickly (but not by global flood sediments!), turned to rock within years to decades, just as the ocean levels dropped by 100 feet.

Just another in a long line of puzzling fossils for young-earth creationists

Sea turtle tracks are but one example of similar challenges that fossil footprints present to the flood geology hypotheses of young earth creationists (YECs). I have written about many of these in past posts such as:

• A Fossil Paradox? Footprints are Rarely Preserved in Stone and yet are very Common
• Fossil Footprints on Crete – First Evidence of Humans Killed by Noah’s Flood or Another Young-Earth Mystery?
• 2500 Year Old Human Footprints Discovered: Insight into the Formation of Fossil Footprints
• Preservation of Behavior – Fossilized Elephant Tracks from the Arabian Peninsula
• Human Fossil Footprints found below Ice Age Deposits
• The Age of Reptiles: A New Dinosaur Trackway Near Moab, UT
• Reconstructing the Past from Observations in the Present: A Practical Example from the Outer Banks
• Another Young-Earth Puzzle–Fossilized Moa Footprints in New Zealand

References:

First fossil trails of baby sea turtles found in South Africa  A summary article from The Conversation.

Lockley, Martin & Cawthra, Hayley & C. De Vynck, Jan & W. Helm, Charles & Mccrea, Richard & Nel, Ronel. (2019). New fossil sea turtle trackway morphotypes from the Pleistocene of South Africa highlight role of ichnology in turtle paleobiology. Quaternary Research. 1-15. 10.1017/qua.2019.40.

Footnotes:

Footnote 1: YECs and Fossil Footprints. Countless numbers of footprints made by hundreds of kinds of organisms are preserved in hundreds of individual layers of the geological column. Millions of these tracks have been identified from just the tiny fraction of rocks that are exposed at the surface of the Earth. But how were so many footprints preserved?

In innumerable Facebook comments and personal conversations I have had with young-earth adherents, I have been assured that footprints can’t be preserved as fossils—at least not by any process that occurs today. At an Answers in Genesis conference I attended, a speaker mocked the idea that footprints of dinosaurs could be preserved by conventional geological methods, pointing out that it would be silly to think that footprints on a beach or even muddy lake edge would last long enough to harden into rock and be preserved. Unfortunately, these speakers are usually not experts and are overgeneralizing to try to influence their geology-naïve audience. They create a “footprint problem” that doesn’t exist so that they can provide a “better” solution. This idea that footprints aren’t expected to be found in the fossil record is even promoted by the top YECs geologist, Dr. Snelling, at Answers in Genesis. Here he addresses dinosaur footprints:

Biblical geologists, on the other hand, say it is the conventional geologists who, in fact, face a dilemma. If geologic change takes place slowly, surely footprints made in mud would be obliterated by wind and rain long before the prints were covered by new sediments and hardened into rock.

Dr. Snelling is perfectly willing to allow his audience to believe that conventional geology has no explanation for fossilized footprints even though he knows that many footprints can be and are preserved under conditions that we observe today. He makes what sounds like an obvious point—who would deny that as you walk around you would have no expectation that your footprints will become “fossilized?” Dr. Snelling and other YEC speakers take this understanding about their audience, show long sets of dinosaur tracks and then ask, “How then could these have been preserved?” The answer, they say, is found in the Noahic global flood in which cataclysmic waves of sediments immediately covered the tracks of these animals preserving them in the rock record, even though they offer no specifics as to how this may occur.  By doubling-down on the difficulty of forming fossilized footprints, they unwittingly create a scenario in which footprints, like these, that are found in “post-Flood” rocks, become even more unlikely, and yet they exist!

YECs believe that special circumstances are required to explain footprints but since they believe that all, or nearly all, of them were produced in the span of one year during a flood, the huge number of prints contained in the rocks would require that a large percentage of all of the footprints made by animals running around trying to escape the flood had to be preserved. This is an extraordinarily optimistic scenario, which is not supported by the relatively slow pacing evident in most fossil trackways in things like impression depth, amount of contact between the ground and the foot, the seemingly random direction of the trackways and the amount and direction of material displaced with each step.

In the ancient earth scenario, only a few footprints of the millions made by a single individual of a population of millions of individuals need be preserved every thousand years or more to account for the observed footprints in rock. Even if only 0.000000001% of all footprints left by dinosaurs, mammals and humans were preserved, the geological record would contain billions of footprints. And it does!

Footnote 2: Human footprints are found in the same rock formation as these sea-turtles. Another reason why YECs would be hard-pressed to claim these sea turtle tracks are the product of global flood processes is that human footprints are found in the same rock formation as these sea turtles.  I know of no YECs claims that human footprints were formed during the Flood and thus they would propose these rock formations must have formed well after the Flood when humans had migrated from the Tower of Babel to the South African coast. 

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Editing provided by MC