Did animals escape to higher ground?

The idea that the order in which terrestrial animals were fossilised reflects the order in which they succumbed to rising Flood waters was first proposed by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris in The Genesis Flood, ¹ a book that made a huge impact amongst American evangelicals and is still regarded by most creationists as their founding document. These writers argued that the flood described in Genesis chapters 7-8 was an inundation of universal extent, of proportions that must have affected the geological record profoundly, and if one were to look for geological evidence of it one would find that evidence, rightly interpreted, from the Cambrian all the way up to the higher parts of the Cenozoic. Virtually all plants and animals fossilised in the rocks of the earth must have been buried during the inundation.

The question was therefore how to re-interpret the fossil sequence which geologists outside the biblical framework saw as reflecting the gradual evolution of all life from a single ancestor over billions of years. Whitcomb and Morris gave, in essence, a two-fold answer, one part attempting to undermine the validity of the sequence itself, the other offering a diluvialist interpretation of the sequence insofar as it was valid. In this article we concentrate on the second part.

The interpretation consists of the following elements (quotations abridged):

1. ‘It is frequently found that the lowermost strata are those containing the simpler organisms, usually marine organisms. These marine creatures were, as would be expected, deposited first and deepest in the Deluge sediments. Two factors combine to make this a general, though by no means inviolable, rule. The sea-bottoms, both deep and shallow seas, would have been first affected by the breaking-up of the fountains of the great deep. It is not until the Permo-Carboniferous is reached, well up in the geologic column, that the first land animals are encountered.’
2. ‘The other factor tending to ensure the deposition of the simple marine organisms in the deepest strata is the hydrodynamic selectivity of moving water for particles of similar sizes and shapes. The organisms in the lowest strata are very “streamlined” and quite dense. These factors alone would exert a highly selective sorting action, tending to deposit the simpler (i.e. more nearly spherical and undifferentiated) organisms nearer the bottom of the sediments [and build up] distinct faunal stratigraphic “horizons” with the complexity of structure of the deposited organisms increasing with increasing elevation.’
3. ‘It is reasonable also to expect that vertebrates would be found higher in the geologic column than the first invertebrates. Vertebrates in general possess much greater mobility. The simplest vertebrates, the ostracoderms, are first found, and only sparingly then, in Ordovician strata. Fishes are found in profusion in the Devonian, often in great sedimentary “graveyards”, indicating violent deposition, and often in fresh-water deposits. The whole aspect of the fossil fish beds bespeaks violent burial in rapidly moving deltaic sediments, vast quantities of sediment entering the ancient lakes or seas of the areas and overwhelming and burying aquatic creatures by the hundreds of thousands.’
4. ‘In other localities, and perhaps somewhat later, land animals and plants would be expected to be caught in the sediments. Of course there would be many exceptions, as currents would be intermingling from all directions, particularly as the lands became increasingly submerged and more and more amphibians, reptiles and mammals were overtaken by the waters. In general, though, beds would tend to be deposited in just the order ascribed to them in the standard geologic column. That is, on top of the beds of marine vertebrates would be found amphibians, then reptiles and finally birds and mammals. This is in the order: (1) of increasing mobility and therefore increasing ability to postpone inundation, (2) of decreasing density and other hydrodynamic factors tending to promote earlier sedimentation, and (3) of increasing elevation of habitat and therefore time required for the Flood to attain stages sufficient to overtake them. The Permo-Carboniferous rocks are those in which continental and oceanic sediments began to meet and commingle on a large scale.’
5. ‘The Tertiary Period is popularly known as the age of mammals. They can once again be most easily explained in terms of greater mobility of the larger, stronger animals, and therefore their generally greater ability to retreat from the rising floodwaters and escape being caught in the swollen streams rushing downward from the hills.’

The explanation, then, was one which visualised the world before the Flood as consisting of various ecological zones, the location of which would determine where, geographically and stratigraphically, animals would be buried. The Flood began with the release of waters into the oceans from underneath the oceans. As a result of these upheavals, oceanic life was buried first. Then terrestrial life at the margins of the continents was overwhelmed. Finally, as the waters rose higher and higher, animals far inland perished, even those that escaped to the mountains. Their drowned bodies collected in valleys and lakes, or were washed out to sea. Hydrodynamic sorting and mobility would affect the order in which marine animals were buried; habitat and mobility would affect the order in which terrestrial animals were buried.

This understanding continues to be widespread amongst creationists. In his book Origin by Design Harold Coffin presents the same picture:

In addition to ecological zones as the reason for the stratigraphic sequence of fossils, we must consider other factors. Animals that could walk would likely try to escape rising water by fleeing to higher ground. That would put creatures from lower zones into higher elevations. ²

Andrew Snelling, former editor of Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal and now a staff member of the Institute for Creation Research, explains:

In the so-called Palaeozoic strata there is a preponderance of marine creatures, beginning with trilobites, corals, sea anemones, shellfish of all types, etc. This is what we would predict, given that the Flood waters carried sediments from the land out to the sea, where they would then be deposited, burying many of the relatively immobile seafloor-dwelling creatures, followed later by … burial of fish. ³

The present editors of the journal continue to promote this explanation. So do most other creationist organisations. For example, the Institute for Creation Research interprets the Grand Canyon along the following lines:

• Precambrian up to the Chuar Group = pre-Flood oceanic crust
• Cambrian = increasing oceanic waters reach the continental margins
• Permian (Coconino Sandstone) = waters 100 feet deep – Flood at its height
• Triassic onwards = Flood waters decreasing⁴
• Tertiary onwards = Post-Flood⁵

According to Kurt Wise, the horizontal sequence of Precambrian fossils in California east towards Grand Canyon reflects a spectrum of marine ecosystems along the pre-Flood continental shelf, from a stromatolitic reef environment on the edge of the shelf to an environment with organisms characteristic of the Palaeozoic nearshore.⁶ As the Flood waters increased, they swept inland and produced the 1,500-metre-high sequence of strata we see in Grand Canyon today. In other parts of North America, for example where there are coals, the order of both first appearance and maximum abundance of plants and animals can be explained by the concept of the ‘pre-Flood floating forest’ – an ecological zone visualised as located between the ocean and the continental margin.⁷

While the designation of Tertiary rocks as post-Flood marks a significant departure from Whitcomb-and-Morris orthodoxy and some workers, such as Austin, Wise and Snelling, accept the order of rocks and fossils presented in the geological column as broadly correct,⁸ the fundamental ideas continue to be those of The Genesis Flood . Namely:

• Today’s continents are roughly where the pre-Flood continents were located.
• The Flood began with the breaking-up of the fountains of the deep, located in the oceans.
• The continents were flooded through the rising of the oceans, pouring in from all sides until even their interiors were inundated.
• The deposits of the Carboniferous and Permian (where the postulated ‘floating forests’ are fossilised) are those in which terrestrial and oceanic sediments began to meet.

If it is not clear how to interpret the fossils in Grand Canyon, this is because ‘it is not clear whether the order of appearance of organisms in Grand Canyon, or anywhere on Earth, is different than a random order which a flood might produce’.⁹

A theory, or ‘model’, nonetheless, is only as good as the evidence which supports it. Appealing though it may be to the imagination, imaginative appeal is no guarantee that it is true. In this article we consider the fossil evidence.

Whitcomb & Morris’s predictions

The writings sampled above supply the reader with a series of expectations about what the fossil record should reveal if there had been a global flood, and assure him that the record fully agrees with those expectations. The occurrence of marine creatures is ‘as would be expected’. ‘It is reasonable also to expect that vertebrates would be found higher in the geologic column.’ Fauna ‘would tend to be deposited in just the order that has been ascribed to them’ – marine vertebrates, then amphibians, then reptiles, finally birds and mammals. ‘A preponderance of marine creatures, beginning with trilobites, corals, sea anemones, shellfish of all types, etc… is what we would predict.’

Since a theory is either confirmed or falsified by the predictions it makes, and this theory is potentially of great consequence, we ought to examine its predictions (so-called, for of course they have the advantage of hindsight). In his book Scientific Creationism Morris lists fourteen, based, he claims, on the recognition that the Flood was a cataclysmic event of extraordinary power and violence.¹⁰ In order to keep the discussion manageable, we shall examine eight of the fourteen.

Throughout the record, fossil assemblages do tend to correspond with ecological communities. In the Bright Angel Shale of Grand Canyon we find trilobites, brachiopods and sea-lilies, but no terrestrial fauna. In the Chinle Group, above the Grand Canyon sequence, we find dinosaur fossils, dinosaur tracks and dinosaur droppings, fossilised ferns and trees; we do not find trilobites or fish. This is, as Morris implies, a universal feature of the fossil record from top to bottom. Occasional – but spectacular – ‘graveyards’ may point to communities wrenched from their habitat by some catastrophe, but they still have the coherence of a community (a shoal of fish or nautiloids, a herd of dinosaurs), living at the level where they are found. However, all this is also in accord with the evolutionist interpretation of the geological record. The prediction does nothing specifically to validate the Whitcomb and Morris theory.

Moreover, there is a problem. To stay with our Grand Canyon illustration, the Chinle Group is much higher than the Bright Angel Shale (Figure 2). Thus, if the Chinle was laid down in the Flood and the dinosaurs which left their tracks and droppings in the Chinle were dinosaurs that perished in the Flood, where was that community of dinosaurs before the Flood overwhelmed them? According to the theory, it must have been on a Precambrian surface. We are asked to believe that somehow, while the bodies were moving around in the water and all the sediments of Grand Canyon were being laid down, the original community remained together, remained alive (since they left tracks), and at roughly the same time all sank together.

Dinosaurs do not appear on any continent until the Late Triassic, more than half way up the geological column. In Arizona the interval between the Precambrian and the Late Triassic is represented by a succession of strata 2 kilometres thick. Yet in the pre-Flood world the dinosaurs supposedly lived on a Precambrian surface. Why, then, were they not buried there, at that level? Why are there no dinosaurs at any level before the Triassic?

As is well known, the fossil record is layered, and over much of the earth it is thousands, even tens of thousands, of metres thick. We are not dealing with thicknesses of just a few tens of metres. This is not a state of affairs one would readily ‘predict’ as arising from a global flood. According to Morris, the waters rose so slowly that they had barely reached the level of even lowland habitats by the Permian, yet somehow, in the Grand Canyon area, they had deposited more than 1500 metres of sediment, limestones as well as sandstones. Where had all this sediment come from? How had it been eroded and transported thither? What depth of water above the original Precambrian surface would have been needed to deposit 1,500 metres of sediment, and how would this depth be consistent with the idea that, by the end of the Grand Canyon sequence, the flood had reached only the margins of the continents? Evidently, the vast thickness of fossil-bearing strata is not what one would have expected.

Nonetheless, Morris predicts a pattern where, going up the strata, we pass through a succession of fossils that corresponds to the relative elevation of their habitats in the pre-Flood world. Marine creatures and land creatures are buried approximately at the level where they had been living their lives. That cannot be correct, however, for it would mean that dinosaurs were buried in the Triassic because, before the Flood, they were living on a Triassic surface, whales were buried in the Miocene because they were living at a level higher than any dinosaur, and so on. The thinking is muddled, since in fact Morris believes that all deposits after the Cambrian, including Triassic and Miocene deposits, were formed by the Flood. The prediction therefore fails.

Marine invertebrates (e.g. shellfish) can occur at any level within a succession of fossil-bearing rock. This fact alone makes a nonsense of the ‘hydrodynamic selectivity’ argument. Certainly factors such as density and smoothness – which would equally affect the accompanying sediment – could affect the pattern of deposition of a single stratum, even a sequence of strata, and ‘graded bedding’ on a scale of a few metres is common enough. But where we are speaking of the entire geological column in an area, we are speaking of many thousands of strata.

Marine invertebrates can occur thousands of metres above other rocks which contain other marine invertebrates. The position of the fossils higher up therefore cannot be explained by the fact that before the Flood they lived on the sea-bottom – a Precambrian sea-bottom. Frequently, as on a modern sea-floor, the shells are broken and scattered, and may well have been transported a certain distance (horizontally, not vertically). Sometimes they are found in life position, showing that the level at which they are buried represents an ancient sea-floor. The clearest examples of fossilised sea-floors are hardgrounds: cemented, usually carbonate, surfaces encrusted with the remains of fauna that attached itself to those surfaces – such as sea-lilies.¹² It is clear from the time required to account for the development of these hardgrounds that they cannot have formed during the Flood. Just the same considerations apply to fossil reefs, which occur at all levels of the geological column.

Nor is it uncommon for rocks containing marine fauna to lie on top of rocks containing the remains of land animals, e.g. dinosaurs. During late-Cretaceous times, chalk, the hardened ooze of calcareous plankton, covered almost the whole of England and Wales.¹³ Dinosaur tracks – left, obviously, by living animals – occur only below this level, such as the theropod and sauropod tracks of Yorkshire and Oxfordshire.

This prediction would make sense only in relation to marine life fossilised in rocks above the original, pre-Flood ocean floors. But where were these oceans? According to Morris they were approximately where the modern oceans are, and the pre-Flood land where the modern continents are. Similarly, Austin et al. associate the beginning of the Flood with the encroachment of (what is now) the Pacific Ocean eastwards across the land of (what is now) Nevada, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. On the other side of North America, the Flood waters came in westwards from the direction of the Atlantic.

Such a scenario does not, however, correspond with geological reality. The sedimentary ooze and oceanic crust beneath the Pacific and Atlantic oceans are Mesozoic/Cenozoic and, as such, much younger than the rocks with which the onset of the Flood is associated (e.g. the rocks of Grand Canyon, which are no younger than Palaeozoic). The marine vertebrates that occur as fossils are fossilised in rocks on the present continents, not the present oceans. And the Palaeozoic rocks which include ‘the Age of Fishes’ (the Devonian), before the appearance of reptiles and mammals, crop out all over the continents, deep inland in fresh-water deposits as well as nearer the coast.

It is true that fishes do not appear in the sequence until after invertebrates first appear. However, when we turn from the generalised ideal to real examples, it is clear that specific kinds of invertebrate – such as the well-known bivalve Gryphaea (which is restricted to the Triassic and Jurassic) or Inoceramus (restricted to the Jurassic and Cretaceous) – do not appear until after the first fishes. Gryphaea and Inoceramus were highly-evolved, heavily-built shellfish designed for life on the muddy environments in which they are fossilised. They do not occur at all in the Palaeozoic. These are not exceptional examples; their frequent occurrence in Mesozoic rocks and absence from Palaeozoic rocks are entirely typical. The Whitcomb and Morris scenario not only does not predict the presence, on top of pre-Flood landmasses, of shellfish which are uniquely Mesozoic; it cannot account for them at all. The scenario predicts that the bottom-dwelling invertebrates would be found predominantly, if not exclusively, in the lowermost rocks, under the present-day oceans.

It is the same situation with fishes. After the Ordovician both fishes and bottom-dwelling invertebrates are found in strata of all ages. For example, the fish of the Green River Formation, Wyoming, on display in almost any fossil shop, belong to the Eocene, near the top of the geological column. The limestones of the Green River Formation were formed in large inland lakes. Around them, and underneath them, was solid land.

Since the previous prediction fails, so does this one. Moreover, Morris supposes that Devonian and Carboniferous sediments, where extinct kinds of amphibian first appear in the record, represent the interface between land and water. We are to understand that, where amphibians are found, the rocks beneath them – designated Silurian, Ordovician and Cambrian – constitute pre-Flood land. But, according to Whitcomb and Morris themselves, the lower strata down to at least the Cambrian were products of the Flood – they lie far above the pre-Flood land. Indeed, after the Precambrian, it is geologically evident that the Ordovician already represents the period of maximum continent-wide inundation.^14-15

This prediction is actually the opposite of what a reader of Genesis might expect (assuming that the Flood waters were mostly marine waters and that fossils were the remnants of life destroyed in the Flood). Genesis makes it clear that the waters submerged the dry land and then, in the course of many refluxes, retreated. Therefore, the igneous and sedimentary rocks allegedly left by the Flood must lie above the place where the pre-Flood land was. Since we stand above the original, pre-Flood land, the fossils of terrestrial fauna and flora ought to lie beneath marine sediments. In fact the reverse is generally the case.

The lower strata of the present continents contain marine fossils. Cambrian strata – at the bottom of the Palaeozoic – record a process of marine transgression in many parts of the world. They occur over all but the central part of United States, and by the end of the Ordovician (Figure 4) most of the continent was under water.¹⁶ Apart from spores, land plants do not occur until the Silurian and land animals not until the Carboniferous.

If most of North America was under water by the Upper Ordovician, how can the idea of animals escaping to higher ground and being overcome in the Mesozoic have any relevance? According to Whitcomb and Morris:

As far as land animals and man were concerned, their greater mobility would have enabled most of them to escape temporarily to higher ground as the waters rose, only occasional individuals being swept away and entombed in the sediments. Eventually, of course, the floodwaters overtook even those who had fled to the highest elevations, but in most cases these men and animals would not be buried but simply drowned and then carried about by the waters on or near the surface until finally decomposed by the elements.¹⁷

Somehow these creatures knew, from the rain falling, that this was going to be a downpour that would engulf the entire land. The instinct of both men and animals was not to stay put in their homes and burrows, or to climb up the nearest tree, but to travel for what could have been tens or hundreds of miles to the highest elevations, and the Flood was tranquil enough to allow them to do so. Immediately before the predictions, nonetheless, Morris asks us to:

Visualise, then, a great hydraulic cataclysm bursting upon the present world, with currents of waters pouring perpetually from the skies and erupting continuously from the earth’s crust, all over the world, for weeks on end, until the entire globe was submerged, accompanied by outpourings of magma from the mantle, gigantic earth movements, landslides, tsunamis and explosions.

Surely anyone who does visualise such events will not be able simultaneously to visualise any kind of animal escaping to higher ground. The instinct of an animal when it starts to rain is to seek shelter, not higher ground. If its burrow becomes completely flooded, that is the end of the animal. We need not even ask what its instincts are when boiling water and lava erupt under its feet, when the crust breaks up to a depth of thousands of metres and the mountains are flattened by earthquakes. It dies within seconds.

Where are the remains of the fields and cities from before the Flood, the forests, buildings and other aspects of civilization? They are not found anywhere. Beneath the Cambrian there are no petrified forests, no monuments, no instruments of bronze and iron bearing testimony to a pre-Flood world. Nor are there any fossilised bones of land animals, or tracks of land animals moving while they were still alive.

Referring to the unconformity between the Precambrian and Cambrian in many parts of the world, geologist E. C. Olson writes:

The continental nuclei at that time were largely stripped down to the crystalline basement. Ancient mountain systems were worn down to their roots reducing the continents more nearly to a plain than they have ever been before or since.¹⁸

That is a comment to make anyone sit up and think. If these ‘ancient mountain systems’ were the mountains of the pre-Flood world (as in the Whitcomb-and-Morris scenario) it would have availed nothing to escape to higher ground. In many regions there would not even have been any mountains – imagine escaping to higher ground in the Netherlands, for example.

There is no such succession. Mobile and slow-moving animals occur at the same levels. Take the dinosaur fossil record, for example, which is restricted to Mesozoic strata. During that interval several dinosaur families show a progressive increase in size – but also a great increase in diversity (number of species) and population density (quantity of fossils found). The earliest dinosaurs habitually moved on two legs and, as a general rule, could move faster and travel longer distances than could quadrupedal dinosaurs. Size did not equate to mobility. The fastest dinosaurs were the carnivores, and these came in all sizes. The gigantic titanosaurs were comparatively slow-moving, yet occur in the latest Mesozoic strata.

There are of course other explanations for the trend of increasing size within species/families, including natural selection (larger body size possibly giving the animal an advantage in escaping predators). There simply is no trend of increasing mobility over time.

Nor is there any trend of increasing ‘complexity’ (whatever that means). If one considers the fossil record of particular families, the trend is one of increasing diversity and, generally, increasing specialisation. This suggests that we are dealing with a genuine genealogical sequence over a considerable span of time, regardless of whether we are observing evolution in any Darwinian sense.

Nor is it true that increasing complexity corresponds to increasing mobility. Suppose that we were to interpret the sequence from amphibians to reptiles to mammals as a sequence of increasing complexity (amphibians, with their ability to exist both on land and in water, could in fact be biologically more complex than reptiles or mammals). Are reptiles less mobile than mammals? Or would large amphibians be less able to survive a flood than terrestrial animals? The answer is obviously no, in both cases. To take an extreme example, sloths are amongst the slowest-moving mammals, but despite their unwillingness to exert themselves, they first appear in the Eocene, near the top of the geological column.¹⁹ There is a continuous record of fossil sloths from the Eocene to the Quaternary, as decisive evidence as one could desire that these animals lived in a post-Flood world.

Conclusion

The theory of ecological zones would work only if a lower-lying zone together with all its fauna was buried before the water reached the next zone up. But this is not what we see. Most of the earth was under water by the end of the Ordovician, long before animal fossils appear.

Morris’s predictions fail: every one. By any normal criteria of science, his theory does not explain the order in which fossils occur in the geological record and ought to be abandoned, however hard that might be. Whether the Genesis account of the Flood is true or not, Whitcomb and Morris’s attempt to corroborate it geologically does it no favours.

1. Whitcomb, J. C. & Morris, H. M., 1968. The Genesis Flood, London.
2. Coffin, H. G., 1983. Origin by Design, Review & Herald Publishing Association, Hagerstown, Md, p 81.
3. Snelling, A. A., 1992. Where are all the human fossils? Creation Ex Nihilo 14:18-33.
4. Austin, S. A. (ed.). 1994. Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, Institute for Creation Research, Santee, Ca, pp
5. Wise, K. P. et al., 1996. Catastrophic plate tectonics: a global flood model of earth history. In: R. Walsh (ed.), Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism, Pittsburgh, pp 609-21.
6. Wise, K. P., 2003. The hydrothermal biome: a pre-Flood environment. In: R. L. Ivey (ed.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, Pittsburgh, pp 359-70.
7. Wise, K. P., 2003. The pre-Flood floating forest: a study in paleontological pattern recognition. In: R. L. Ivey (ed.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, Pittsburgh, pp 371-82.
8. Snelling, A. A. and eight other signatories, 1996. The geological record: a statement, Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 10:333-34.
9. Austin, S. A. (ed.), 1994, op. cit., p 147.
10. Morris, H. M., 1974. Scientific Creationism, San Diego, Ca, pp 118-20.
11. Lockley, M. G., Hunt, A. P. & Meyer, C. A., 1994. Vertebrate tracks and the ichnofacies concept: implications for palaeoecology and palichnostratigraphy. In: S. K. Donovan (ed.), The Palaeobiology of Trace Fossils, Baltimore, p 260.
12. Wilson, M. a., & Palmer, T. J., 1992. Hardgrounds and hardground faunas, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
13. Rawson, P. F., 1992. The Cretaceous. In: P. McL. D. Duff & A. J. Smith (eds), The Geology of England and Wales, London, p. 374.
14. Sloss, L. L., 1988. Tectonic evolution of the craton in Phanerozoic time. In: L. L. Sloss (ed.), Sedimentary Cover - North American Craton: US, Boulder, Colorado, pp 25-51.
15. Hallam, A., 1992. Phanerozoic Sea-Level Changes, New York.
16. Cook, T. D., & Bally, A. W. (eds), 1975. Stratigraphic Atlas of North and Central America, Princeton, New Jersey, p. 14.
17. Whitcomb & Morris, op. cit. [1], p 266.
18. Olson, W. S., 1966. Origin of the Cambrian-Precambrian unconformity, American Scientist 54:458-64.
19. Benton, M. J., 1990. Vertebrate Palaeontology, London, p. 254.