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LiveScience: “Petrified Animals Died Quickly” A team examining a fossil deposit in the Canadian Rockies has determined that the fossil “bonanza” was buried by a rapid, muddy “miracle of preservation.”
The team, from the University of Leicester, was looking at the Burgess Shale graveyard, where petrified bodies have been found with even soft tissue preserved. Scientists have found the remains of worms, eyes, and internal organs among the fossils at the site. But since the fossils were discovered in 1909, paleontologists have wondered what allowed such extensive preservation.
The rock layers were probably the result of the mud slurry that buried the unsuspecting creatures at the bottom of the site.
The researchers—geologist Jan Zalasiewicz and paleontologist Sarah Gabbott—concluded that the deposit was created by a rapid mud slurry that covered the bodies so completely that whole bodies were petrified. They also found that the rock layers were probably the result of the mud slurry that buried the unsuspecting creatures at the bottom of the site, which the scientists believe was then a sea bed.
Zalasiewicz explains that the mud slurry would have carried the creatures below the level at which scavengers or even most bacteria could have reached the corpses, with later mudslides (perhaps caused by earthquakes) burying the fossils even deeper.
Zalasiewicz also noted that the fossils are from “early in the history of complex multi-cellular life” and references the enigma of the Cambrian explosion, when, according to the evolutionary interpretation of the fossil record, life “very suddenly” became complex and diverse—still a mystery, as Zalasiewicz calls it, to Darwinists.
Evolutionists now have an explanation for why these fossils are so well-preserved—but it’s the same explanation creationists have had for thousands of years! The Flood model explains, in general, how a watery deluge combined heavy rain with subterranean water activity—and substantial geological and volcanic activity—that reshaped the physical world. From this model, we understand how catastrophic forces (including mud slurries) account for nearly all of the fossils we uncover today and explain the origin of geologic features (canyons, rock layers, etc.).
Those who accept millions of years continue to resort to a local catastrophe here, a local catastrophe there; a mud slide here, a flood there. Biblical creationists see this as triggered by the global Flood of Noah’s age—a Flood documented in civilizations around the world.
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