The Fossil Record 61to the dilemma. The layers of rock with fossils of extinct animals represented a dark,
dangerous period before the Creation and flood of Genesis (the antediluvian period, Latin
for “before the flood”) not described in the Bible. God had created and destroyed these
earlier antediluvian worlds before the Genesis record begins. This solution was not too
heretical for the time; it allowed Cuvier to recognize that the rock record was full of fossils
of extinct organisms that could not have made it to Noah’s ark and that were certainly not
alive in his day.
Other geologists and paleontologists followed Cuvier’s lead and tried to describe each
layer with its distinctive fossils as evidence of yet another Creation and flood event not
mentioned in the Bible. In 1842, Alcide d’Orbigny began describing the Jurassic fossils from
the southwestern French Alps and soon recognized ten different stages, each of which he
interpreted as a separate nonbiblical creation and flood. As the work continued, it became
more and more complicated until 27 separate creations and floods were recognized, which
distorted the biblical account out of shape. By this time, European geologists finally began
to admit that the sequence of fossils was too long and complex to fit with Genesis at all.
They abandoned the attempt to reconcile the fossil sequence with the Bible. Remember,
these were devout men who did not doubt the Bible and were certainly not interested in
shuffling the sequence of fossils to prove Darwinian evolution (an idea still not published
at this point). They simply did not see how the Bible could explain the rock record as it was
then understood.
Instead of worrying about theology, geologists and paleontologists realized that faunal
succession was an extremely powerful tool that allowed them to date and correlate rocks all
over the world. The principle of faunal succession grew into the discipline of biostratigra-
phy, where the distribution of fossils in the different strata helps us determine their age (see
Prothero 2013a: chap. 10). Biostratigraphy, in turn, helps us map the distribution of rocks on
earth. It is the principal tool used by oil and coal geologists to date and correlate the rocks
they are drilling and exploring for valuable resources. Without biostratigraphy, we would
have no oil or gas, and our modern industrial age, dependent as it is on cheap petroleum,
would never have occurred.
As we saw with Smith and Cuvier, biostratigraphy does not require evolution or any
other theoretical explanation for why the fossils change through time. It simply deals with
the empirical fact that they do change. Biostratigraphic theory considers how to decipher
these patterns of fossil distribution and get the most reliable results and has little or no bio-
logical component at all. Indeed, many fossils that are valuable biostratigraphic time indi-
cators are actually treated as unusual objects of curious shapes, not like remains of extinct
organisms. If they were nonbiological objects such as nuts, bolts, and screws and changed
predictably through time, they would work just as well. The proof of this is that many of the
best fossils for biostratigraphy are poorly understood biologically (this includes most micro-
fossil groups) and the biological relationships of some important extinct organisms (such as
graptolites, conodonts, and acritarchs) were completely unknown for more than a century.
That didn’t stop them from being useful for biostratigraphy.
Of course, once the idea of evolution came along, it explained why fossils change through
time. But to recapitulate my main point, the succession of fossils through time was estab-
lished by devoutly Christian geologists decades before Darwin published his ideas about
evolution. There is no possibility of the alleged fraud of arranging fossils to prove evolution,
as creationists claim.