Footprints in the Coconino Sandstone are attributed to animals making
tracks on damp sand dunes in a desert. However, they appear to have been
made underwater instead. Leonard Brand compared the Coconino footprints
with footprints made by actual reptiles under various conditions, and the
Coconino footprints best matched the footprints made underwater.
Source:
Brand, Leonard R., 1978. Footprints in the Grand Canyon.
Origins 5(2):64-82. http://www.grisda.org/origins/05064.htm Brand, Leonard R. and Thu Tang, 1991. Fossil vertebrate footprints in
the
Coconino Sandstone (Permian) of northern Arizona: Evidence for underwater
origin. Geology 19(12): 1201-1204.
Snelling, Andrew A. and Steven A. Austin, 1992. Grand Canyon: Startling
evidence for Noah's Flood! Creation Ex Nihilo 15(1): 47.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/docs/v15n1_grandcanyon.asp
Response:
The evidence for footprints being made underwater comes from rather
ambiguous statistical studies, but is contradicted by evidence (Lockley
1992; Lockley and Hunt 1995; Loope 1992), including the following:
"One of the most common observations is that the tracks have bulges
or sand crescents on one side, thereby proving that they were made
on inclined surfaces" (Lockley and Hunt 1995).
Tracks showing possible loping, running, and galloping gaits are
found throughout the Coconino Sandstone. These can only have been
made on dry land.
Tracks of small arthropods, attributable to spiders, centipedes,
millipedes, and scorpions, occur abundantly in the Coconino
Sandstone. (Schur [2000] has some excellent pictures.) Some of
these trackways can only be made on completely dry sand.
Raindrop impressions also appear.
The Coconino Sandstone covers an area of 200,000 square miles.
Snelling and Austin (1992) proposed that thousands of cubic miles of
sand were transported from hundreds of miles north. Forces violent
enough to transport the sand would have killed any animals that got in
the way. There would have been nothing alive within a hundred miles of
where the footprints were found.
Brand himself, in the conclusion to one of his papers, wrote that: "The
data do suggest that the Coconino Sandstone fossil trackways may have
been produced in either subaqueous sand or subaerial damp sand" (1996).
So Brand's own work, taken at face value, does not necessarily indicate
that the footprints were made underwater.
Brand, Leonard R., 1996. Variations in salamander trackways resulting
from substrate differences. Journal of Paleontology 70(6):
1004-1011.
Lockley, M. G., 1992. Comment and reply on "Fossil vertebrate
footprints in the Coconino Sandstone (Permian) of northern Arizona:
Evidence for underwater origin" Geology 20(7): 666-667.
Lockley, M. and A. P. Hunt, 1995. Dinosaur Tracks and
Other Fossil Footprints of the Western United States. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Loope, D. B., 1992. Comment and reply on "Fossil vertebrate footprints
in the Coconino Sandstone (Permian) of northern Arizona: Evidence for
underwater origin" Geology 20(7): 667-668.
