From A Storehouse of Knowledge

A fossil is the preserved remains, impression, or trace of a once-living organism.

Contents 1 Types of fossils 1.1 Skeletal remains 1.2 Entire organisms 1.3 Plants 1.4 Coprolites 1.5 Footprints 1.6 Amber fossils 2 Lagerstätten 2.1 Conditions for formation 2.2 Bitter Springs 2.3 Burgess Shale 2.4 Redwall Limestone 2.5 Montceau-les-Mines 2.6 Mazon Creek 2.7 Florissant 2.8 Green River Formation 2.9 La Brea Tar Pits 3 Index fossils 4 Fossil succession 4.1 Geological range and order of taxonomic groups 4.2 Reworking 4.3 Interpretation 4.3.1 Flood geology 4.3.2 Secular geology 5 See also 6 References

Types of fossils

Skeletal remains

Perhaps the best-known types of fossils are those that are the skeletal remains of creatures. In many cases the organic material has been mineralised, although unmineralised or partly mineralised bones are known.

Some fossils are "articulated", which means that the bones are in the same positions relative to each other as they would be when the creature was alive, whilst others are "disarticulated", which means that they are jumbled up.

Entire organisms

Sometimes the fossil shows the outline of the entire organism, and scales, skin, hair, and/or feather impressions can be made out.

Even creatures without skeletons have been preserved, such as jellyfish. This is contrary to Darwin's prediction that "No organism wholly soft can be preserved".

Plants

Plant fossils include tree trunks, leaves, and pollen.

Coal is the fossilised remains of plant material, and although individual plants are not always identifiable, in other cases parts of plants can be identified in the coal.

Coprolites

Coprolites are fossilised faeces, or droppings. They provide information about dietary habits, which sets them apart from other fossils which provide information about morphology, or shape.

Footprints

Footprints of various creatures have been found in rock layers. These include footprints of humans, dinosaurs, and other creatures.

Amber fossils

Amber is fossilised tree resin which is often found to have remains of other living things, such as insects, trapped in it, exquisitely preserved.

Lagerstätten

Conditions for formation

Because exceptional conditions are required for the preservation of fossils, they are not distributed uniformly in the rocks. Sites with an exceptional number of fossil organisms or exceptionally well preserved specimens are known as lagerstätten, from the German word for storage place. Such formations occur throughout the world and throughout the geological record from the Pre-Cambrian to the Pleistocene. The vast majority of fossils are buried in sedimentary rock, and most sedimentary rock is laid down by water.

A number of factors can contribute to either a large number of fossils at one site or an exceptional preservation of detail. The remains of most organisms do not become fossils but disintegrate through the action of various agents from scavengers to bacteria to chemical reactions. Hard parts like bones and shells are more easily preserved, but even that is rare. Fish, for example, normally float to the surface when they die, where they can be eaten by scavengers or rot, so that fish fossils, if they form at all, are often only formed from the disjointed bones that eventually sink. Therefore one of the most important requirements is that the remains be removed from the biosphere quickly enough. For bone, woody plants, and shells, it is sometimes sufficient that the isolation occurs after many years, although shells must also be preserved from too violent motion. For soft body parts and delicate plants, the isolation would have to be faster, perhaps within days. Darwin believed that "No organism wholly soft can be preserved",^[1] yet many fossils of soft-bodied creatures such as jellyfish have been found, for example as flattened carbonaceous films, pyritized in a process involving sulfur and iron, or as casts.

The simplest process is burial, for example in a slide, either on land or under water, or in sediment carried by the waters of a river or flood, but sinking into an anoxic or toxic environment is another possibility. Examples of the latter are the brines thought responsible for the fossils in the Solnhofen Limestone,^[2][3] the tars of the La Brea Tar Pits, and the acidic and anaerobic waters of the sphagnum bogs in Northern Europe. Once decay has been dramatically slowed by the toxic environment, burial and fossilization can proceed at a more moderate pace.

Bitter Springs

Bitter Springs in Central Australia is a formation classified as Pre-Cambrian (radiometric age 850 to 1000 million years) and contains no fossils of multi-cellular organisms, but thirty species of microfossils, mostly cyanobacteria but also eukaryotes. There are also many stromatolites produced by these organisms.

Burgess Shale

One of the most famous fossil sites is the Burgess Shale, located in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia. It is classified as middle Cambrian (radiometric age 505 million years), and it preserves many imprints of soft animal parts, often in exceptional detail. The quality of preservation is apparently the result of rapid burial and very little subsequent disturbance (bioturbation) by burrowing animals. Many of the fossils show signs of decay before burial, and bioturbation is not completely absent.

Creationists believe that these sediments were laid down during the Flood of Noah and see the unusually good preservation as being indicative of this.

Secular geologists are still debating the details but currently favor the hypothesis that the animals were buried by mud-silt "slurry flows".

Redwall Limestone

The Redwall Limestone (310-355 million years old, according to secular geologists, dated by the fossils found in it,^[4] although in places it directly overlies the supposedly 510-570-million-year-old Muav limestone without any evidence of the missing 155 million years) is probably the most prominent rock layer in the Grand Canyon as it usually forms a sheer cliff around 150 m492.126 feet
164.042 yards
328.084 cubits
7.456 chains high, separating the upper and lower regions of the Canyon. The lateral extent of the formation is some 300 km. Numerous marine fossils can be found, and one two-meter6.562 feet
78.74 inches
200 cm high section contains billions of fossilised nautiloids.

Creationary scientists Steven Austin and Kurt Wise analyzed the size distribution and orientation of 76 nautiloids in one 330 m² exposure. As they reported at a conference, they concluded that the animals were rapidly buried alive on the flank of a building hydrothermal mound.^[5][6]

Over most of the formation, neither a steep slope nor scour features are found. Secular geologists would expect these features if the deposits resulted from turbidite flow. The limestone in the formation is also of a type that secular geologists believe is only formed in calm seas. They therefore conclude that the animals died and sank to the sea floor, where they accumulated over time.

Montceau-les-Mines

Montceau-les-Mines is a Carboniferous (radiometric age 300 million years) lagerstätte in France containing fossils of marine creatures as well as amphibians, spiders, scorpions, millipedes, insects, and reptiles. It also shows impressions of raindrops and mud cracks, thought by secular geologists to indicate a dry, sun-baked surface. The presence of marine creatures, if they are found in the same layers, would not fit with either raindrop impressions or mud cracks. The presence of terrestrial creatures with the marine creatures suggests that the former were washed into the sea by a river or flood.

Mazon Creek

Another Carboniferous (radiometric age 300 million years) fossil bed is Mazon Creek in Illinois (USA). As at Montceau-les-Mines, a variety of marine and terrestrial plants and animals are preserved here. Secular scientists think that the area at the time the organisms lived and died was mixture of swampy lowlands and shallow marine bays, similar to southern Louisiana today. The rivers washed dead land animals from the swamplands into the bay to be mixed with the marine animals there. The sediments carried by the river provided rapid burial of the dead organisms, and the preservation was enhanced by the formation of ironstone out of the high concentration of iron in the groundwater and the carbon dioxide from the decaying organisms.

Florissant

The fossil bed at Florissant, Colorado (USA) is notable for well preserved fossils of bees and birds, together with freshwater mollusks and fish. The animals were all rapidly buried by the airborne ashfall from volcanic eruptions.

Green River Formation

In United States there is a very large fossil bed from the Eocene (radiometric age 50 million years) known as the Green River Formation, which extends over parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming and consists of three separate basin areas. The formation contains fossils of many different fresh-water animals, including fish, mollusks, and crustaceans. Around the edges of the basins are also fossils of land animals and plants. Several fossil species are found in one basin but not in the others.

Some of the deposits are nearly 800 m thick. The deepest layers do not contain any fish fossils at all, and a large majority of fossils are fragmentary, but there are some complete, well-preserved skeletons. The best preserved fossils come from two distinct layers of very fine-grained lime muds in one of the basins, in an area known as Fossil Lake. One of these layers is 1.8 m thick, the other is 46 cm thick.

Creationists interpret the excellent preservation of some of the fossils to be the result of rapid burial during Noah's Flood.^[7]

Secular geologists, in contrast, conclude from a number of indications,^[8] including millions of fine layers (varves), that the formation took several million years to form. During much of this time, the climate must have been subtropical and constant, as evidenced, for example, by fossils of crocodiles. Secular geologists think that the episodes of extremely good preservation of fossils must have been associated with cold, wet spells lasting a few thousand years. The cold would have prevented dead fish from floating and being exposed to surface scavengers, and the deep water would have resulted in anoxic conditions and inhibited bottom scavengers. The combinined influences would have allowed time for slow burial of the remains.^[9] They see this hypothesis supported by evidence of a complicated history in which the shapes and volumes of the lakes were changed due to tectonics, sedimentary depositions, and changes in both drainage and climate.^[10]

La Brea Tar Pits

One of the most recent sites with many well preserved fossils is the La Brea Tar Pits in downtown Los Angeles. Asphalt or tar has been seeping out of the ground here for thousands of years. A wide variety of animals, many now extinct, have wandered into the tar, perhaps mistaking it for a pond when it was covered with water, become stuck, and died. Their bones sank into the tar, which preserved them until today. Many of the animals are carnivores which were presumably attacking herbivores or other carnivores that had previously become trapped.

Index fossils

Index fossils (also known as guide fossils, indicator fossils or zone fossils) are fossils used by secular geologists to define and identify geologic layers. Their use is based on the observation that certain fossils, if they are present in the geologic column at any location, follow the same, predictable order (apart from fossils that are considered "reworked"; see section Reworking below). The conventional understanding is that this order is the result of the slow evolution of species coupled with the slow deposition of sediments. The fossilized species in any layer will be those that were alive during that particular period of geological history.

By contrast, the creationary view is that the limited distribution of particular fossil species and their order relative to other fossil species is the result of factors affecting the time during the Flood at which they died and the time they required to sink to the bottom. Such factors might include the ecological zones in which they lived and the hydrological characteristics of their bodies. For example, the lower rock formations would generally be expected to contain bottom-dwelling marine creatures, as these would be among the first creatures buried. Swimming creatures, land creatures and plants, and birds would be buried later in the flood. Hydraulic sorting would tend to separate different types of creatures, and bury similar ones together.

Not all fossils are useful as index fossils, and some fossils are more useful than others. The best are those that are distinctive, abundant, and have a wide geographic distribution but a short range in the geological column. The existence of index fossils was recognized, and they were used to define the geographic strata, long before radiometric dating was used to provide an absolute time scale. Ammonites are considered a good choice and have been widely used as index fossils, but corals, graptolites, brachiopods, trilobites, and echinoids (sea urchins) are also important. For example,

• Trilobites are very common in strata from the Paleozoic to the upper Permian (radiometric age from 540 to 248 million years), but are not found in lower or higher levels.
• Ammonites are common in Mesozoic deposits (radiometric age from 245 to 65 million years), but are not found above the K-T boundary.
• Graptolites are widespread colonial marine hemichordates found in rocks from the Cambrian period to the early- to mid-Carboniferous (radiometric age from 540 to 320 million years).

Observation of variations within these large groups are believed to permit a finer division of the strata. While large fossils are easier to identify in the field, they are also rarer and thus do not enable precise correlations and are more likely to require adjustments in the range. Better in that sense are nanofossils, including radiolarians and foraminifera, which are microscopic but very abundant throughout the world and throughout the geologic column. Furthermore, they exist in many distinguishable forms, each one of which is found to exist only in a relatively thin layer of the geologic column.

An index fossil that is thought to be especially well characterized might be chosen by international agreement to define a boundary in the geological column. In fact most of the roughly 100 Global Boundary Stratotype Sections and Points (GSSPs) are defined by different stages of animal life, and in almost cases that animal is a marine invertebrate. GSSPs are selected by the International Commission on Stratigraphy based on multiple factors, including the degree to which they are representative of the same boundary on sections worldwide.

A key criterion of index fossils is that they be found only in limited ranges. However, there are problems with this requirement.

First, it is not uncommon that new finds are outside the previously known range, leading to an extension of the known range. One example where this involved an index fossil is Lystrosaurus, several species of mammal-like reptiles found throughout the world but most abundantly in South Africa. In Early Triassic formations Lystrosaurus fossils are unusually common, making up 95% of the individuals in some fossil beds. The abundance, easy identification, and apparent restriction to the Triassic led to their use as a stratigraphical marker indicating an early Triassic age for the horizons in which they were found. This changed in the 1990s when a specimen of Lystrosaurus was found in formations considered to be Late Permian.^[11][12] Concerning the stratigraphical use of Lystrosaurus, the original authors concluded,

The occurrence of Lystrosaurus in Late Permian rocks indicates that isolated specimens of the genus should no longer be used for biostratigraphical purposes. Unless other Triassic genera were to be found with the Late Permian ones, it remailns reasonable to use an assemblage of genera, of which Lystrosaurus is part, to correlate lowermost Triassic rocks, but use of Lystrosaurus alone could be misleading."

The current situation, based on a 2007 study of 189 Lystrosaurus specimens in South Africa,^[13] is that one species (L. maccaigi) is found only below the horizon of what is known as the "Permian–Triassic extinction event", a second species (L. curvatus) straddles the horizon, and two species (L. murrayi and L. declivis) are only found above it:

We suggest that L. maccaigi may be used as a biostratigraphic marker to indicate latest Permian strata in South Africa and that, in support of previous proposals, the genus Lystrosaurus should not be used as a sole indicator of Triassic-aged strata. Our field data also show that L. curvatus may be regarded as a biostratigraphic indicator of the P–T boundary interval.

Adjustments of ranges are not always extensions: reclassifications of existing finds sometimes lead to decreases in the estimated range.

A second problem is the tendency to give separate species names to fossils simply because they occur in different formations. For example, Nucha naucum is a sponge found in New South Wales, in a formation classified as Middle Cambrian. But when an almost-identical sponge was found on Vancouver Island in British Columbia in a formation classified as Upper Triassic, it was given a different name: Nucha? vancouverensis sp. nov..^[14]

Because of these sorts of problems with index fossils, some creationists call the whole idea of index fossils into question.^[14][15][12]

Fossil succession

Geologists have correlated layers of rock around the world, mainly by means of the fossils they contain. The deepest rocks with fossils of multicelluar organisms are known as Cambrian. All the rocks from the Cambrian up can be divided into 12 layers known as "systems". Measurements of radioactive isotopes and decay products in these rocks follow largely consistent patterns, although there are many exceptions which don't fit the general pattern. Under the assumptions used by secular geologists, such as the rates of radioactive decay having always had their present values, these measurements can be converted into radiometric ages of the rocks. However, as these assumption are contrary to a biblical worldview and they contradict the Biblical chronology, the dates cannot be considered accurate, but they can still be useful, not only to make a connection to secular natural history, but also to provide a measure of the relative depth of the various layers that is easy for non-experts to understand.

Geological range and order of taxonomic groups

There is indisputably a great deal of order in the fossil record.^[16][17] The fossils of organisms belonging to a given species or larger group will often be found no deeper than a certain system and no higher than another system. The following table shows the lowest system in which fossils of various groups of animals and plants have been found. Fossils from each group are found in all higher levels up to the top.

Animals and plants found as fossils up to the highest rock layers and also living today

system	radiometric age at bottom (Ma)	extant animals first appearing	extant plants first appearing
Cambrian	542	animals with shells, fishes
Ordovician	488		land plants
Silurian	444
Devonian	416	insects, amphibians	club mosses, horsetail rushes, ferns
Carboniferous	359	reptiles	pines
Permian	299		ginkos
Triassic	251	nautilus, oysters, flies, mammals
Jurassic	200	birds
Cretaceous	146	bees	flowering plants, mangroves
Paleogene	66	dolphins
Neogene	23	moas
Quarternary	2.6	humans

The records of some other groups and species are confined to limited, but contiguous, systems, and are not found today. According to mainstream scientists, on a species and genera level, this is the most common situation. "[N]early all fossil species and genera are extinct today. Very few modem (sic) species or genera are found as fossils at all."^[18] However, this assumes the accuracy of the species identification—how do the scientists really know if a fossil is of the same or a different species as a living organism, when interfertility cannot be tested—and since Simpson made this comment, many species have been eliminated as it was found that different researchers gave different names to different specimens that are now considered to be the same species.

Animals and plants found only as fossils in deeper rock layers

system	radiometric age at bottom (Ma)	extinct animals found	extinct plants found
Cambrian	542	trilobites
Ordovician	488	trilobites
Silurian	444	trilobites
Devonian	416	trilobites, ammonites	archaeopteris
Carboniferous	359	trilobites, ammonites	archaeopteris, annularia
Permian	299	trilobites, ammonites
Triassic	251	ammonites, pterosaurs, ichthyosauria	cheirolepidiaceae
Jurassic	200	ammonites, pterosaurs, ichthyosauria	cheirolepidiaceae
Cretaceous	146	ammonites, pterosaurs, ichthyosauria	cheirolepidiaceae
Paleogene	66		Pinus peregrinus, Hymenaea protera
Neogene	23
Quarternary	2.6

A few species are found in supposedly older rocks, missing from supposedly younger rocks, but are still alive today. In some cases palaeontologists conclude that the species are sufficiently different to be a different species ("Elvis taxon"), although being unable to test interfertility, this is often a matter of opinion, and palaeontologists are likely to give a different species name to organisms that they believe, on the basis of evolutionary thinking, to likely be different, even where the differences are minor. In other cases the gap in the fossil record is genuine. Such a case is referred to as "Lazarus taxon" (or colloquially, with some ambiguity, as a "living fossil"). Some of these would formerly have been in the previous table as "now extinct", until living specimens were found.

Animals and plants found as fossils in deeper rock layers and also living today (Lazarus taxa)

system	radiometric age at bottom (Ma)	animals found	plants found
Cambrian	542	monoplacophora[19] (a deep-sea mollusk)
Ordovician	488	monoplacophora[19]
Silurian	444	monoplacophora[19]
Devonian	416	monoplacophora[19], coelacanth (a lobe-finned fish)
Carboniferous	359	coelacanth[20]
Permian	299	coelacanth[20]
Triassic	251	coelacanth[20]
Jurassic	200	coelacanth[20]
Cretaceous	146	coelacanth[20]	Metasequoia
Paleogene	66	Lazarussuchus	Metasequoia
Neogene	23	Lazarussuchus (a small, amphibious reptile), Laotian rock rat, Monito del Monte (a small marsupial), Gracilidris (an ant)	Metasequoia, Nightcap Oak
Quarternary	2.6

The table above probably includes most of the Lazarus taxa discovered in the last century. It is probably no accident that all of the animals in the list except coelacanth are small. The two most dramatic examples, monoplacophora and coelacanth, are also deep sea dwelling, which may decrease both the chance of burial before destruction and the chance discovery by paleontologists.

These examples barely scratch the surface of the regularities and relationships in the fossil record, but they should serve to illuminate the nature of fossil succession, as well as showing that fossils not being found in particular layers does not mean that the plants or animals didn't exist at that time.

Reworking

A number of factors can confuse the fossil record. For example, fossils can be eroded out of the original rocks and "reworked" into systems higher in the geologic column.^[21] Much more rarely small fossils can contaminate deeper systems by falling into cracks. In either case there might be independent evidence that allows the reworked fossils to be clearly distinguished from the indigenous ones,^{[22] [23][24]} but in many other cases reworking is simply assumed because the fossils are not where evolution says they should be.^[25][26]

Distinguishing reworked from contemporaneous material is not impossible in the case of early Tertiary reworking of Cretaceous faunas. Many Cretaceous terrestrial and marine taxa became extinct prior to the Tertiary...^[24]

There are hundreds of published instances of anomalously occurring fossils,^[27] and although this is a very small fraction of the hundreds of millions of fossils that have been catalogued^[28], they point to the unfalsifiability of determining the correct age of fossils^[29], and pose a considerable problem for biostratigraphers.^[26]

Microscopic fossils like pollen are particularly susceptible to reworking because their small size enables them to penetrate even small cracks and crevises, and also reduces the chance that excessive wear of the fossils will point to reworking. There are, however, a number of criteria that can help identify contamination by relatively recent pollen.^[30]

• Pollen is generally clear or very light yellow when fresh, but turns darker with age.
• Fresh pollen is round, but pollen indigenous to sedimentary rock will usually be flattened by the same processes that produced rock from the sediments.
• It is usually assumed that if rocks were heated to a high temperatue, for example, by nearby vulcanism, then ancient pollen would not survive. This assumption was challenged by a 2007 report of fossil plant spores in metamorphic rocks.^[31]

Interpretation

A problem for evolutionists and creationists alike is how to interpret the fossil record. In neither case do the arrangement of fossils fit neatly into the respective explanations.

Flood geology

In the paradigm of the Great Flood as described in the Bible, all "kinds" of terrestrial and marine animals and plants were living on the Earth when the Flood came. All the terrestrial vertebrates not on the Ark and many marine animals and most plants died during the Flood. Their remains were either destroyed or buried in the huge deposits laid down during the Flood year. These deposits account for a large fraction of the geologic column. A task for Flood Geology is to explain the observed fossil succession as a result of the Flood. Flood geologists have proposed a number of factors that would work together to give the order that is observed. The most important of these are ecological zonation, hydrological sorting, and differential escape.

One of the main factors is ecological zonation, the idea that the organisms living in certain habitats will be buried by the Flood in an order that reflects where they lived. Typically, it is suggested that bottom dwelling marine animals will be buried first, followed by free swimming fish, followed by shore dwelling amphibians and reptiles, followed by mammals and birds. This scenario accounts for some of the gross ordering, but a lot of details are troublesome. For example, insects and amphibians are found two systems deeper than any oysters, and pines (which often grow at high elevation) are found 4 systems lower than mangroves (which always grow on the coast), at least according to the standard interpretation of those fossils.

The idea behind hydrological or hydrodynamic sorting is that the organisms that died in the Flood would be buried in different places, along with the sediments themselves, according to various properties of the organisms. This properties, like size, shape, and buoyancy, will affect how fast the organisms sink or how they are swept along and deposited in moving water. Those that settle faster will later be found in deeper layers of rocks than those that settle more slowly. In fact, every system except perhaps the lowest are found to contain a variety of small and large organisms (from insects to large herbivores and predators), a variety of dense and light organisms} (like bottom dwelling shell fish as opposed to trees), so that hydrological sorting does not seem to have been a very effective mechanism.

The third major proposed sorting mechanism is differential escape, that is, that certain animals will be found in higher strata because they were better able to flee and did not succumb to the Flood as quickly. Again, this idea is intended to account for some of the major features of fossil succession, but has difficulty in accounting for others. It could explain, for example, why human fossils are generally only found in the highest layers, as humans would have the greatest ability to survive the longest.^[32] On the other hand, it is generally agreed that velociraptors were good runners, and yet all their fossils are found at lower levels of the geologic column than those of slow animals like sloths. Flightless birds like the moas are not found in the lowest systems, but only in the very highest.

One way to illustrate the difficulty of understanding fossil succession in the Flood paradigm is to consider organisms that are very similar but whose fossils are found in different systems. Ichthyosaurs and dolphins, for example, are both air-breathing marine animals. Their bodies are streamlined and balanced for swimming, and they are of similar size. There appears to be no significant differences between the two species in terms of hydrological properties, ecological niche, or ability to flee, and yet every ichthyosaur fossil has been found in deeper rock systems than every dolphin fossil. Similarly, there are both flowering and non-flowering plants with every possible combination of hydrodynamic properties and habitats (and plants have no ability to flee). The model discussed here would predict that plants are found deeper or higher based on some external properties, but in fact they are sorted by whether or not they have flowers. There are seven systems with fossils of land plants below the lowest system containing fossils of flowering plants. In addition, the various parts of each plant species, for example trunks, leaves, and pollen, are found together in the same rocks, rather than, say, the pollen of all species being near the bottom or mixed throughout the geological column.^[33]

Secular geology

In the paradigm of Darwinian evolution, fossils are the imperfect record left by continually changing life forms over many millions of years. The basic elements are that sediments are deposited in some regions for long periods of time and during additional long periods are changed to rocks, that species are not immutable but arise from other species, exist for a long time, and then either go extinct or evolve into other species, and that, occasionally, under special circumstances, the remains of some of the organisms living at a given place and time are preserved in the sediments being laid down at the same place and time.

Not surprisingly, the criticisms of the evolutionary paradigm concentrate on the imperfection of the fossil record. Those imperfections are of two kinds. One is the gaps in the record, that is, transitional forms that must have existed according to the theory of evolution but for which no evidence has been found. The other is "out of place" fossils, that is, fossil species that, according to the theory, must have lived at one time, being found in rocks that must have formed at a different time.

According to Darwinism, creatures slowly (over millions of years) and gradually changed into completely different types of creatures. If this is is correct, then many creatures must have existed that were in "transition" from one type of creature to another, so-called "transitional forms". Charles Darwin himself recognized that this abundance of forms is not found in the fossil record and proposed that the reason lies in its imperfection, the explanation that secular geologists have agreed upon ever since.

Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.— Charles DarwinChapter X: On the Imperfection of the Geological Record; On the Absence of Intermediate Varieties at the Present Day, in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859)

The nature of that imperfection is believed to be very complex. It is not so that every organism has, for example, one chance in a million of being preserved by a fossils. The view of secular geologists is that conditions that produce any fossils at all are rare, but when the conditions are right, many individuals living at that place and time might leave a record. Furthermore, some types of organisms are more readily preserved than others. Finally, many paleontologists believe that evolution does not proceed as smoothly as Darwin imagined, but rather as "punctuated equilibrium", which would further decrease the fraction of the fossils showing transitional forms.

Creationists explain the absence of transitional forms with two effects. The first is that plants and animals were created as disjoint kinds, so that transitions between the kinds never existed. The second is that, although a good deal of speciation probably occurred between Creation and the Flood, and since the Flood, essentially the whole fossil record reflects only the plants and animals that were alive at the time of the Flood. Any transitional forms leading up to these will not have been fossilized, nor will any transitional forms that have lived since then. The forms which have been found with intermediate characteristics are explained as simply the use by God of a common design in several organisms.

As has already been discussed above under Reworking, out-of-place fossils are not uncommon. There are a number of plausible mechanisms by which the remains of an organism might appear in a different layer than that corresponding to the time when it lived, and there are many cases where there is independent evidence corroborating that displacement, so some number of out-of-place fossils must be expected. The issue is whether the number is large enough, as creationists believe, to call the entire narrative of evolution into question.

In the creationist model, there is no trouble imagining any number of processes during the Flood that would lead to stray fossils in arbitrary positions, so there is nothing here that needs explaining.

See also

• Transitional form

References