Countless billions of plant and animal fossils are found in extensive “graveyards” where they had to be buried rapidly on a massive scale. Often the fine details of the creatures are exquisitely preserved.
For example, billions of straight-shelled, chambered nautiloids (figure 2) are found fossilized with other marine creatures in a 7 foot (2 m) thick layer within the Redwall Limestone of Grand Canyon (figure 1).1 This fossil graveyard stretches for 180 miles (290 km) across northern Arizona and into southern Nevada, covering an area of at least 10,500 square miles (30,000 km2). These squid-like fossils are all different sizes, from small, young nautiloids to their bigger, older relatives.
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To form such a vast fossil graveyard required 24 cubic miles (100 km3) of lime sand and silt, flowing in a thick, soup-like slurry at more than 16 feet (5 m) per second (more than 11 mph [18 km/h]) to catastrophically overwhelm and bury this huge, living population of nautiloids.
Hundreds of thousands of marine creatures were buried with amphibians, spiders, scorpions, millipedes, insects, and reptiles in a fossil graveyard at Montceau-les-Mines, France.2 More than 100,000 fossil specimens, representing more than 400 species, have been recovered from a shale layer associated with coal beds in the Mazon Creek area near Chicago.3 This spectacular fossil graveyard includes ferns, insects, scorpions, and tetrapods buried with jellyfish, mollusks, crustaceans, and fish, often with soft parts exquisitely preserved.
At Florissant, Colorado, a wide variety of insects, freshwater mollusks, fish, birds, and several hundred plant species (including nuts and blossoms) are buried together.4 Bees and birds have to be buried rapidly in order to be so well preserved.
Alligator, fish (including sunfish, deep sea bass, chubs, pickerel, herring, and garpike 3–7 feet [1–2 m] long), birds, turtles, mammals, mollusks, crustaceans, many varieties of insects, and palm leaves (7–9 feet [2–2.5 m] long) were buried together in the vast Green River Formation of Wyoming.5
Notice in many of these examples how marine and land-dwelling creatures are found buried together. How could this have happened unless the ocean waters rose and swept over the continents in a global, catastrophic Flood?
