>Fascinating stuff, I might have to do some more reading on this paticular
>deposit. Let me throw in one more complicating factor. Is it not these
>very deposits that also record whole "nests" of eggs found intact with
>possibly at least one case of a crouched dinosaur skeleton over them? If
>that is so it is probably this fact that most puzzles me in a global flood
>context.
This is an example of an issue that has bothered me about trying to
attribute much of the geologic column to the Flood. How does a
catastrophic flood simultaneously produce drastic, widespread damage and at
the same time account for delicate preservation of whole fossils? A
subaqueous debris flow hauling huge pebbles over a large area should damage
the fossils and mix in aquatic fossils and finer-grained, non-eolian
sediment.
In its least scientific forms, the Flood is a magical means of
explaining anything that doesn't seem to fit a young-earth model. In Huse's
Collapse of Evolution, it even explains a few things that did not need
explaining. He claims that animals are often fossilized in an attitude of
terror, in reference to the sagging of the jaw and backwards bend in the
neck that normally occur after death. Likewise, the lack of branches on
many fossil logs needs no violent flood to explain them. Any piece of the
trunk from between the roots and the first branches will not have branches
[and, with less human interference, trees would generally be tall]. Also,
a log lying on the forest floor today often lacks branches because they are
smaller and decay first. Finally, branches may break in the process of
trying to extract the fossil.
David C.