the Phanerozoic Eonothem (Pimiento et al. 2017). Evolutionary scientists have made many attempts to identify the causes for these rapid changes in the fossils and for the disappearance of major groups of fossils. Meteor impacts and rapid climate changes caused by volcanism or other factors have been suggested. However, most of these so-called extinction events remain a mystery to the evolutionary scientists. Creation scientists do not consider these as true “extinction” events. Instead, these horizons are interpreted as major shifts in the burial pattern of fossils during the Flood. So-called extinctions are merely the level at which certain fossils were no longer being actively buried, so they disappear upward in the geological column. It may be that at these levels the environments that contained these animals Figure 2. Evolutionary timescale and sea level curve showing the five major extinctions and their relationship to the megasequences (Clarey 2020). and/or plants were already inundated, preventing any further burial in younger rocks. Figure 2 shows that several of the major extinction events do closely coincide with the six megasequences, one coinciding with the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) and one with the Triassic-Jurassic (Tr-J) (Clarey 2020). The other three major extinction horizons fall within the middle or toward the top of the megasequence boundaries. Recall, megasequences are defined on the basis of major erosional boundaries, often reflected by sudden changes in rock type and/or pre-Flood environment. Therefore, it should be no surprise that some of these changes correspond to rapid shifts in the fossil content also. The fossils deposited are dependent on the pre-Flood environment being inundated, tectonic forces at work, currents, waves and the TOMKINS AND CLAREY Paleontology of the Global Flood 2023 ICC 563
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=