Fossil tracks and nests

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Fossil tracks

In an earlier article we saw that the Lower Palaeozoic period (Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian) was a time when the ocean waters swept over the continents. (See: ‘Earth′s catastrophic history’)

So if this was true we would expect to find no footprint evidence of living land animals in that Lower Palaeozoic period, but there should be plenty of footprint evidence after that.

The diagram below shows the order of the periods – the youngest at the top:

There are no vertebrate tracks in the thousands of metres of sediments which form the Lower Palaeozoic period.

The first tracks to appear are those of the Amphibians in the Devonian and Carboniferous periods.

Then amphibians, reptiles and mammal-like reptiles in the Permian.

In the Triassic there are tracks of reptiles and dinosaurs.

Then some mammals and birds, along with amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs in the rest of the Mesozoic.

Lastly in the Cenozoic, there are tracks of amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals .

This distribution of tracks reinforces the view of catastrophic flooding in the Lower Palaeozoic period.

This left behind the massive erosion surface, known as the Great Unconformity.

Then as the waters went down, the amphibians and reptiles that were able to survive the violent flooding, left their tracks as they came up onto the land.

Virtually all the land creatures perished and therefore they didn′t appear in the fossil record until later when they had increased in numbers and had began to repopulate the earth.

The appearance of the fossil tracks is acceptable with this line of thought, if the Mesozoic and Cenozoic are taken as being laid down over about a 200 year period. [1]

Dinosaur nests:

Dinosaur nests are found in the Mesozoic. (See the diagram above).

They increase in numbers of eggs and nests, with the largest concentration occurring in the Upper Cretaceous sediments.

Again this fits with the view of the flooding in the Lower Palaeozoic period, where the dinosaurs would have taken time to repopulate after this catastrophic event.

As they began to increase, then the numbers of dinosaur nests would obviously increase.

References:

Thanks to Paul Garner for his lecture delivered at the autumn meeting of The Genesis Agendum at Baden-Powell House, London on Saturday, 30 November 1996.
[1] Adapted from: Garton, M (1996), The pattern of fossil tracks in the geological record, Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 10, 82-100

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Explaining the fossil record