and Africa (Takai et al. 2000; Stevens et al. 2013; Rasmussen et al. 2019). To explain this, evolutionists have actually proposed the absurd idea that monkeys rafted back and forth between continents on the open ocean. While intercontinental monkey fossil data give no credence to the idea of evolution, they do show that late Flood runoff destroyed similar ecosystems on the newly separated continents as monkeys, and other higher-elevation creatures, were buried late in the Flood. 4. Issues with the Tejas Megasequence – Tertiary whale fossils Whale fossils (Cetacea) in the Tertiary are abundant (Tomkins and Clarey 2019), but they are generally not deposited in the interior continental regions, but instead are buried on the coastal margins. Figures 18 and 19 show the PBDB distribution of Cetacea and Mammalia, respectively. The Mammalia map includes Cetacea, but the latter represents only 4% of the total. While Cetacea fossils are buried on the coastal margins of nearly every major landmass, they are also found across the entire continent of Europe. This is not surprising since ICR’s Column Project has shown that Tertiary marine sediments cover most of Europe (Clarey 2020). Interestingly, evolutionary researchers have recently described a massive global extinction event that involved many marine mammals which occurred near the top of the Pliocene (uppermost Neogene, the upper part of the Tertiary), just below the Quaternary boundary (Pimiento et al. 2017). Some creationists have suggested that both the marine and land mammals of the Tertiary were somehow fossilized in local post-Flood catastrophes (Whitmore and Garner 2008; Ross 2012) but the pervasive global distribution of whale and other mammal fossils strongly contradicts this claim. In addition, the fact that many continental Tejas deposits contain much greater amounts of fossilized animal and plant diversity than currently is alive and exists at these locations (Whitmore and Wise 2008) adds even more weight to the creationist proposition that these are late Flood receding phase deposits. 5. Issues with the Tejas Megasequence – Flood runoff better explains the Tejas Paleontological evidence indicates that many of the diverse plants and mammals inhabiting higher and temperate pre-Flood elevations were buried in the late runoff phase of the global Flood, including the Tertiary coals found globally. The megasequence representing this late Flood deposition is known as the Tejas and corresponds to the majority of the Cenozoic Erathem (prior to the Pleistocene) in the geological column. During this megasequence, animals living at the highest pre-Flood elevations were wiped off and the surface was eroded down to the crust, transporting organisms great distances in all directions (Clarey 2020). This may seem preposterous, but consider a Plateosaurus dinosaur bone was found in Triassic strata 110 km offshore Norway in the North Sea, 2.25 km below the seafloor (Hurum et al. 2006). Although this is a Triassic example, it shows that long-distance transport occurred commonly during the Flood year. Also, the Lower Tejas (Paleocene) Whopper Sand in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico was poured into the Gulf at the onset of the Tejas. It is between 300-575 meters thick and is found at distances of 350-400 km offshore (Berman and Rosenfeld 2007). The best explanation for this sand body is high-energy return flow at the beginning of the receding phase. And more recently, similar lemur-like fossils have been discovered in Lower Tejas strata in both Wyoming and on Ellesmere Island in northernmost Canada (Miller et al. 2023). These mammal fossils all probably existed together in central Canada on pre-Flood high ground while alive (Clarey 2020). As the Flood reached its peak on Day 150, it wiped off these animals living on the highest hills and spread their remains both north and south to Ellesmere Island and Wyoming, respectively. These examples illustrate long-distance transport was likely during the Tejas megasequence. As noted above, the Tejas megasequence alone accounts for 32.5% of the total volume of the Phanerozoic sedimentary rock record (Clarey and Werner 2023). How could local catastrophes after the Flood produce this volume of sediment, averaging 1.94 km in thickness across five continents today, and totaling 191,255,830 km3 of sediment across much of the land mass of the world (Clarey and Werner 2023)? And how could local catastrophes after the Flood produce the same relative order of fossils in the Tertiary sediments across all continents? Global distributions of sedimentary layers and the similar order of fossil types on each continent demand a global explanation. The global Flood remains the best reason for the Tertiary. Thus, the end of the global Flood is most likely defined as the upper margin of the Neogene system (just before the Quaternary at the top of the Cenozoic). It is thus called the N-Q Flood Boundary (Clarey 2020). DISCUSSION The global Flood began with the deposition of the Sauk Megasequence and minimal continental flooding and initially only involved the burial of marine ecosystems. This trend continued through the deposition of the Tippecanoe. Some coastal inundation began in the Kaskaskia with the fossil appearances of tropical vegetation, Archosauria, and insects. Of course, marine mixing as a basic Flood paradigm was continuous throughout all of the megasequences, remaining a hallmark of fossil deposition throughout the Flood. We illustrate this by the use of Brachiopoda as marine reference taxa and demonstrate the patterns of Brachiopod global deposition mapped out by the six megasequences over the course of the whole Flood (Figure 20). The floodwaters continued their progressive inundation and burial of higher elevations of land ecosystems through the Kaskaskia and Absaroka. The end of the Kaskaskia and the beginning of the Absaroka would possibly have occurred about Day 40 in the Flood-year progression (Johnson and Clarey 2021). The floodwaters continued to rise through the Absaroka and Zuni and peaked in height by the end of the Zuni – corresponding to the end of the Cretaceous System (Clarey 2020; Clarey and Werner 2023). At the end of the Zuni, the floodwaters covered all the highest hills by at least seven meters (15 cubits) during the deposition of Cretaceous System and possibly the onset of the Paleocene (the top of the Zuni). The Cretaceous System also included the final phases of continental separation and continual seafloor formation, but not the end of catastrophic plate motion. Afterward, during the deposition of the Tejas (Tertiary system) the oldest seafloor began to cool and sink and sections of the newly separated continents and mountain ranges were rapidly uplifted, causing the floodwaters to rapidly change direction and recede. This recession carved canyons out of the soft sediments (e.g., Grand Canyon) (Clarey 2018) and buried massive amounts of plants and animals in large basins that had formed at the base of the mountains (e.g., Rocky Mountains in North America and Andes in South America) (Clarey et al. 2021; Tomkins and Clarey 2021). In addition, the continental runoff also formed massive Tejas sediments offshore such as the Whopper Sand in the Gulf of Mexico (Clarey 2015a). While evolutionists have extreme difficulty in explaining Cenozoic geology and paleontology, the progressive global Flood model offers a close fit to the data. It is our contention that the N-Q boundary in the rock record marks the approximate end of the Flood. This not only matches the global megasequence data, and much of the paleontology, but also negates the awkward proposition of rapid whale evolution and other untenTOMKINS AND CLAREY Paleontology of the Global Flood 2023 ICC 581
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=