the systems periods and the erathems eras since they believe these rock layers represent actual periods and eras of time in the past. Creation geologists view these as merely days or weeks during the yearlong Flood. The fossil record is simply the successive order of burial. Fossils are so important to the geological column that each subdivision of the column was divided on the basis of abrupt fossil changes in the rock layers. As you go up or down the geological column, different fossils appear and disappear. Most geologists think the layers that contain the same organisms were buried at similar moments in the past, or at least close in time. The biggest change in fossils, where fossils suddenly appear in the rock record in great and diverse numbers, is designated by the Phanerozoic Eonothem, or “visible life eon.” This point in the rock record also coincides with a new erathem and a new system called the Paleozoic Erathem and the Cambrian System, respectively. Below this point, the rocks are lumped into the collective and generic Precambrian, which has also been further divided into three eonothems, or eons. Since we are dealing with the fossil record here, we ignored these subdivisions and note that these rocks do indeed contain some fossils, but most are microfossils and/or algal-type fossils like stromatolites. Most of the Precambrian fossils are likely pre-Flood. For all practical purposes, the fossil record starts in the Phanerozoic Eonothem, Paleozoic Erathem, and Cambrian System. This coincides with the onset of the flooding of great portions of the continents via the Sauk Megasequence. Changes in the Phanerozoic fossils in a vertical sense that are most significant represent boundaries of erathems or eras (Fig. 1). The Paleozoic Erathem contains primarily marine fossils, but toward the top, in the Pennsylvanian System (Upper Carboniferous), we see more land animals and plant fossils suddenly appearing in great numbers in the rocks. The Mesozoic Erathem contains many reptile fossils including the dinosaurs. And the Cenozoic Erathem contains a multitude of mammal fossils of various types. All three erathems contain billions of marine fossils mixed in with the terrestrial fossils. The mixing of land and marine environments is extremely common in the rock record (Clarey 2020). Smaller changes (often referred to as “extinctions”) in the fossils were designated as systems or periods. These are what subdivide the erathems. Each represents a change in the fossils in a vertical sense. Many of the boundaries of these systems and erathems coincide with what the evolutionary community considers extinction events. These so-called extinctions are where the fossils change abruptly and some organisms disappear upward within the rock record. There are five, and now possibly six, major extinction events within Figure 1. Calibration of the Sloss-based (Sloss 1963) megasequence Flood model with the standard geological column. TOMKINS AND CLAREY Paleontology of the Global Flood 2023 ICC 562
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