In the discussion of the origins of polystrate petrified forests found Yellowstone National Park, Morris (1995) used the tree-ring research of Arct (1991) to argue that the fossil trees were all contemporaneous and, thus, can't represent the growth of successive forests periodically buried by volcanic debris flows. There is a web page, "
Specimen Creek fossil trees grew at the same time From the EvoWiki - RationalWiki." that briefly describes the flaws with the arguments and interpretations of Arct (1991) and discredits his conclusions.
An additional flaw with Arct's interpretations is that the alleged matches come from a limited vertical range within the Lamar River Formation, which contains the Yellowstone Petrified Forests. Direct observation of the latest eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, and eruptions within Central America, where equivalent and greater thicknesses of identical sediments have accumulated during a single eruption, show that these sediments could have very easily accumulated as the result of a single volcanic eruption. As a result, even if the trees were contemporaneous, it the interval of sediment containing the trees studied by Arct (1991) could have accumulated as the result of a single, normal volcanic event and there isn't any need to postulate an extra-ordinary catastrophe for its deposition.
References Cited:
Arct, Michael J., 1991, Dendrochronology in the
Fossil Forests of the Specimen Creek Area
Yellowstone National Park. Ph.D. dissertation,
Loma Linda University,Loma Linda, CA, 268 pp.
Morris, John D., 1995, the Yellowstone Petrified
Forests. Impacts no. 268. Institute for
Creation Research, Santee, California.
Other web pages of ineterest are:
MacRae, Andrew, 1994. Yellowstone National Park (U.S.) Fossil Forests.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/yellowstone.html
Claim CC332.1: Specimen Creek in the Yellowstone Petrified Forest ( Arct )
CC332.1: Specimen Creek Fossil Forest
Fossil Forests and the Flood
http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/forests.htm
Bill Birkeland
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