These Fossilized Trees Are a Problem for Evolution

Imagine a forest containing various forms of life from just over 300 million years ago. There are 20-meter-high Calamites trees, giant Arthropleura crawling around the forest floor, and Hylonomus lyelli; the first reptile, building its home inside the stump of a lycopsid tree. Now imagine that a devastating rainstorm strikes, causing a massive flooding event. As a result, inches of sediment rapidly covered the forest floor and fill hollow logs and tree stumps; trapping some of the creatures who lived inside of them. This process repeated itself several times over the span of 15 million years. . . . Because of these changes, we can move through geological time as we walk along the beach at Joggins.1

Now, before we analyze their explanation in detail, if you are unfamiliar with these famous (in geological circles) fossil cliffs, they consist of a stretch of tilted sedimentary rock strata approximately 15 km long and sometimes 30 meters high within the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, Canada, which, of course, has the highest tides in the world. The tides here cause rapid erosion to these cliffs as the waters come in and out very quickly, revealing new fossil discoveries regularly, including 10-meter-tall trees2 that extend upright through the strata.

One of the main reasons I mention Joggins (other than its in Canada and I’ve been there several times) is that the fossil cliffs there have been declared a UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage site which is revered as an evolutionary icon and referred to as “the ‘Coal Age Galapagos,’ . . . [which] provide an outstanding example of the evolution of life on Earth.”3

According to the evolutionary explanations given on the website, how did the cliffs form? “Layers of sediment were deposited one after another from a series of flooding events, which formed the cliffs that we admire today.”4

They even include a picture of the strata with the following caption underneath.

Caption on website—“Image of the Joggins Fossil Cliffs. Here you can see the individual layers from each flooding event that have been tilted overtime. Image Source: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1285/”

However, one can also look up pictures like this one below, showing the numerous examples of giant trees that I mentioned earlier, which extend vertically through the very meters of layers they tout as being laid down in a series of floods that deposited several inches (their words) of sediments at a time.

Caption from website—“One of the standing fossil trees for which Joggins is famous, in which are found fossils of the world’s earliest reptiles. (Photo: Andrew MacRae).”5

Facts vs. Interpretations

The facts, which everyone can agree with, are as follows. We can all go to Joggins and observe over 30 meters of sedimentary deposits that contain thousands upon thousands of overlapping fossils at the site. These fossils range in height from flat imprints, to snails a few centimeters high, to larger creatures like amphibians and reptiles, to hollowed-out tree stumps a meter or so high, all the way up to 10-meter-tall trees.

However, the evolutionary interpretation for the fossils within those layers (which supposedly span at least 15 million years) goes against the commonly touted slow and steady sedimentary deposition rates that we saw earlier in Part 1—a rate of less than a centimeter per year. Instead of continuous incremental deposition, evolutionists claim these layers were deposited by several separate events, such as devastating rainstorms. They claim these rainstorms caused massive flooding events, resulting in the accumulation of inches of sediment (notice it said inches not yards or meters) that rapidly covered the forest floor and filled in hollow logs and tree stumps. Keep in mind, this process “repeated” itself many times over the span of those made-up 15 million years.

Yet we are told by evolution-believing experts that fossilization requires complete and rapid burial of any organism for it to become fossilized. Do you remember the quotation I presented earlier in Part 1 that stated, “They can be as small as a single cell or as giant as a dinosaur skeleton or petrified tree. . . . For a fossil to form, sediment must cover the organism quickly”?6

So how did the hundreds of trees in the Joggins cliffs survive if they were upright through the “millions of years” of time as the strata slowly built up during floodlike events? Those trees would obviously have been dead and exposed to the elements while the inches of sediments built up around their bases and then gradually overtop their entire length throughout the “millions of years.” How could they have remained standing and preserved over these vast time periods while exposed to the environment before they were completely covered?

One could propose that different layers accumulated on top of each other if there were definitive boundaries between each one with no penetration by any organism passing between those layers. But that’s not what we see in Joggins or many of the other fossil sites worldwide. The overlapping trees that are several meters high destroy that notion completely, so these widespread evolutionary-based explanations of deposition rates versus fossil formation simply don’t make any sense.

Again, lest anyone think that Joggins is some kind of anomaly in the world of geology, examples of these polystrate fossils (fossils that traverse through “many strata”) can be found all over the world and have been known about for a very long time.

Just look at this picture from the 1800s titled “Coal-Mine at Treuil, St. Etienne, France, Showing the Trunks of Fossil Trees Traversing the Overlying Strata of Sandstone.”

In addition, we should consider the following as well. If the rock strata at Joggins were created by a series of successive rapid events, where do the “millions of years” fit into their story? Because if every one of these layered groupings were deposited quickly, where is the physical evidence of millions of years having happened?

I ask that because I’m old enough to remember being told in school that the actual layers (what you could see and feel) were the “rock-solid” proof of deep time, and here they are saying all the layers we observe happened rapidly, within days. So where do the millions of years fit?

Sedimentary Special Pleading

You see, when all has been said and done, the natural explanation of what we observe at Joggins (and other sites with the same phenomenon) is that the entire body of sediment containing the trees was put into place all at once, or else they would never have been covered and would have all rotted away over the “vast ages.”

However, that doesn’t just apply to these trees in Joggins. It applies to whatever sized fossil you are referring to wherever they are found. Even a dead fish only a few centimeters thick, let alone some of the gargantuan creatures we find within some layers, would need to have been covered rapidly which would have required a lot of sediment.

Yet even a few centimeters of sudden deposition defy the normally referenced rates. Also, if there is any overlap of these fossils throughout the same layers, then we know that all that interconnected strata must have been laid down at the same time. This is just a commonsense conclusion that anyone should be able to easily understand.

Without a complete bias toward deep-time explanations, it’s difficult to think of how anyone could have come up with something other than rapid deposition. In fact, it’s so obvious that some modern evolution-believing geologists are now proposing massive catastrophic flooding events took place in the past to account for it.

That’s right, despite the geological community’s embracing the concept of uniformitarianism over the last 150 years (which generally rejected the belief in large catastrophic events as an explanation for rocks and fossils), they are now embracing the idea that there may have been several. They just don’t want to admit it might have been one big flood, of course, because that would be far too biblical.

They are in the minority, however. Their hybrid model causes major explanatory problems by attempting to include rapid deposition of massive quantities of sedimentary rock while simultaneously preserving the old incremental model’s timescale. Just look at this article from NASA’s Earth Observatory page where they simultaneously attempt to keep the old timeline alive while at the same time supercharging the deposition rates:

For an organism to fossilize, it must be buried quickly and preserved relatively intact for thousands or millions of years. . . . Nova Scotia’s Joggins Fossil Cliffs preserves a paleontologist’s dream: multiple layers of ancient forest with trees still in their standing positions and undisturbed animal tracks. . . . Floodwaters deposited massive quantities of sand and mud quickly enough to cover the region, preserving trees where they stood. . . . The rock layers of the Joggins Fossil Cliffs preserve a 15-million-year sequence of sedimentary rocks.7

Conflicting Concepts

So can you see the conflicting explanations we’ve seen both in Part 1 and 2 here? “Common knowledge” states that sediments generally get laid down in watery environments gradually, at rates of less than a centimeter a year. However, both the Nova Scotia Museum and UNESCO websites said the Joggins region was created through a series of individual smaller flood events that deposited inches of sediments at different times, not slowly and incrementally as per usual.

Now it seems the Earth Observatory article is contradicting both explanations, saying there were events at Joggins so massive that entire trees (tens of meters tall) were covered all at once. We could suspect the reason they have is that trees being buried over hundreds of thousands of years is quite silly. As their fellow evolution-believing geologist Derek Ager put it,

If one estimates the total thickness of the British Coal Measures as about 1000 m, laid down in about 10 million years, then, assuming a constant rate of sedimentation, it would have taken 100,000 years to bury a tree 10 m high, which is ridiculous.8

However, even assuming this new massive deposition model (which makes much more sense), why would they continue to say the layers got laid down over 15 million years if all that deposition could be done in one (or even two or three) very rapid, colossal event(s)? How do fast events take millions of years to happen?

It’s as if they keep inching closer and closer to the truth of what really happened to produce the majority of the rocks and fossils we see, based on the facts we observe, all while clinging to the falsehood of their required but unobservable concept of millions of years. This devotion is likely due to their commitment to the story of evolution in contrast to the truth of biblical creation as recorded in Genesis.

The Bible Has the Answers

People are looking for answers and want to know why they should trust the Bible when they think that scientific evidence such as rocks and fossils seem to disprove the Bible’s history. And yet, the existence of the enormous fossil graveyards we see around the world are the very evidence of the worldwide judgment that God proclaimed on this planet because of the wickedness of man, as recorded in Genesis 6–9. It was the global event that most people refer to as Noah’s flood.

The existence of the enormous fossil graveyards we see around the world are the very evidence of the worldwide judgment that God proclaimed on this planet because of the wickedness of man, as recorded in Genesis 6–9.

This deluge was the mechanism that accounts for the rapid deposition of the majority of sedimentary rock found worldwide. This rock entombed billions of creatures within it after the fountains of the great deep burst open, followed by 40 days and nights of torrential rain that would have mixed together with all of the accumulated biomass and been laid down over several months during the flood into the great layers we see today.

And this yearlong event then culminated in the shifting landmasses colliding and thrusting up out of the oceans and shedding off the water from the newly formed continents we live on today, just as Psalm 104 says.

You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. At your rebuke they fled; at the sound of your thunder they took to flight. The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them. You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth. Psalm 104:6–9

Yet while the biblical account makes sense of the facts around us, even many Christians get caught up in the nonsensical evolutionary explanations put forth and seem fearful to challenge them, lest they be thought of as “science deniers” if they were to speak out against the idea of millions of years, when nothing could be further from the truth. The Bible’s history fits perfectly with the facts we observe around us, so it is as scientific as can be, and yet, many seem to want to “go with the majority of experts” and try to adjust Scripture to “fit” with the science of the day.

However, when these supposed scientific explanations don’t make any sense, are constantly changing to attempt to accommodate different facts we observe, and often contradict one another, why should we bother with them when the Bible has a perfectly logical explanation?

It’s amazing to think that when I asked Google AI how many books on geology have ever been written, it responded, “It’s impossible to definitively say . . . but . . . the total number of books published on geology is likely to be in the tens of thousands.” While we can’t give you an exact number, it’s safe to say that there are likely hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of books on geology that have been written throughout history.

Yet all we should do is trust in one book—the revelation of God to his people—the Bible. When you trust in the truth of God’s Word starting from the very first verse in Genesis, you can understand what we see in God’s world matches what we read in his Word. As the old King James puts it, “Thy word is true from the beginning” (Psalm 119:160).