68 Evolution and the Fossil Record
the research I did in my doctoral dissertation. At the base of the sequence are marine fossils,
but right above them are the late Eocene fossils of the Chadron Formation, which include
many large and spectacular mammals, including the huge rhino-like brontotheres. Above
these in the overlying Brule Formation is a different assemblage of fossil mammals, none of
which look like they could have outrun the huge brontotheres. Many of these are rodents.
It’s hard to imagine them doing a better job at “scrambling for higher ground” than the big-
ger, longer-legged animals. The clincher, however, is the fact that the most abundant fossils
in the Brule Formation are tortoises! We have a new version of Aesop’s fable of the tortoise
and the hare, although here the dumb tortoises not only beat the hares to higher ground but
also nearly all the rest of the smarter, larger, longer-legged mammals as well. If there ever
was a clear-cut falsification of the flood geology model, this alone should be enough!
In addition to this stratigraphic fantasy world, Price and later flood geologists were
particularly obsessed with overthrusts, places on earth where older rocks are shoved on top
of younger ones along a fault plane. Price claimed that these overthrust faults were imagi-
nary. Because they put the fossils in the wrong order, evolutionists had to explain away this
anomaly by claiming that older rocks were thrust on top of younger rocks. Many creationists
have repeated this claim (often verbatim from Price). For example, Whitcomb and Morris
(1961:187) lifted the following partial quote from Ross and Rezak (1959) on the Lewis thrust
in Glacier National Park:
Most visitors, especially those who stay on the roads, get the impression that the Belt
[the oldest rocks, of Precambrian age] are undisturbed and lie almost as flat today as
they did when deposited in the sea which vanished so many million years ago.Whitcomb and Morris fail to give the rest of the citation, which reads,
Actually, they are folded, and in certain places, they are intensely so. From points on
and near the trails in the park, it is possible to observe places where the Belt series, as
revealed in the outcrops on ridges, cliffs, and canyon walls, are folded and crumpled
almost as intricately as the soft younger strata in the mountains south of the park and
in the Great Plains adjoining the park to the east.So much for the supposed evidence that the fossils were deposited out of order! If the cre-
ationists were at all interested in real geology, they would spend the time and effort to see the
rocks for themselves and realize that there is good independent evidence for the overthrust-
ing. At the very least, they should not resort to deceptive quoting out of context, when the
complete quotation clearly denies their claim.
In summary, the flood geology model constructed by Price and modified by Whitcomb
and Morris bears no relation to any actual sequence of rocks or fossils on earth but was
dreamed up to explain oversimplified cartoons. If these authors had any real experience with
rocks or fossils, they would never have considered the model remotely reasonable. Indeed,
religious geologists who have done their homework on fossils (as in the quotations from Clark
and Block above) admit that the flood geology model does nothing to explain the real fossil
record. Any consideration of a real sequence of fossils and rocks (such as the Big Badlands
or the Grand Canyon) immediately demolishes the notion that a single Noachian deluge can
account for the rock record and the actual sequence of fossils contained in those rocks.