66 Evolution and the Fossil Record
In a supreme twist of irony, the disproof of flood geology is found just beneath the
Answers in Genesis creation “museum” in Kentucky. The museum is built upon the
famous Ordovician rocks of the Cincinnati Arch, which span millions of years of the later
Ordovician. If you poke around the slopes all around the area (as I often have), you will find
hundreds of finely laminated layers of shales and limestones, each full of delicate fossils of
trilobites and bryozoans and brachiopods preserved in life positions that could never have
been disturbed by floodwaters—and each layer of hundreds represents another community
of marine organisms that grew and lived and then was gently buried in fine silts and clays
(fig. 3.5). There is no possibility these hundreds of individual layers of delicately preserved
fossils were deposited in a single “Noah’s flood.” Over a century ago, paleontologists doc-
umented that these fossil communities change and evolve through time, so they can tell
FIGURE 3.5. The rocks of the Cincinnati Arch just beneath the “Creation Museum” debunk flood geology all
by themselves. In many cases, you can find layer after layer of marine fossils in life position, undisturbed and
buried by fine layers of mud, before another layer of organisms grew on the next layer, and so on. In these shots
from road cuts in northern Kentucky just a few miles from the museum, you can see huge fossil coral heads
in life position, each lying on a different layer of shallow seafloor mudstones. Each individual coral shows
many years of growth bands, proving that it was not brought there by a flood but grew for many years on this
shallow seafloor before it was finally buried. And there are many such examples, one layer after another. (A)
Broad overview of one road cut, showing coral heads growing in place in multiple levels. (B) Close up of two
large coral heads, showing their exposed growth bands, and also the fact that each grew on a different layer at
a different time, so they were not dumped there by a single flood event. (Photos by the author)
(A)(B)