Web Page Exclusive - February 1999

Why the Eggs and Footprints are Troubling

The Trouble With the Eggs

Geologists have traditionally held to the notion of uniformity. That is, they have said that rock layers were formed at the bottom of oceans or seas as sediment accumulated slowly, uniformly, over thousands or millions of years. Each year, they said, a tiny fraction of an inch of sediment solidifies into a thin layer. Biblical creationists, on the other hand, have always maintained that most of the fossils were formed during Noah's flood.

The dinosaur eggs in Patagonia (Argentina) were so quickly and deeply buried that the embryos inside the eggs were preserved. Even evolutionary geologists admit they must have been buried in a flood.

This isn't the only place where geologists have come to admit fossils were buried by a catastrophic event (a flood), rather than by slow uniformitarian processes. Although they don't admit that they were buried by The Flood, geologists find themselves in the uncomfortable position of saying that all the fossils all over the world were buried by local floods. Admitting that there is evidence of lots of floods all over the world is dangerously close to admitting that there is evidence of one big flood over the entire world.

We haven't actually seen the site where the eggs were found, but descriptions talk about it being difficult to walk or drive without crushing the eggs. This makes it seem that the eggs aren't jutting out from the face of a cliff. They apparently aren't in the wall of a canyon that was eroded by a river. They seem to be on a relatively flat (but not necessarily absolutely level) surface with few (or no) rock layers above them.

So, we immediately wonder, "Why aren't these eggs covered by a layer of Tertiary rocks laid down from 2 to 65 million years ago. And why isn't there a Quaternary layer of rock formed on top of that during the last 2 million years?" An evolutionist would probably argue that the location where these eggs were found is apparently fairly high up on the slopes of the Andes mountains. (The maps we have don't show the elevation.) Clearly the area was above sea level when the eggs were laid. The land probably remained so high that the eggs were never submerged by a shallow ocean during the Tertiary and Quaternary periods, so no sedimentary rocks formed over them. If that is so, how is it that after 100 million years the rocks containing the eggs weren't eroded away.

The Trouble With the Footprints

In 1978, Mary Leaky found some footprints at Laetoli, Tanzania. These footprints have been described in the February 1997 issue of National Geographic and the September 1998 issue of Scientific American. Nobody disputes that they are identical to modern human footprints. In fact, everyone would say that they were modern human footprints, except for the fact they are in rocks that evolutionists claim are 3.6 million years old. That is about 1.5 million years before Homo erectus is suppose to have evolved. Did ancient apes have fully human feet?

There are also the much more controversial footprints near Glen Rose, Texas. The presence of very human-tracks in rocks containing charcoal fragments that have been carbon-14 dated at just a few thousand years old is not unusual. The problem for evolutionists is that there are unmistakable dinosaur tracks in the very same rocks. In some places they overlap, showing that both sets of footprints were made at the same time. Evolutionists might accept human tracks that are 3.6 million years old, but they just won't accept human tracks that are more than 65 million years old.

Why Bring Up Trouble?

There are about as many explanations for the perfectly preserved dinosaur eggs and the footprints as there are experts. The experts will likely be arguing about them for years. Why did Palevitz and Lewis bring up controversial topics like these when trying to prove how unified scientists are in their understanding of evolution?

Go back to "Short Shrift to Evolution?"

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