Dinosaur Extinction: Noah’s Flood or an Asteroid?
Natural history museums spend millions on displays that promote the idea that an asteroid impact hitting the edge of the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico 66 million years ago was responsible for the final dinosaur extinction. While evolutionists have published over 90 different theories about this dinosaur extinction event, the asteroid theory takes the leading place in museums today.[i]
But have you considered whether this single event could explain the simultaneous extinction of all dinosaurs around the world,[ii] including a massive dinosaur kill zone in North America that spans three countries and fourteen states, stretching over 1,800 miles long and 1,000 miles wide?
Figure 82. Dinosaur Fossils in America.[iii]
Over a million square miles across the American West are filled with every kind of dinosaur, and they’re all mixed with other land animals, including birds, and all sorts of marine life like clams, rays, and sharks. In addition, many of these layers filled with dinosaurs are stacked one on top of the other. Could a single asteroid that hit over 1,500 miles away from the heart of this disaster zone really be responsible for all this?[iv] This chapter explains why Catastrophic Plate Tectonics during Noah’s Flood provides a better explanation.
Figure 83. The Chicxulub Asteroid Crater Responsible for Dinosaur Extinction?[v]
An asteroid hitting the Yucatán peninsula would certainly have regional consequences that could easily spread over part of present-day Central America. But the billions of fossils in the middle of North America were buried in multiple mud, sand, and volcanic ash layers from successive, watery events, and some of these layers are hundreds of feet thick and stretch over multiple states in the U.S. How could a single asteroid, falling well over a thousand miles away from the center of this area, bury dinosaurs across 14 U.S. states under hundreds of feet of mud, sand, and volcanic ash?
For example, consider the Lance Formation. This geological unit spreads across several states and is packed with fossils of many sorts of land, air, and marine creatures, including small and large dinosaurs, pterosaurs, fish, mammals, crocodiles, lizards, snakes, turtles, birds, frogs, and salamanders. It’s quite obvious that entire ecosystems were buried here during Noah’s Flood.
Figure 84. Lance Formation[vi]
Figure 85. Lance Formation Dinosaur Fossils.[vii]
Doesn’t it make perfect sense that these widespread mud, sand, and ash layers which are filled with dinosaur bones were deposited by a worldwide flood? It’s fascinating to see how many secular paleontologists admit that dinosaurs died in watery catastrophes. In fact, the leading textbook on bonebeds which catalogues most of the largest bonebeds in the world, admits that most of them were laid down by watery catastrophes.[viii]
Figure 86. Bonebeds Database Reveals the Majority of Bonebeds were due to Watery Catastrophes.
When looking at the largest of these dinosaur bonebeds in Canada, secular scientists widely admit they were formed by dramatic high-speed water events.[ix]
Let’s not forget the most obvious clue about dinosaur extinction: They’re all buried in sedimentary rock! There may be ash from volcanoes mixed in, but most dinosaur fossils have to be chiseled out of mud and sand layers that have hardened into stone. Many of these rock units laid down in layer-cake manner commonly span thousands of square miles. What’s unique about the dinosaurs is that they are found in the very mud and sand that killed them—often twisted about and disarticulated.
How could an asteroid impact all the way down in Mexico deposit these extensive mud and sand layers that are hundreds of feet thick and stretch laterally for thousands of miles? An asteroid would certainly create a crater on the Earth’s surface, with mud and sand layers thinning out from the crater, but the actual dinosaur bone layers in the American West remain about the same thickness for hundreds of miles. Noah’s Flood could do that, but an asteroid would not. The Bible says that surging Flood waters took months to cover the entire globe. Sure enough, dinosaurs are found in sequentially-laid mud and sand layers all over the Earth. Deposition of these layers must have occurred quickly one after the other because the upper surface of each layer is flat without erosion, indicating hardly any time passing before the next layer was laid on top of it by the next huge flood surge.
The other challenge for the asteroid theory is that the Cretaceous fossils that cover multiple states in the middle of North America are at elevations hundreds of feet higher than the current ocean level could have placed them. Even secular scientists explain that the only way to get these extensive fossils to their current elevation is through the massive flooding followed by buckling of the continent.[x] Earth’s rapidly subducting crustal plates during Noah’s Flood would have compressed and buckled the sedimentary layers deposited on the plates by cycles of numerous tsunamis flooding across the land, killing and burying dinosaurs mixed with marine life, as high as the elevations where we find them today.
Figure 87. Example of Geological Folding. The layers had to be bent and folded while still pliable.
A profound challenge for the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction is that a single asteroid does not produce such multiple, continent-wide fossil-packed layers. Most dinosaur fossils are contained in layers of mud that were laid down in successive fashion—one after the other—as if by repeating very large amplitude tsunamis. These layers are often hundreds of feet thick and laterally continuous for thousands of miles. The well-developed Catastrophic Plate Tectonics theory accounts for these features in terms of rapidly subducting plates that repeatedly lock and then unlock and slip. Each slip event unleashes a large amplitude tsunami.
These rapidly subducting plates resulted in enormous volcanism that spewed megatons of ash that entombed countless dinosaurs in multiple states. The evidence for this is obvious. For example, the Independence Dike Swarm is a system of linear fissures that erupted during the Flood (see Figure 88).
Figure 88. Independence Dyke Volcanic System[xi]
This system extends over 370 miles in southern California and belted out 4,000 cubic miles of ash that covered multiple states, leaving behind enormous ash deposits like the Brushy Basin Member which is 110 meters thick in eastern Utah and found in 35 other locations around the region.[xii] These ash beds are mixed with sandstone brought in from massive, mud-filled tsunamis generated by catastrophic rifting. The countless dinosaurs buried in this mixture is exactly what we would expect to find with a worldwide Flood that involved rapid oceanic rifting because both oceanic and volcanic upheaval was happening at the same time.
The case for the Biblical Flood grows even stronger when looking at how the strength of the volcanic systems and extent of the ash deposits declined after the Flood. Truly something big happened in the past that rapidly buried the dinosaurs in mud, sandstone, and ash, and it certainly wasn’t an asteroid that fell over 1,500 miles away from the heart of this disaster zone. The rapidly subducting ocean plates created the Independence Dike Swarm during the Flood, depositing 4,000 cubic miles of ash. This was followed by a couple of major Yellowstone eruptions after the Flood that deposited 600 then 240 cubic miles of ash. This was later followed by the Long Valley Eruption that produced 150 cubic miles of ash, then the Crater Lake Eruption with only 17 cubic miles of ash, and finally the Mount Saint Helens Eruption which deposited only one-quarter cubic mile of ash. The volcanic eruptions appear to be growing less intense over time, which is consistent with large catastrophes during the flood followed by a slowing of tectonic plate movements, and thus fewer and less intense volcanic eruptions over time (see Figures 89 and 90).
Figure 89. Volcanic Ash Volume Pre/Post Flood.[xiii]
Figure 90 shows the vast coverage of each of these volcanic systems, with the largest ones erupting during the Flood then gradually reducing intensity after the Flood.
Figure 90. Volcanic System Coverage During/After the Flood.
Let’s consider something else about the asteroid-dinosaur extinction theory: While museums portray the asteroid theory using expensive exhibits, did you know that the scientific community is far from settled on this idea? Over the last 30 years, hundreds of geologists have disagreed with the asteroid theory, believing instead that an extreme episode of volcanism explains the final dinosaur extinction.[xiv]
These scientists assert that it was the massive volcanic eruptions of basalt in India—called the Deccan Traps—that were primarily responsible for the dinosaur demise. These eruptions extruded over 288,000 cubic miles of lava, which is over one million times more voluminous than the Mount Saint Helens eruption in 1980.[xv] We’re talking about enough lava to cover the state of California one mile deep.
Flood basalts like the Deccan Traps are found on several continents, usually with fossil-bearing sedimentary layers beneath them, and further fossil-bearing sedimentary layers above them, indicating they also are the result of spectacular, catastrophic processes during the Genesis Flood.[xvi] Princeton Professor Dr. Gerta Keller has been at the forefront of this disagreement with the asteroid theory that started over 30 years ago. She has explained her findings at numerous GSA conferences and articles.[xvii]
Creationists have no problem with both the Chicxulub impact and the Deccan lava eruptions happening around the same time during the Flood. In fact, the impact in Mexico and numerous others could have started or accelerated the Deccan eruptions and others during the Flood by triggering the breakup of the “fountains of the great deep” mentioned in Genesis. Even some secular geologists have suggested that the impact in Mexico may well have triggered or accelerated the Deccan eruptions.[xviii] The evidence for large numbers of asteroid impacts during the Flood is compelling. In fact, a survey found that 71 of 110 asteroid impacts are found in fossil-bearing sedimentary rock layers—layers that were laid down by the Flood. Most of the remaining 39 likely occurred after the Flood.[xix]
Figure 91. A History of Craters: Two Interpretations. Geologists have found over a hundred impact craters (horizontal black bars) on Earth. On this table, 39 of the 110 impacts were deposited in the uppermost rock layers, and the rest were spread over the many lower layers.[xx]
Indeed, the impact of a large asteroid may well have initiated the catastrophic movement of the tectonic plates at the onset of the Flood. Once plate subduction was initiated, molten rock rose from below to fill rifts in the zones where plates were pulling apart. Disturbances in the Earth’s interior from the rapidly subducting plates subsequently led to volcanic eruptions around the world. The dinosaur fossil record attests to this overall picture, with millions of creatures buried in muddy layers by subduction-driven tsunamis.
“K–Pg” Boundary
Geologists have found that in many regions the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene layers, called the “K–Pg” boundary, is marked by high levels of the rare metal iridium. While it is true that nearly all dinosaur fossils are absent above this K-Pg boundary, the areas with high iridium levels are not restricted to the thin zone that defines this boundary.
In fact, in the same regions where the K-Pg boundary was discovered, recent studies have identified a four-meter-thick layer rich in iridium—not the thin line shown in most textbooks. These studies reveal that there was not a single iridium “spike,” but rather a horizon of peak values within a sequence of iridium-enriched clays that were most likely deposited by volcanic activity as well as an asteroid or series of asteroids. [xxi]
Numerous scientists have taken the stance that these wide bands simply do not support the idea of a single impact extinction event.[xxii] In fact, Dr. Keller and other scientists[xxiii] invested over 30 years looking for evidence to support the Chicxulub impact in the Yucatan peninsula as the cause for the K-Pg extinction event and found very little evidence for such a conclusion. Although they found occurrences of iridium anomalies in Italy, Denmark, Tunisia, and India in the context of the K-Pg boundary, these were never associated with Chicxulub impact ejecta. Other scientists have also been puzzled to find out there is virtually no iridium in the Chicxulub ejecta material itself—not in the layer at the base of the event deposit nor in the ejecta layer above.[xxiv] This was not what evolutionists were expecting—how could the very asteroid impact site that was supposedly responsible for depositing all the iridium associated with the K-Pg boundary extinction, not itself have iridium?
From a Biblical history viewpoint, this makes perfect sense because volcanic eruptions also release iridium and the resulting ash and dust clouds tend to spread worldwide. This certainly appears to have been the case for the eruptions that produced the Deccan Traps.[xxv] Indeed, airborne particles above Hawaiian basaltic eruptions have been found to be highly enriched in iridium, at levels much higher than at the K-Pg boundary.[xxvi]
Certainly, asteroids that have impacted the Earth in the past must have contributed to iridium levels, especially in regions where the sedimentation rate was relatively slow and iridium fallout from the atmosphere could concentrate. This would have been true during the Flood. However, since volcanism was so voluminous and widespread during the Flood, this latter explanation seems to fit the data much better than does the asteroid hypothesis,[xxvii] including intervals that evolutionists identify as great extinction events within their worldview.[xxviii]
Next let’s consider the timing of the asteroid impact and the dinosaur extinction. Natural history museums portray the asteroid as wiping out at least two-thirds of all species of life in just days, weeks, and months after the event. However, evolutionary dating now places the impact 100,000 to 300,000 years below the K-Pg boundary,[xxix] that is, the point marking the time of dinosaur extinction. This is because researchers now assert that the 13 to 30 feet of sandstone west of the impact layer was deposited hundreds of thousands of years before the dinosaur extinction.[xxx] This obviously pushes the Chicxulub impact back in time well before the extinction.[xxxi]
The Biblical timeline, however, does not have any such dating challenges. Biblical genealogies constrain the Flood to just thousands of years ago and implies that at least one of the assumptions behind radiometric dating is invalid. The 14 different types of bio-organic materials including blood vessels, collagen and bone cells still found in dinosaur bones also lends powerful support to the Biblical timeline. Consistent with the Biblical timeframe, both asteroids and volcanism were concurrent with tsunami waves and crustal deformation induced by Catastrophic Plate Tectonics, which buried the dinosaurs and many other animals in sediments very rapidly.
Noah’s Flood and the Tanis Fossil Bed
Let’s look at a recent fossil bed that supports these conclusions. In 2019 the discovery of the “Tanis” fossil bed in North Dakota was announced—a discovery that many paleontologists are calling the “find of the century.”[xxxii] This two-acre fossil bed is a snapshot of what North America looked like at the peak of the Genesis Flood. This site is full of fossils, many in upright rather than flat positions, including trees, plants, and saltwater mosasaurs mixed with thousands of complete freshwater paddlefish and sturgeons. The pristine condition of the fossils suggest that they were covered almost immediately after death.
But the most amazing thing about this site is that the creatures here were buried with millions of microtektites—tiny blobs of glass that form when molten rock is blasted into the air by an asteroid impact and then fall back to Earth as smoking hot projectiles about the size of BBs. These were found jammed into the gills of about half of the fossilized fish, in amber, and buried into small mud dents around the site. Some believe these microtektites at this site are connected to the Chicxulub asteroid falling about 1,900 miles away.
They also found broken remains from almost all known dinosaur categories in the area,[xxxiii] including eggs and hatchlings, and a Triceratops hip complete with tissue impressions, indicating a rapid death and burial. Even the evolutionary scientists admit this bonebed was caused by a flood, specifically two massive tsunamis they believe were initiated by the Chicxulub impact 1,900 miles south.[xxxiv] Biblical Creationists, however, find evidence that leads to much broader flooding, mostly coming from rapidly subducting plates along the west coast of the continent.
Their research paper well established that this site was the result of at least two successive tsunamis, evidenced by the combination of land and marine creatures mixed together, the 3-D condition of the fossils, and the various age groups within each species, indicating a complete snapshot in time. The fossil fish also had clear signs of “tetany,” a condition indicating sudden death due to poisoning, asphyxiation, or choking.
They’re also clear that at least two major tsunamis occurred one right after the other, as proven by rapid sedimentation and a 180-degree change in flow direction, indicating inundation and backflow phases. They also found no evidence of roots or burrows nor of branches with attached leaves at the boundary between the tsunami layers.[xxxv]
Noah’s Flood and the Hanson Ranch Fossils
Another fossil site that supports the global Flood as the explanation behind the dinosaur extinction is the Hanson Ranch Bonebed in the Lance Formation of eastern Wyoming. This 80-acre dinosaur graveyard contains over a million bones, many of which are concentrated in a thin 1–2 meter layer of mudstone. One 500 square meter excavation area has yielded over 8,000 bones, most of which belong to hadrosaurs.
Scientists believe that they were killed by a catastrophic event and their bones were later redeposited just weeks or months later because the bones are in a graded bed with big bones at the bottom and little bones at the top, a condition that requires sorting during a catastrophic emplacement. After these dinosaurs were killed by the initial event, their bodies floated, rotted, broke apart, and then just weeks or months later massive amounts of water and mud picked up the collection of dead creatures and hydrologically sorted the bones, depositing them where they are today.[xxxvi]
Here is the amazing thing—it’s not just Hanson Ranch that has tons of hadrosaur bones buried like this. Similar hadrosaur bonebeds are all over America. In fact, when comparing the representation of the various types of bones found at this site to five other hadrosaur bonebeds in Alaska, Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming, scientists made an incredible finding: The types of bones found at these other locations were statistically significantly matched to the types of bones found at Hanson Ranch.[xxxvii] This means that similar devastation and burial factors were in play at all six of these bonebeds, evidenced by all sites having high percentages of large limb and rib bones and low percentages of smaller bones like vertebrae and chevrons.
Scientists believe these unique burial conditions were caused by an initial death event, followed by temporary emplacement where decay and disarticulation occurred, then hydraulic winnowing removed the connected sections like vertebral columns and smaller bones before the remaining bones were swept away by underwater debris flow that later resulted in the final deposit.
Such a multi-phase, watery catastrophe doesn’t line up with a single asteroid event, does it? What happened here and at the other correlated sites was clearly the result of a worldwide flood. Tsunamis from catastrophic rifting served the initial blow, killing these creatures and fracturing about 30% of their bones with “greenstick” fractures that only occur with fresh bones. This was followed by weeks or months of decomposition and disarticulation, and then their remains were later consolidated in the muddy layers they’re buried in.
This also seems to be the case with another one of the largest hadrosaur bonebeds located in north-central Montana. An estimated 10,000 hadrosaurs are buried in this location in a thin layer spanning over one mile. These bones are disarticulated, orientated east to west, and some of the bones are found standing upright, indicating a debris flow. Moreover, there are no young juveniles or babies in this bonebed, indicating these creatures were running from something, leaving all the young behind.
When evaluating the possibility of a mud slide creating this bonebed, paleo experts Horner and Gorman stated: “How could any mud slide, no matter how catastrophic, have the force to take a two- or three-ton animal that had just died and smash it around so much that its femur—still embedded in the flesh of its thigh—split lengthwise?”[xxxviii] This certainly matches what they found at the Harris Ranch bonebeds, with over 30% of the bones having greenstick or spiral fractures.
Summary
All this evidence fits perfectly into what we would expect with a global Flood. The Chicxulub asteroid and others were pelting the Earth simultaneous with earthquake-generated tsunamis and volcanism from rapid plate motion, rifting, and subduction. Freshwater and saltwater creatures were buried together along with land animals and plants. Clear evidence shows that repeating tsunamis were responsible for transporting huge volumes of mud from the ocean and then retreating, leaving deposition. When widening out the view to the surrounding area, we see that this site in North Dakota is just a local snapshot of the larger-scale processes that generated the dinosaur fossil deposits of the Lance Formation in Wyoming, which is at the same level in the rock record as the Tanis site in North Dakota.
There’s something else that doesn’t quite line up with the asteroid extinction theory. If the asteroid was responsible for the ultimate dinosaur wipe-out, how did all the delicate creatures like mammals, frogs, birds, insects, fish, plants, and amphibians survive the same catastrophe? The dinosaurs and many marine reptiles were all mysteriously wiped out and fossilized while many other smaller and more environmentally sensitive animals lived on? How could such an impact be powerful enough to wipe out all the tough, thick-skinned dinosaurs, but leave behind the fragile thin-skinned frogs and amphibians? The same goes for sensitive clams. And why do the frog and clam fossils found near dinosaur fossils look the same as frogs and clams alive today?[xxxix] If harmful chemicals and acids can soak right through the porous skin of frogs and amphibians, and silt chokes clam gills, how did they survive and the sturdy dinosaurs perish? Evolutionists also believe that small rodent-like mammals that later evolved into humans also somehow survived the asteroid by crawling into holes just a few feet underground.
Evolutionists also present the rescuing device for the incomplete dinosaur extinction with the idea that, “Dinosaurs didn’t really die out, they just evolved into birds.” This dino-to-bird theory resurfaced in the 1960s[xl] as a rescuing device for evolution, but the facts show that at least 120 species[xli] of birds were living at the same time as dinosaurs, including numerous “modern” looking birds like loons, parrots, flamingos, cormorants, sandpipers, owls, penguins, avocets, ducks, and numerous waterfowl.[xlii] Dinosaur footprints have even been found right alongside bird footprints.[xliii] The fact is that birds have existed alongside land creatures since the Creation week.
The evidence for a worldwide Flood burying the dinosaurs outside the Ark is everywhere. This happened just thousands of years ago during Noah’s Flood when the fountains of the great deep were broken apart and the year-long process of the worldwide Flood unfolded.
Massive oceanic rifting on a worldwide scale created new seafloor as old seafloor was pulled under the continents, creating cycles of tsunamis that occur when the seafloor plate binds to the overriding plate and then releases, just like how many tsunamis are generated today. As more and more seafloor was created at the ocean rifts, the new crust rose, pushing the bottom of the seafloor upwards. This caused the floodwaters to progressively rise higher and higher across the land. This explains the multiple layers in which these creatures are found as they were buried by the rising flood waters and repetitive tsunamis.
Dinosaurs were buried violently during this process, with over 90% of them now found disarticulated, or torn apart. Many of them are even found choking on mud as they died with their necks arched backwards. Widespread volcanism that occurred during this process also shows this happened quickly—over a single year and not millions of years. With few if any volcanoes in the Morrison Formation itself where the bulk of the fossilized dinosaurs are found, geologists believe that the huge volume of volcanic ash in the Morrison Formation is from mega-volcanoes on the West Coast, lofted and carried far to the east by wind, or else transported eastward by tsunamis, or both. The Morrison formation’s Brushy Basin Member alone spans five states and includes over 4,000 cubic miles of volcanic material. That’s enough to cover the state of New Jersey in ash one half of a mile deep!
There are many plain indicators in the rocks and fossils that this happened rapidly, not over millions of years. How else can we explain the massive dinosaur graveyard where 10,000 adult Maiasaura were found buried in mud without a single young dinosaur mixed in with the entire herd? Every single dinosaur in the area was at least nine feet long. It sounds like the adult dinosaurs were stampeding away from the imminent danger of raging floodwaters; their young could not keep up and became engulfed in some lower part of the remaining land of the peninsula.
These evidences surely point to the rapid and widespread catastrophe of the flood… But do you know what is even more convincing? Soft tissues found in dinosaur bones. Over just the last few decades scientists have been discovering astonishing occurrences of soft tissues in dinosaur bones. We’re talking about over 50 peer-reviewed, secular science journals that have now reported 14 bio-organic materials found in dinosaur bones. They’re finding blood cells, blood vessels, connective tissue and even collagen, which has a maximum shelf life of just tens of thousands of years, with some stretching it out to a maximum of 900,000 years. Either way—with a maximum shelf life of less than one million years, what’s collagen doing in dinosaur bones that are supposedly over 66 million years old? Many dinosaur bones are even found un-fossilized in places like Madagascar, Alaska, and Montana. Even the founder of the largest dinosaur museum in the world admitted that “…usually most of the original bone is still present in a dinosaur fossil.” This type of bio-organic material has been found in the bones of several different dinosaur species. They sure don’t seem like 65-million year old “rocks,” do they? When you step back and look at all this evidence, doesn’t it look like the catastrophic worldwide flood described in the Bible that happened just thousands of years ago makes better sense of the evidence?
[i] Clarey, Timothy. “Do the Data Support a Large Meteorite Impact at Chicxulub?” Answers Research Journal 10 (2017): 71–88. There have been well over 90 secular, published ideas attempting to explain this extinction, from dinosaur medical problems, overspecialization, competition with mammals, plant changes, climate changes, sea level changes to increased volcanism, the most popular remains an extraterrestrial impact (Charig, A.J. “Disaster Theories of Dinosaur Extinction.” Modern Geology 18 (1993): 299–318. See also Archibald, J. D. “Dinosaur Extinction: Past and Present Perceptions.” In Brett-Surman, M. K., Holtz, T. R., Farlow, J.O., and Walter, B, eds. The Complete Dinosaur, Second Edition. Bloomington: Indiana Press, 2012: 1027–1038.
[ii] Evolutionists hold that this extinction event pertained only to the dinosaurs living at the end of the “Cretaceous era.”
[iii] Paleobiology Database: https://paleobiodb.org/navigator/. Accessed January 26, 2017.
[iv] Kornei, Katherine. “Huge Global Tsunami Followed Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Impact.” Posted December 20, 2018. EOS.org. https://eos.org/articles/huge-global-tsunami-followed-dinosaur-killing-asteroid-impact. Accessed September 22, 2020.
[v] Map from Paleobiology Database: https://paleobiodb.org/navigator/. Accessed January 26, 2017; Chicxulub crater superimposed from: Ingomar200 (YouTube Channel): “Chicxulub Tsunami.” Posted October 13, 2012. YouTube. https://youtu.be/Dcp0JhwNgmE. Accessed September 22, 2020.
[vi] Image credit: Wikipedia.
[vii] Map from Paleobiology Database: https://paleobiodb.org/navigator/. Accessed January 26, 2017.
[viii] Rogers, Raymond R., Eberth, David A., Fiorillo, Anthony R. Bonebeds: Genesis, Analysis, and Paleobiological Significance. University of Chicago Press (January 30, 2008).
[ix] Eberth, D.A., Brinkman, D.B., and Barkas, V.A., “Centrosaurine Mega-bonebed from the Upper Cretaceous of Southern Alberta: Implications for Behaviour and Death Events” in New Perspectives on Horned Dinosaurs: The Ceratopsian Symposium at the Royal Tyrrell Museum (September 2007): 495. Image credit: Dinosaur Provincial Park Museum.
[x] Bond, Gerard. “Evidence for continental subsidence in North America during the Late Cretaceous global submergence.” Geology 4 (9) (September 1, 1976): 557–560.
[xi] Hopson, R.F., Hillhouse, J.W., and Howard, K.A. “Dike orientations in the Late Jurassic Independence dike swarm and implications for vertical-axis tectonic rotations in eastern California,” in Wright, J.E., and Shervais, J.W., eds., Ophiolites, Arcs, and Batholiths: A Tribute to Cliff Hopson: Geological Society of America Special Paper 438 2008: 481–498.
[xii] Christiansen, Eric H., Kowallis, Bart J., Dorais, Michael J., Mills, Chloe N., Pickard, Megan, Parks, Eric. “The record of volcanism in the Brushy Basin Member of the Morrison Formation: Implications for the Late Jurassic of western North America.” The Geological Society of America, Special Paper 513 (2015).
[xiii] Austin, Steven. “Supervolcanoes and the Mount St. Helens Eruption.” Acts & Facts (Features). Posted May 1, 2010. Institute for Creation Research. www.icr.org/article/supervolcanoes-mount-st-helens-eruption. Accessed September 22, 2020.
[xiv] For an introduction to this controversy in the secular geology community, see: Keller, Gerta. “The Impact Controversary.” Princeton University. https://massextinction.princeton.edu/chicxulub/2-impact-controversary. Accessed September 22, 2020: “Unfortunately, that did not happen either during the 1994 field trip attended by about seventy scientists, or in the years since. Instead, interpretations of the K-Pg age of the Chicxulub impact, Chicxulub as the single cause for the K-Pg mass extinction, and the tsunami scenario to explain any discrepancies became the lore in the scientific community and popular wisdom.”
[xv] Keller, Gerta. “The Impact Controversary.” Princeton University. https://massextinction.princeton.edu/deccan-volcanism/01-deccan-volcanism-adventure-science. Accessed September 22, 2020. See also:
Achenbach, Joel. “Did a massive volcanic eruption in India kill off the dinosaurs?” Posted December 11, 2014. Washington Post.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/12/11/did-a-massive-volcanic-eruption-in-india-kill-off-the-dinosaurs/. Accessed September 23, 2020.
[xvi] Austin, S.A. et al., “Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model of Earth History,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism, R.E. Walsh, ed. Pittsburgh, PA: Creation Science Fellowship, 1994: 609–621.
[xvii] For an overview of this background, see: Bosker, Bianca. “The Nastiest Feud in Science.” September 2018. The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/dinosaur-extinction-debate/565769/. Accessed September 23, 2020.
[xviii] Including geophysicist Mark Richards., formerly of UC Berkeley and now at the University of Washington. See: Richards, M. A. et al. “Triggering of the largest Deccan eruptions by the Chicxulub impact.” GSA Bulletin 127 (11–12) (2015): 1507–1520.
[xix] Snelling, Andrew A. “Did Meteors Trigger Noah’s Flood?” Posted January 1, 2012. Answers in Genesis. https://answersingenesis.org/the-flood/did-meteors-trigger-noahs-flood/. Accessed September 23, 2020.
[xx] Ibid.
[xxi] Sarjeant, William A.S. & Currie, Philip J. “The ‘Great Extinction’ that never happened: the demise of the dinosaurs considered.” Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 38, 2001: 239–247; Rocchia, R.D., Boclet, D., Bonté, P.H., Jéhanno, C., Chen, Y, Courtillot, C.M., and Wezel, F.C. “The Cretaceous–Tertiary boundary at Gubbio revisited: vertical extent of the Ir anomaly. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 99 (1990): 206–219; Crocket, James H., Officer, Charles B., Wezel, Forese C., Johnson, Gary D. “Distribution of noble metals across the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary at Gubbio, Italy: Iridium variation as a constraint on the duration and nature of Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary events.” Geology 16 (1) (1988): 77–80. See also: Oard, M.J. “Is the demise of the dinosaurs by a Yucatán impact a myth?” Journal of Creation 18 (1) (2004): 6–8. Oard noted: “Sarjeant and Currie (2001) further reported that the original site in Gubbio, Italy, made famous by the Alvarez et al. paper (1980), was reanalyzed by Crocket et al. (1988) and Rocchia et al. (1990). These authors found that the reported iridium anomaly was not a single spike in value as claimed by Alvarez et al. (1980), but a series of iridium-rich layers spread across a 4 m thick interval. Sarjeant and Currie (2001) concluded that this is hardly the type of data that support a single impact.”
[xxii] Sarjeant & Currie, 2001.
[xxiii] Keller, Gerta. “Conclusions – Based on 30 Years of Research.” Princeton University. https://massextinction.princeton.edu/chicxulub/12-conclusions-%E2%80%93-based-30-years-research. Accessed September 22, 2020. Keller stated, “After 30 years of chasing evidence in support of the Chicxulub impact as the cause for the KTB mass extinction we found little more than the iridium anomalies, which are usually very small (<0.5 ppb), except for rare locations in Italy (Gubbio), Denmark, Tunisia (El Kef), India (Meghalaya). They are never associated with undisputed Chicxulub impact ejecta (impact spherules), and frequently occur in multiple small Ir concentrations at clay layers above and/or below the KTB. Iridium concentrations such as these are increasingly being questioned as primary sources and re-interpreted as remobilization and re-concentration at redox layers (Colodner et al., 1992; Martin-Peinado and Rodriguez-Tovar, 2010; Miller et al., 2010; Gertsch et al., 2011). The Ir contribution from volcanism, formerly thought to be negligent, is also under study.”
[xxiv] Keller, G. et al. “More evidence that the Chicxulub impact predates the K/T mass extinction.” Meteoritics & Planetary Science. 39 (7) 2004: 1127–1144; Clarey, T. “Chicxulub Crater Theory Mostly Smoke.” Posted May 31, 2017. Institute for Creation Research: Acts & Facts. www.icr.org/article/chicxulub-crater-theory-mostly-smoke; Keller, G., Adatte, T., Baum, G., & Berner, Z. “Reply to ‘Chicxulub impact predates K-T boundary: New evidence from Brazos, Texas’ Comment by Schulte et al.” Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 269 (3–4) (2008): 621–629.
[xxv] Oard, Michael J. “The Extinction of the Dinosaurs.” Posted August 1, 1997. Answers in Genesis. https://answersingenesis.org/dinosaurs/extinction/the-extinction-of-the-dinosaurs/. Accessed September 23, 2020; Officer, C. & Page, J. The Great Dinosaur Extinction Controversy. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1996, Ref. 76, pp. 110–129.
[xxvi] Oard, 1997.
[xxvii] “Closing in On the K-T Boundary of Dinosaur Extinction.” Posted July 16, 2011. Answers in Genesis. https://answersingenesis.org/dinosaurs/extinction/closing-in-on-k-t-boundary-dinosaur-extinction/. Accessed September 23, 2020.
[xxviii] Oard, M.J. “Is the demise of the dinosaurs by a Yucatán impact a myth?” Journal of Creation 18 (1) (2004): 6–8.
[xxix] Sanders, Robert. “Did dinosaur-killing asteroid trigger largest lava flows on Earth?” Posted April 30, 2015. Berkeley News. https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/04/30/did-dinosaur-killing-asteroid-trigger-largest-lava-flows-on-earth/. Accessed September 23, 2020; Rosen, Julia. “Down to Earth With: Paleontologist Gerta Keller.” Earth Magazine. www.earthmagazine.org/article/down-earth-paleontologist-gerta-keller. Accessed September 23, 2020.
[xxx] MacPherson, Kitta. “Princeton geoscientist offers new evidence that meteorite did not wipe out dinosaurs.” Posted May 4, 2009. Princeton. www.princeton.edu/news/2009/05/04/princeton-geoscientist-offers-new-evidence-meteorite-did-not-wipe-out-dinosaurs?section=. Accessed September 23, 2020; Keller, Gerta, Adatte, Thierry, Stinnesbeck, Wolfgang, Rebolledo-Vieyra, Mario, Urrutia Fucugauchi, Jaime, Kramar, Utz, Stüben, Doris. “Chicxulub impact predates the K-T boundary mass extinction.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101 (11) (March 2004): 3753–3758. Note: “Since the early 1990s the Chicxulub crater on Yucatan, Mexico, has been hailed as the smoking gun that proves the hypothesis that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs and caused the mass extinction of many other organisms at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary 65 million years ago. Here, we report evidence from a previously uninvestigated core, Yaxcopoil-1, drilled within the Chicxulub crater, indicating that this impact predated the K-T boundary by approximately 300,000 years and thus did not cause the end-Cretaceous mass extinction as commonly believed. The evidence supporting a pre-K-T age was obtained from Yaxcopoil-1 based on five independent proxies, each with characteristic signals across the K-T transition: sedimentology, biostratigraphy, magnetostratigraphy, stable isotopes, and iridium. These data are consistent with earlier evidence for a late Maastrichtian age of the microtektite deposits in northeastern Mexico. See also: Thomas, Brian. “Strata Data Axes Asteroid Dinosaur Demise.” Posted May 14, 2009. Institute for Creation Research. www.icr.org/article/strata-data-axes-asteroid-dinosaur. Accessed September 23, 2020. Note Thomas states: “The new data she collected for her recent study bolsters Keller’s prior claim that the Chicxulub meteor did not annihilate the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period. The researchers determined that the mass extinction sediment lies on top of four to nine meters of sandstone material that was deposited on top of the Chicxulub crater. Keller told the National Science Foundation that these roughly 20 feet of ‘sediments were deposited at about two to three centimeters per thousand years after the impact,’ a deposition rate consistent with the concept that hundreds of thousands of years separated the events.”
[xxxi] Many secular geologists (including Keller) maintain that the Chicxulub impact predates the K-T (now called K-Pg) boundary by 120,000 years. See:
Gradstein, F., Ogg J., and Smith, A. A Geologic Time Scale. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (2004) and Keller, G. “Impacts, volcanism and mass extinctions: random coincidence or cause & effect?” Australian Journal of Earth Sciences 52 (2005): 725–757.
[xxxii] Wikipedia has a very useful page on the Tanis location: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanis_(fossil_site). Accessed September 23, 2020. For details about the site and images, see the leading article about the site, especially the Supplement: DePalma, Robert A., Smit, Jan, Burnham, David A., Kuiper, Klaudia, Manning, Phillip L., Oleinik, Anton, Larson, Peter, Maurrasse, Florentin J., Vellekoop, Johan, Richards, Mark A., Gurche, Loren, Alvarez, Walter. “A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116 (17) (April 2019): 8190–8199.
[xxxiii] Ibid.
[xxxiv] Ibid (Supplement, p. 7).
[xxxv] The Tannis research reports (cited above) provide strong evidence for the tsunamis happening in correspondence with one or more asteroids during the Genesis Flood. Both layers were full of both fresh and salt water creatures as well as land creatures and plants. They believe this 10-plus meter high tsunami took about a day to travel the 1,900 miles from the Chicxulub crater to North Dakota, if it in fact traveled up the Western Interior Seaway. While Biblical Creationists have no problem with the Interior Seaway during a stage in the Flood process, it certainly wasn’t the only flooding going on, with massive bonebeds of this size and much larger being laid down all across America and other parts of the world, happening at the same time. Secular geologists openly admit to a “Late Cretaceous Transgression” (see Bond, 1976) where catastrophic folding and buckling of the North American continent was necessary to deposit fossils today much higher than present sea levels could have done.
[xxxvi] “10,000 Dinosaurs in One Meter of Mud.” Is Genesis History. https://isgenesishistory.com/10000-dinosaurs/. Accessed September 23, 2020.
[xxxvii] Snyder, K., McLain, M., Wood, J., Chadwick, A. “Over 13,000 elements from a single bonebed help elucidate disarticulation and transport of an Edmontosaurus thanatocoenosis.” PLoS ONE 15 (5) (2020): e0233182.
[xxxviii] Horner, J.R. & Gorman, J. Digging Dinosaurs. New York: Workman Publishing, 1988, 122–123.
[xxxix] Hoesch, W. A. & Austin, S. A. “Dinosaur National Monument: Jurassic Park or Jurassic Jumble?” Acts & Facts. 33 (4) 2004.
[xl] The idea has been around since the 19th Century with Huxley proposing this notion first. See: Pavid, Katie. “How dinosaurs evolved into birds.” Natural History Museum (UK). www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-dinosaurs-evolved-into-birds.html. Accessed September 23, 2020.
[xli] Brocklehurst, N., Upchurch, P., Mannion, P.D., O’Connor, J. “The Completeness of the Fossil Record of Mesozoic Birds: Implications for Early Avian Evolution.” PLoS ONE 7 (6) (2012): e39056. See also: Mitchell, Elizabeth. “Birds Buried with Dinos at K-T Boundary.” Posted October 8, 2011. Answers in Genesis. https://answersingenesis.org/fossils/fossil-record/birds-buried-with-dinos-k-t-boundary/. Accessed September 23, 2020.
[xlii] Werner, C. Evolution Grand Experiment, Kindle Location 3458–3459.
[xliii] Martin, A.J., Vickers‐Rich, P., Rich, T.H. and Hall, M. “Oldest known avian footprints from Australia: Eumeralla Formation (Albian), Dinosaur Cove, Victoria.” Palaeontology, 57 (2014): 7–19. Note specifically: “Moreover, although the tracks may belong toenantiornithine birds, their overall form and size are similar to those of ornithurines (Falk 2011), specifically birdsbelonging to the modern clade Ardeidae, such as egrets and herons (Elbroch and Marks 2001; Lockley et al. 2009).”
