Fossils – records of death, not life

On Sunday night I went to a mate’s church to hear John Mackay, a creationist speaker who grew up in Brisbane and spends most of his time now around the world debating evolutionists. His website is www.creationresearch.net, and his stuff is pretty good. He always wears a fishing style vest and an Indiana Jones style hat and he makes me think of what Steve Irwin would have been like if he was into palaeontology... . Anyway, we watched the documentary John has made in response to Darwin’s anniversaries (200 yr birth, 150 yr Origin of Species) called Darwin on the Rocks. This doco is mostly about rocks and fossils and in it he says this: “Fossils are not the record of life, but the record of where things died.” I’ve never thought of it quite like that before, but I really liked it!

Fossils are a record of how and where and when(?) things died, not how they lived. That is why we find land-dwelling and sea-dwelling creatures fossilised together: not because they lived together, but because they died together. He also showed that in any given field of fossils (some of which stretch for hundreds of miles) most of the fossils with the field are pointing in the same direction. This shows that they were all buried at the same tie by the same event – they were al carried along together so they all point the same way. Funny how these two things, land- and sea-dwelling creatures fossilised together and fossils facing the same direction, are evidence of a catastrophic flood. But that’s what we would expect to see, isn’t it?