Flood geologists expect to find marine fossils mixed in the same layers as land animal and land plant fossils. We see it all over the world.1,2 Scientists can directly observe the results of massive waves, created by tectonic activity, that crashed across the continents.1 The global Flood caused many animals and plants to be transported both onto the land and offshore, too.
A recent discovery in Wales brings the land and marine mixing issue to the forefront again. 3 Conventional scientists from the University of Bristol and The Natural History Museum in London discovered dinosaur bones mixed in the same bone beds with fossils of countless marine fish (and at least one coelacanth), sharks, and swimming reptiles, including ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. 3
Lead author Owain Evans said:
The bone bed paints the picture of a tropical archipelago, subjected to frequent storms that washed material from both land and sea into a tidal zone. This means that from just one fossil horizon, we can reconstruct a complex ecological system, with a diverse array of marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and placodonts [extinct marine reptiles] in the water, and dinosaurs on land.4
And just a few years earlier, conventional scientists discovered bipedal dinosaur prints in a marine rock bed layer in the same part of southern Wales and in the same group of rocks (Upper Triassic Mercia Mudstone Group). 5 They suggested it was made by a dinosaur like Plateosaurus, a sauropodomorph (long-necked dinosaur) commonly found in Europe in similar rock layers.
So, it should not have been a surprise that the dinosaur bones found by Evans and his team were also attributed to Plateosaurus and to an unknown theropod (predator dinosaur). Maybe they found a possible body for the footprint maker.
The authors concluded,
The dinosaur bones are unusual, and Lavernock may have yielded more such bones than any other British Rhaetian bone bed. These terrestrial elements suggest that the lower bone bed accumulated close to shore, but underwent considerable transport, with clasts perhaps moving back and forwards, to explain the abrasion of specimens, the larger elements and absence of smaller specimens.3
With this evidence, it is surprising that conventional geologists still don’t seem to get it. They see the mixed assemblages and the flooding but interpret it in their deep-time worldview, ignoring the possibility that there was a global flood. Their many “storms” over vast time amount to many floods, just never the one Flood.4
Unsurprisingly, a better explanation for these recent Welsh discoveries is the global Flood. It explains the transport of the marine fossils inland, the abrasion, the mixing with land animals, and even the rapid burial. It also makes sense of the dinosaur footprints in freshly deposited marine sediments. Those dinosaurs were likely scrambling to find any remaining dry ground at that point in the Flood, leaving their footprints before being washed away themselves by the next wave.
The evidence continues to stack up in support of biblical truth. The rocks don’t lie!
References
- Timothy Clarey, Carved in Stone: Geological Evidence of the Worldwide Flood (Dallas, TX: The Institute for Creation Research, 2020).
- Tim Clarey, “Dinosaurs in Marine Sediments: A Worldwide Phenomenon,” Acts & Facts, June 2015, 16.
- Owain Evans et al., “Microvertebrates from the Basal Rhaetian Bone Bed (Late Triassic) at Lavernock, South Wales,” Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 135, no. 3 (2024): 321–334.
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Dario Radley, “Origins of ‘Welsh Dragons’ Finally Exposed by Scientists,” Archaeology News, June 7, 2024, https://archaeologymag.com/2024/06/origi
ns-of-welsh-dragons-finally-exposed/. -
Enrico de Lazaro, “Triassic Dinosaur Footprints Discovered in Wales,” Sci News, January 3, 2022, https://www.sci.news/paleontology/penart
h-dinosaur-footprints-10423.html.
* Dr. Clarey is the director of research at the Institute for Creation Research and earned his doctorate in geology from Western Michigan University.
