Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004

Previous Claim: CH550   |   List of Claims   |   Next Claim: CH561.2

---

Claim CH561.1:

Source:

Response:

1. The fossil record does not show such a pattern of organisms sorted ecologically:
   • Many animals that appear in the lower strata appear in all strata, even recent ones. Corals and clams, for example, appear at all levels.
   • Whales do not appear until much later than fish, despite living in the same ecological zones.
   • Birds do not appear until after flying reptiles.
   • Dinosaurs consistently appear in strata before modern land animals.
   • Grasses live in virtually all land areas, but they appear in the geological record only near the top, long after other land animals and plants.
   
   
2. Even if ecological zonation could explain how deeply various faunal zones are buried, it does not explain how they came to be buried atop one another. How did a terrestial ecology come to be transported on top of a marine ecology, such that fine details such as footprints, burrows, and paleosols were undisturbed and such that the layer extends over hundreds of square miles? How did many such layers get stacked on top of each other? Ecological zonation implies that the ecological zones got buried in place. What we see is ecological zones forming and living for awhile on top of the fossils of older ecological zones, repeatedly.
   
   
3. Fossil strata often appear in orders that contradict ecological zonation (and other flood deposition explanations). For example, North American midcontinent outcrops record at least fifty-five cycles of marine inundation and withdrawal (Boardman and Heckel 1989; Heckel 1986). That is, marine ecologies are interleaved with terrestrial ecologies.

References: