64 Evolution and the Fossil Record
shells of marine invertebrates and fishes in the lower levels, followed by more advanced
animals such as amphibians, reptiles (including dinosaurs) fleeing to intermediate levels,
and finally the “smart mammals” would climb to the highest levels to escape the rising
floodwaters before they were buried.
The first time a professional geologist or paleontologist reads this weird scenario, they
cannot help but be amazed at its naiveté. Price, Whitcomb, and Morris apparently never
spent any time collecting fossils or rocks. What their model is trying to explain is a cartoon,
an oversimplication drawn for kiddie books—not any real stratigraphic sequence of fossils
documented in science. Those simplistic diagrams with the invertebrates at the bottom, the
dinosaurs in the middle, and the mammals on top bear no resemblance to any local sequence
on earth. In fact, those oversimplified cartoons show only the first appearance of invertebrates,
dinosaurs, and mammals, not their order of fossilization in the rock record (since inverte-
brates are obviously still with us and are found in all strata from the bottom to the top; see
page 1). This diagram is an abstraction based on the complex three-dimensional pattern of
rocks from all over the world. In a few extraordinary places, such as William Smith’s Eng-
land, or the Grand Canyon, Zion, and Bryce National Parks in Utah and Arizona, we have a
fairly continuous sequence of a long stretch of geologic time (fig. 3.4), so we know the true
order in which rocks and fossils stack one on top of another. But even in that sequence, we
have “dumb” marine ammonites, clams, and snails from the Cretaceous Mancos Shale found
on top of “smarter, faster” amphibians and reptiles (including dinosaurs) from the Triassic
and Jurassic Moenkopi, Chinle, Kayenta, and Navajo Formations.
Just to the north, in the Utah-Wyoming border region, the middle Eocene Green River
Shale yields famous fish fossils quarried by commercial collectors for almost a century. The
Green River Shale produces fossils of not only freshwater fish but also freshwater clams and
snails, frogs, crocodiles, birds, and land plants. The rocks are finely laminated shale diag-
nostic of deposition in quiet water over thousands of years, with fossil mudcracks and salts
formed by complete evaporation of the water. These fossils and sediments are all characteris-
tic of a lake deposit that occasionally dried up, not a giant flood. These Green River fish fos-
sils lie above the famous dinosaur-bearing beds of the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation in
places such as Dinosaur National Monument and above many of the mammal-bearing beds
of the lower Eocene Wasatch Formation as well, so once again the fish and invertebrates are
found above the supposedly smarter and faster dinosaurs and mammals.
If you think hard about it, why should we expect that marine invertebrates or fish would
drown at all? They are, after all, adapted to marine waters, and many are highly mobile
when the sediment is shifting. As Stephen Jay Gould put it,
Surely, somewhere, at least one courageous trilobite would have paddled on valiantly
(as its colleagues succumbed) and won a place in the upper strata. Surely, on some
primordial beach, a man would have suffered a heart attack and been washed into
the lower strata before intelligence had a chance to plot a temporary escape. . . . No
trilobite lies in the upper strata because they all perished 225 million years ago. No
man keeps lithified company with a dinosaur, because we were still 60 million years
in the future when the last dinosaur perished. (Gould 1984:132)In addition to the examples just given, there are hundreds of other places in the world where
the “dumb invertebrates” that supposedly drowned in the initial stages of the rising flood