The Great Creationist Fossil Failure

Well, I gave a link for the information about the Cretaceous fauna. For the rest, you know, you can just look up terror birds or giant ground sloths or whatever on Wikipedia and see that yes, they are found in South America, and giraffids in Africa, and so on.

But easy to falsify it, as I did in my O.P. How did he measure the motion of the water?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

An honest Christian flat-Earther knows the Bible is God's own inspired word. Nothing can change that. What CAN change is the various theories we come up with to reconcile geological and geographical facts with the Biblical revelation. It turns out that there are many ways to do that for many questions, even if a lot remains unanswered. It is not "honest" to give up on the Bible if you are a believer. It may never be possible to answer all the questions, of course, and some hypotheses will have to be modified or given up, but there are plenty that have been answered, and the only hitch is that spherothink is so entrenched most of our opponents can't even understand the answers, and can't see the absurdities of their own theories.

... and since you said that there were "a billion or so" of them, one has to admire his dedication.Austin himself claims to have measured 71 of them, but his results do not seem to be available on the internet.

Yes, that would indeed be nice.At present there are an estimated quarter of a million known fossil species, and of course many of these are represented by more than one fossil. So that would be quite a big job.

Since Faith wants to talk about the fossils of the Redwall Limestone, let's connect them to the topic. Let's have a little look at the Redwall fauna.There are crinoids such as Teleiocrinus, Agaricocrinus, Platycrinites --- but no modern crinoid genera.There are foraminifera such as Endothyra and Eomillerella --- but no modern foram genera.There are corals such as Michelinia, Ekvasophyllum, Lithostrotion, Dorlodotia, Zaphrenites --- but no modern coral genera. So tabulate and rugose corals are found in the Redwall but not in the present, whereas stony corals, which are found in the present, are entirely absent from the Redwall.There are gastropods such as Straparollus, Rhineoderma, Baylea, and Loxonema --- but no modern gastropod genera.There are cephalopods such as Poterioceras and Triboloceras --- but no modern cephalopod genera.There are blastoids --- an extinct type of stemmed echinoderm. These include Cryptoblastus, Orophocrinus, Lophoblastus, Globoblastus, and Pentremites. But there are no more modern types of echinoderm such as sand dollars.There are trilobites --- extinct crustaceans. But no crustacean types of more modern origin, such as lobsters.So the raging waters of the Flood managed to somehow sort into one place a bunch of species which weren't going to make it to the present day, putting them together despite their disparities in size and shape, while carefully abjuring those in the same classes which would --- carefully picking out just those corals, those crinoids, those crustaceans which weren't going to make the cut.The Flood was not only clever enough to do that, it managed to avoid depositing any land animals in the Redwall Limestone. Or, indeed, any sea creatures later than the Paleozoic: no ichthyosaurs, or plesiosaurs, or whales, or teleost fish ...In short, it produced exactly what Those Evil Godless Paleontologists expect to see in an in situ assemblage of marine Carboniferous fauna. Which is strange, because, as we all know, there was no such thing as the Carboniferous Period --- was there?

Your explanation is evolution?Welcome aboard, I guess. Except that you wish to cram 300 million years of evolution into four thousand years? No, Faith, not even the same genera. Or family, or order ... tabular and rugose corals, for example, are different orders in the class of corals. Trilobites and lobsters are different subphyla in the phylum of arthropods. Are you going to tell me that lobsters evolved from trilobites in four thousand years? Have you ever looked at a lobster and a trilobite? Why do land animals and the larger sea creatures come higher in the geological column? That's a large part of what this thread is about, your explanation can't involve just assuming that this is just the sort of thing that happens. Really? If you're told by Evil Godless Scientists that they've dated rocks to the Carboniferous, creationists would expect those rocks to contain no trace of a lobster? On what grounds is that expectation formed? How do you get from belief in a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis --- to a relationship between radioactive decay and malacostrians?You can't, can you? No, what you need are two more pieces of information: first, that the same Evil Godless Scientists say that lobsters didn't evolve 'til the Cretaceous; and second, that the fossil record always looks as though the Evil Godless Scientists are right. Then you can start expecting that there'll be no lobsters in these so-called "Carboniferous" rocks. Without those additional data points, you could form no expectations at all about which rocks would contain lobsters.

I think that's a reasonable interpretation, though. No-one would read the Book of Genesis and think it meant that all the fish drowned.

So why, then, are you explaining lobsters (for example) as creatures that "came later"? There are fossil lobsters. Ergo, there were lobsters living at the time of the Flood, along with the trilobites. So why are they never found in the same fossil beds?

Did you understand post #77?

But these modern living creatures are also very similar to dead fossil creatures, which would have lived in the Flood. But these, living and dead, are markedly different from the fauna of the Carboniferous.Let's try it again.We have fossils of trilobites and lobsters --- both arthropods, both living (you would say) at the time of the Flood.We have fossils of blastoids and sand-dollars --- both living (you would say) at the time of the Flood.We have fossils of rugose coral and stony coral --- both living (you would say) at the time of the Flood.And somehow, the flood waters managed to sort the trilobites, the blastoids and the rugose corals together, distinguishing them from the lobsters, the sand-dollars, and the stony corals. How? How did the Flood never ever get muddled and put a lobster alongside a rugose coral, or a sand-dollar in the same bed as a trilobite? How did this inanimate water sloshing around conspire with radioactive decay to construct the illusion of the Carboniferous?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

How did the Flood manage to strictly segregate (for example) Carboniferous and Cretaceous fossils, contriving without a single error to sort fauna according to the false illusory time-scheme that exits only in the fevered imaginations of scientists?Why do we never get a lobster and a trilobite in the same bed? Or a stony and a rugose coral? Or a sand-dollar with a blastoid? Or any of the former with any of the latter?Here is a fossil of a lobster with a teleost fish. Why am I never, ever, ever going to see a trilobite with a teleost fish? Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I do.Now, until YECs can come up with something that even vaguely approximates an explanation for why the fossils of the Redwall Limestone are in perfect accordance with real geology, with evolution, and with an old Earth, perhaps they should stop touting them (or, to be precise, fewer than six dozen of them) as evidence for "flood geology".

... which you can't think of.So the score is one entire fossil record to real geology, zero entire fossil records to flood geology.

Come on now. It's not an illusion that we find (for example) trilobites and blastoids and rugose corals in rocks dated to the Carboniferous, and lobsters and sand-dollars and stony corals in rocks dated to the Paleogene. Paleontologists are not merely looking at the rocks and hallucinating. There is order in the fossil record, and it is incumbent on you to explain it.Now, when a paleontologist says to me: I found an assemblage of marine fauna, and when I look at the lead and uranium content of zircons found above those strata, I make such-and-such measurements --- then I can confidently say: then it will contain no lobsters, no tabulate corals, no rugose corals, no teleost fish, no ichthyosaurs, no whales ... and I will be right every time.The only way you can predict such a thing is by accepting as a brute fact that the fossil record will always conform to the predictions made by old-Earth evolutionists using their much-despised methods of radiometric dating. You cannot predict it from the book of Genesis, but only from the empirical fact that the fossil record always looks as though the evos are right.Will you admit that this is in fact a point to us?