News is starting to leak out about what appears to be the imminent announcement of new discoveries and analyses of the perplexing bones found deep in a cave in South Africa. In addition to providing a much younger date for the fossils than expected and the revelation that there is a second chamber with additional specimens,... Continue Reading →
Thousands of footprints preserved in a windswept eroded rock surface deep in an isolated desert region of the Arabian peninsula tell the story of an ancient herd of elephants walking across an ancient muddy landscape. These are possibly the longest continuous set of footprints in the world and have been described in an article in the journal,... Continue Reading →
Animal tracks preserved in stone are found in great abundance in many parts of the geological column. You might be asking yourself, aren't the chances incredibly small that any individual track made in mud would be preserved over long periods of time? You would be right. The vast majority of footprints won’t survive the ravages of... Continue Reading →
Billions of footprints are preserved in the rock record. While bones get all the attention, fossil footprints likely outnumber bones. How can we make sense of this observation? Surely, preserving a bone must be far more likely than preserving a footprint? I have written about how paleontologists use information from footprints and bones to reconstruct... Continue Reading →
Dinosaur tracks and eggshells are abundant findings within the geological column, capturing the attention of numerous dedicated paleontologists. Their relentless pursuit involves uncovering, studying, and interpreting these remnants of long-extinct creatures. However, is all this painstaking effort merely an illusion when considering the young-earth perspective? Could the majority of paleontological work be seen as fabricating... Continue Reading →
Are the existence of plant thorns and thistles proof that the world can only be a few thousand years old? Yes! according to most young-earth creationists. I've written several times about thorns and creation (eg. The Prelapsarian Acacia and the Good Creation: On the Origin of Thorns) but a video available at creationtoday.org - a small fringe young-earth... Continue Reading →
Every month seems to bring a report of a new fossil from the Jurassic or Cretaceous period rocks that show evidence of feathers. This deluge of new fossil finds will not end because there are as many fossils under preparation for publication as have already been published. Just considering the fossils already revealed to the public... Continue Reading →
What happens when a speaker gives a talk about dinosaurs but doesn't have any training in geology or paleontology? You could get a string of distortions of both of these fields of inquiry and even problems keeping facts straight. A few weeks ago I witnessed just such a talk when I attended an Answers in Genesis... Continue Reading →
The difference between what young earth creationists like to term "operational" or "observational" science and historical science doesn't have the sharp distinction they like to project to their audience. I was reminded of this recently when I had an opportunity to hear Tommy Mitchell speak at a local Answers in Genesis conference a few weeks ago. One particular talk was... Continue Reading →
John Ray, one of England's greatest 17th century natural theologians, spent much time pondering the meaning of fossils or "formed stones" as they were called then. I have shared some of his thoughts about fossils and Earth's history before (See: John Ray on Flood Geology: Words that Still Apply Today). In a correspondence with... Continue Reading →
At the bottom of an ancient lake in southwest Wyoming thousands of fish, plant leaves, and other animals were preserved with amazing detail. These fossils represent very different organisms than those found in other parts of Wyoming such as the fossil sites that we found this summer north-central Wyoming (Hiking through the Jurassic Period in Wyoming... Continue Reading →
The Ark Encounter in Kentucky is built on a foundation of trillions of fossils but when they built a new activity to allow visitors to find their own fossils they opted to give them assorted fossils from other places in the world. This was a missed educational opportunity. When I wrote about my visit to the... Continue Reading →
Young earth creationists greatly underestimate the fossil record when they tell their audiences that there are "billions of dead things buried in rock layers." The point, that there are huge numbers of fossils, is correct but billions is such an underwhelming number compared to the reality of the fossil record. The vastness of the fossil record was driven... Continue Reading →
This summer two of my sons and I took a hike through the Jurassic time period. Near Greybull, Wyoming is a long ridge called Sheep Mountain. Geologically speaking, Sheep Mountain is an anticline which is a type of folded bedrock that has an arch-like shape with its oldest rocks at its core. Because what are typically horizontal rock layers are here found tipped... Continue Reading →
Scattered across the upper surface of a hard layer of limestone in the badlands of the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming are the tell-tale signs of dinosaur activity: footprints. Over one thousand footprints have been identified here, most of them on one exposure of rock in a small gully in the Red Gulch region. On our family vacation this... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 