A: An oft-repeated series of textbook illustrations shows a hypothetical animal dying alongside a stream. Before nature’s degradative influences have full sway, the stream overflows, burying the carcass in mud, protecting it from ruin. Over the years, the mud accumulates around the remains, and eventually the entire region subsides, allowing even greater thicknesses of lake bottom or ocean bottom mud to blanket the area, mineralizing the bones and consolidating the mud into rock. Eventually, the region rises again, and erosion exposes the now-fossilized remains.

This scenario would, no doubt, be applicable in rare cases, but it ignores significant advances in sedimentation theory made in recent decades. Geologists now recognize that most rock units are the result of widespread, high-intensity processes, accomplishing in minutes what has traditionally been attributed to slow and gradual processes.

A global Flood would have done what major floods do. Such a Flood would have eroded and dissolved both soil and rock. Fragments would have been transported and redeposited elsewhere as sediments full of dead plants and animals, the creatures that died in Noah’s Flood. Now we observe those sediments hardened into sedimentary rock layers, while the dead things have hardened into fossils.

Read the whole article from The New Answers Book 3 to see how the Bible’s history helps us understand the fossil record.

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