The fossil record is crucially important to evolutionists because, as Darwin immediately realized, it is the one and only possible source of the information required to validate his theory according to the requirements of the scientific method. [Ed: It’s a good idea to know a bit about fossilology, G-Man, in case some evolutionists get you in a corner and try to duff you up.]

The Origin of Some Geological Terms
Any encyclopaedia or geology text book will show a diagram of the “Geological Column”, the notional series of rock strata that supposedly span the history of the earth, from “Pre-Cambrian” times up to the present. The concept is apparently attributed to Charles Lyell, whom we met earlier.

Many of the strata or layers of rock depicted, identified by particular fossils they contained, were originally named after the locations in which early geologists identified them – Cambrian, for example, coming from the Roman name of Wales, and Devonian strata (the Age of Fishes and Ferns—including armoured fish) having first been recognized in Devon. The Cretaceous strata, however, as illustrated by the white cliffs of Dover and composed mostly of micro shell fossils, were named, because of their composition, from the Latin for “chalk”.

The Cambrian and Silurian (named after an ancient Welsh tribe) strata were identified by Roderick Murchison about 1835 and traced through various parts of England and Wales on the basis of the fossils they contained, links sometimes also being made on the basis of banding patterns in the sediments.

This technique, called “bio-stratigraphy” was apparently taught to Murchison by engineer and canal builder William “Strata” Smith, who had used ammonite fossils to correlate Mesozoic outcrops and excavations in various locations. Although not interested in publishing his ideas, Smith was happy to discuss them with other members of the “Geological Society of London”.

Notice that the geological column is notional and does not exist in its entirety anywhere on earth. Be aware also that, according to standard geology theory, the formation of each new and younger set of strata necessarily required the destruction and recycling of earlier strata and their fossil content – implying immense potential complexity and confusion.

That said, however, there need have been no destruction and recycling of older strata if all the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic formations were laid down in one massive, world-wide catastrophe which sorted the marine creatures into the lower strata and the larger, land-dwelling ones in the higher. Additional material would of course have been required to form the more recent Cenozoic formations.

The Geological Column
Although geology theory, for the most part, is conceptually relatively simple, its practice is made extremely difficult by the horrendous complexity of the puzzling observations it attempts to interpret. Such complexity is perhaps to be expected if, as already noted, most of the rock higher up the “Geological Column” was formed, as geologists suggest, by recycling and modifying materials eroded away from already existing fossil-bearing rocks lower down. [Ed: But what if little green men from Mars shipped all the extra rocky stuff for the Cenozoic in from outer space by Fedex, G-Man? ]

In some parts of the world, rather oddly, including Scotland, Pre-Cambrian formations, supposedly composed of the most ancient rocks of all, now lie exposed on the very surface of the Earth. Likewise, Cambrian formations lie exposed over much of North Wales. In “Man, Time and Fossils”, Ruth Moore describes how the remains of dinosaurs that supposedly died out 65 millions years ago in the Mesozoic era were also found lying exposed on the earth’s surface, this time on the western prairies by early American settlers.

The column is intended to illustrate a pattern of evolutionary development, and strata are fitted into the scheme on the basis of their fossil content – with mostly marine creatures at the bottom, extinct land creatures in the middle, and “modern” organisms on the top.

Stratigraphy and Index Fossils
Although the techniques used to identify and date rock strata are not difficult to understand, their practical application can be very difficult, and a book I have to hand, for example, lists some 500 types or rock and mineral, each with its own unique physical and chemical properties.

As already noted, fossil content is the important factor in identifying and correlating strata in different locations – which is why strata with the same fossil content may be composed of totally different rock material in different locations.

As an illustration of the use of “index fossils”, the start of the Devonian period is now defined by the first appearance of fossils of the grapolite “Monograptus uniform”. No marker is suggested for the “end” of the period.

Although sedimentary rocks are dated by their index fossil content, based in turn on questionable assumptions as to their age, rocks of volcanic origin can be dated by radiometric methods, as we shall discuss later.

Unconformities
By carefully comparing strata in many parts of the world, geologists have now worked out a notional time sequence for the geological column - the fossil distribution of which is supposed to demonstrate evolution from simple sea creatures, all the way up to the land animals and birds of the present day. The reasoning proceeds along the lines that if stratum A is above B here, but B is above C over there, then the sequence must be A,B,C.

Simple as the picture appears, there are problems and complications – for example, in situations where strata identified by their fossil content as being “younger”, e.g. type “A”, are found lying underneath “older” strata, e.g. type “C”. Such “unconformities”, are neatly explained away by the strata all having been flipped over by a massive earth movement – or by an “overthrust”, where a block of strata has been lifted up, thrust sideways, and plonked down somewhere else, thus depositing its older lower strata on the top of younger surface ones. In this manner, observations that contradict the evolutionary story are explained away or quietly ignored.

Creationist Explanation of Stratationa Form
Creationists, however, who claim that most strata were formed by Noah’s Flood, explain the fossil record by pointing out that currents of moving water can sift and sort flora and fauna on the basis of their density – so that in a massive swirling and subsiding deluge the denser organisms such as shell fish would be deposited first and so appear in the lower strata, and would already be under water anyway. The gases produced inside rotting dead bodies of larger creatures could also explain why their remains might be more buoyant for a time and so appear in so-called younger, overlying strata – a complex situation, but one greatly simplified by Lyell’s uniformitarianism assumptions.

A Key Fact
Regardless of these complexities, the key fact to remember with regard to the geological column is that geologists all agree that the very earliest strata are the Cambrian and the Pre-Cambrian that underlie them. Evolution therefore requires that the fossils found in these strata should be of the very simplest prototype organisms. However, as Darwin realized, and as we have discussed, the Cambrian organisms, such as Trilobites, that abounded there were massively complex.

How Fossils Form
The remains of most dead plants and animals simply perish due to the diligent work of teams of scavenging organisms. Fly maggots, for example, will do their job of burrowing and opening up the flesh for the entry of other organisms and oxygen, a complex and thorough operation. As a result, most plants and animals usually never leave a fossil trace behind when they die, or if they do, just the hard parts such as shell and bone. A dead cat buried in the garden, would probably disappear without trace after ten years. [Ed: Is that why the Church of England permits a burial plot to be re-used after 25 years, G-Man?]

As a result, the fossil record is, even now, relatively meagre – and since the organisms most likely to be fossilized are sea creatures with solid shells, that record presents a seriously distorted picture of the flora and fauna of any particular time, compounded numerically by the fact that some marine organisms, such as the trilobites, apparently grew and discarded several shells during their lifetime. The burial and fossilisation of organisms on the sea bed is favoured by the accumulation of sediments which fall continuously like fine snow,

For land organism to be fossilized, some kind of catastrophe or accident is probably required in order to bury and preserve their remains. Little wonder that 99% of the fossil record consists of marine organisms, with coal beds being the prime source of plant fossils.

Notice that although the fossil record is comparatively meagre, as Darwin claimed, it still does not support his claim that the overwhelmingly vast majority of fossils should be those of “missing links”, imperfect and failed forms.

Whole Body Fossils
The hundreds of woolly mammoth remains found in the frozen wastes of Siberia are interesting example of a whole-body fossils, which are not really fossils at all, but organism that perished in circumstances that actually preserved their flesh and bone and protected them from the assiduous attentions of the scavengers, maggots and bacteria that would normally consume them – events such as floods, mudslides and volcanic ash and scalding water, and at La Brea in Los Angeles by becoming trapped in tar pits.

Bizarrely, some creatures were killed so quickly that their final postures were also preserved – for example, a fish swallowing a smaller one, a marine creature giving birth, and even, one source claims, a mating mammoth with its long male member still in a state of erection. A small Siberian mammoth was found with the grass and buttercups, remnants of its last meal, still in its mouth.

Most fossils are actually mineralised copies of the organism structure, sometimes both external and internal – created by a process of petrifaction in which organic tissues are replaced by elements such as calcium and magnesium. Usually, the finer the sediment that bury an organism, the finer the detail of the resulting fossil, which is why the flying reptile Archaeopteryx is known to have had feathered wings.

Anomalous Fossils
Sometimes the “index fossils” used to “date” rock strata are found in the “wrong” strata, perhaps accompanied by fossils that are supposedly much older or younger on the notional evolutionary chart of descent. These are classed as being “anomalous”.
A Google search using the key words “anomalous fossils” will throw up all manner of discoveries that fly in the face of orthodoxy, such as iron axe heads encased in rock supposedly hundreds of millions of years old, and artefacts constructed from alloys only quite recently invented

Polystrate Fossils
Another casually dismissed problem is that of “polystrate” fossils mentioned earlier, such as petrified tree trunks that pierce several coal seams and the rock strata sandwiched between them, each of which apparently took millions of years to form by repeated ingressions and egressions of the sea.

Polystrate fossils are common in coal beds and were recognized as a “mystery” by geologists over a hundred years ago. The orthodox explanation is that a tree took root in a marsh, then died and stood there without rotting for hundreds of years and actually assisted the formation of further coal seams by helping entangle floating mats of vegetation around it when the area was flooded again.

As already mentioned, uniformitarianism does allow for relatively rapid acting local floods and changes to occur and for the formation of several seams of coal to take place in just a few hundred years, rather than millions.

A study websites devoted to such palaeontological problems soon confirms the sheer complexity and the speculative nature of the subject.

The Coelacanth
Add to that the netting by fisherman in 1938 off the coast of South Africa of a specimen of the supposedly extinct Coelacanth fish. Previous to that amazing discovery, the presence of a Coelacanth fossil, an established “index fossil” for the Devonian age, was taken as reliable evidence that the stratum containing it was about 70 millions years old.

Since that time, however, hundreds more specimens have been netted, some of them about four feet long, somewhat bigger than the ancient version.. It is reported that in 1986, German biologist Hans Fricke studied these strange creatures at great depth using a miniature submarine – and discovered that they are equipped to swim in all directions, including backwards and upside down.

Coupling this discovery with that by Japanese fishermen of what appeared to be a 10 metre long Pleisosaur kind of creature, a Loch Ness Monster look-alike, one wonders how many more apparetnly “extinct” organism remain to make their re-appearance.

Pre-Flood Creatures
Some of extinct creatures, such as the woolly mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, were evidently variants on still-extant “kinds” of animals and probably lived in the pre-Flood world that lasted from Adam to Noah. In reading about strange and exotic creatures from the past, it should be born in mind that mutation to giant forms has always been a possibility, as it even demonstrated in a garden todday by dwarf and tall pea and bean plants and even dogs.

The mammoth, with its woolly coat, and no doubt other internal adaptations, would seem to provide an excellent illustrations of Hough’s suspicion that organisms, or at least populations of organisms, can actually sense their environment and respond to its needs in a creative manner, rather than waiting in hope over millions of years for the accumulation of accidental DNA copying errors to somehow save it.

Mass Extinctions
Cunningly exploiting the fact that many exotic creatures that once existed, including 99% of all species, now no longer exist, “genealogical tables” have been concocted supposedly illustrating how “simple” sea creatures must have evolved their fins into legs to become land creatures, some of them then somehow sprouted wings and learned to fly.

As we shall see a little later, however, most of the fossil record is totally irrelevant anyway to the discussion at hand – since, with the exception of some most recent additions, it simply represents the flora and fauna of a pre-Adamic age - ancient organisms did not disappear because they evolved into modern organisms, but because, as geologists now assure us, they were destroyed, like the dinosaurs, by a series of mysterious but massive cataclysms that befell the earth – as clearly evidenced by the state of the moon’s surface, and that of each other planet that NASA gets a closer look at.

As a result, according to G-Theory, the so-called “creation week” was a week of restoration of an earth from which all life had been erased by a massive catastrophe that also left it flooded and in total darkness – a condition described in the Hebrew account as “tohu” and “bohu”, without form and void, shapeless and empty.