← The Creation Podcast
Loading summary
Transcript79 lines
- [00:06]
A
Far north, in the Canadian High Arctic, there's a place where large land animals don't live today. A landscape defined by ice, long darkness, and extreme cold. Yet buried in that frozen ground, scientists recently uncovered the fossilized remains of a rhinoceros. Not a single bone or fragment, but most of the skeleton preserved in remarkable condition. According to evolutionary timelines, this animal shouldn't have lived in the Arctic, shouldn't have been able to travel there from other continents, and shouldn't be preserved so completely in rock layers thought to be millions of years old. Yet the fossil exists. Welcome to the Creation Podcast, where we explore how science confirms scripture. I'm your host, Trey, and today we're taking a closer look at a remarkable Arctic fossil and. And what it reveals about Earth's past. Joining us is ICR geologist Dr. Tim Clary. Dr. Clary, thanks for being here.
- [01:01]
B
Oh, it's always a pleasure.
- [01:03]
A
Absolutely. We love having you on here. And before we dive into it, can you briefly share your background in geology and how your work here at ICR relates to interpreting these fossils?
- [01:14]
B
Well, I've gotten several degrees in geology, including a PhD and two masters along the way as well. One in geology, one in hydrogeology, which is groundwater geology, and their bachelor's in geology. So I'm geology'd out with the terminal
- [01:28]
A
degree at Too Many Rocks.
- [01:30]
B
What I do here is I've been working on the sediments and the stratigraphy, we call it, all the different layers all over the world on every continent, mapping those out and showing that there are similarities on every continent. The same order of fossils, the same order of rocks, everything that supports the global flood. And currently, I serve as the director of research for the research group here at the Institute for Creation Research.
- [01:54]
A
So you're well qualified to speak on this topic. And so, to set the stage, a new rhino fossil was recently discovered on Devon island in the Canadian High Arctic. So, for many listeners, that may sound mildly interesting. You know, oh, that's cool. But what does it really matter? But why is this surprising?
- [02:16]
B
Well, what's surprising about is the location and actually the location within the stratigraphy or within the rock layers as well. Things they didn't expect. So they had to come up with three sort of impossible explanations, and they even admit that these are nearly impossible, but yet that's all they could say to keep their evolutionary timeline.
- [02:35]
A
Okay, so, as you mentioned, this is interesting because of where it's found and also where it's found in the layers. But more than that, it's also interesting and unexpected because of how well preserved it is. The rhino fossil is about 75% complete and discovered in a geological feature called the Hatton Crater. Hatton Crater. Can you explain what the Haughton Crater is and why it's significant from a geological standpoint?
- [03:06]
B
Well, the Haughton Crater is really just a depression. You know, it looks like it's not for certain. I'm not sure if they got really looked over all the details of it, but it looks like it's an impact crater that happened prior to the deposition of this fossil obviously. And so it kind of formed the depression that the animal was kind of trapped in. As the animal, I believe was being transported by water into this location, the evolutionary scientists would say it somehow fell in there or whatever it did. But it's a big crater, it's 15 miles wide. So it isn't like just a small little sinkhole that you think about like in Florida where it was collapsing houses might collapse into a sinkhole, for example. This is a big impact. And as a creationist we do believe there are impacts, particularly during the flood year. We see several of them. One in Sweden, other places around the world. The old Chicxulub impact down in the Yucatan Peninsula that many evolutionists say caused the extinction of dinosaurs. I'm not a big fan of that, but that's another whole topic in itself. But there were actually impacts and there were impacts. Of course the meteor or Baringer Crater in Arizona is another impact, but this was even bigger. It was made about a 15 mile wide location, but it happened in what's called the Oligocene, earlier Oligocene, these are some of the tertiary layers, they get divided out. We also call those the Tejas megasequence, the last megasequence in our flood interpretation. This is when the water was receding, we believe. But nonetheless this kind of provided the basis, you know, kind of the basin for the animal to get trapped in Gotcha and become fossilized.
- [04:38]
A
Okay, so according to the mainstream interpretations of all of this, how old are the rock layers where this fossil was found?
- [04:46]
B
Well, the fossil is found between what's called the Oligocene below and the Miocene above. So right about the boundary and that's estimated to be, and they're age is 23 million years ago. So about 23 million years ago, you know, give or take a few million years between friends. It's kind of how it works, give or take.
- [05:05]
A
That's awesome. Okay, so why was it surprising that this particular fossil was found in this spot in the, in the geologic record?
- [05:15]
B
Well, this Particular species, which I think is pronounced Epia seretharium, has also been found in Europe in many places and even in Asia, but in rocks that are 20 million years older than that, according to the evolutionary timeline. So they didn't expect to find the same species, you know, rock layers, this young in their worldview and also at this location. How did it get from Europe or Asia all the way over across the Atlantic Ocean or across the Arctic Ocean, depending on which way. How did it get to Devon Island? That's the big question. That's the first big question we gotta address.
- [05:48]
A
Gotcha. So it was found, A, remarkably preserved B, found in a layer that it's not supposed to be in. C, it's found in a place that it's not supposed to be in. Correct. Okay. All right. Well, then let's dig into that. Let's try to answer some of these questions. So finding a rhino in the Arctic raises a question. How did it get there? As you mentioned, and according to evolutionary paleontology, rhinos appear in Early Cenozoic rock layers and including Europe and North America. So from what you stated, that would be much older. Correct.
- [06:23]
B
About 20 million years. They estimated somewhere down closely to what's called the Eocene epoch. So you're looking at the Lower Tejas or the Lower Cenozoic. And what we're finding, this particular rhino we're talking about today is actually kind of in the middle part of that. Okay. So you're looking at, you know, there's all these names, if you're not familiar with them, it's just the kind of. The lower part of the Cenozoic is where they find them in Europe and Asia. And now we're up kind of in the middle. So Cenozoic, where they found this particular.
- [06:51]
A
Gotcha.
- [06:51]
B
One specimen apparently, too.
- [06:53]
A
So just to clarify, when we use these terms, secular scientists will use these terms, and they tend to have an age assigned to them. When we use these terms, we're just referring to the layer that it's found in. We're not assigning the millions of years to the layer, correct?
- [07:10]
B
That's correct. We use the names because we almost have to touch to understand where we are in different parts of the world at different times. And that's what my megasequence research showed, is that these are pretty valid, that you can use the same, you know, the megasequence names, but the rock layers that are within those megasequences are pretty consistent as well.
- [07:29]
A
Okay.
- [07:29]
B
And so we can find salt layers for Example that stay within the boundaries and different unique rock types that stay within the boundaries. It isn't just the fossils we rely on to correlate its fossils and rocks, but they do seem to work. And that's because it was a global flood. So you expect to find the same things on every continent at about the same time. But this was a surprise because this is the only one. This is the only specimen of this particular species. And it's. According to evolutionary timeframe, it's out of place. Not only out of place physically, but in terms of time as well.
- [08:02]
A
Okay, so what geographic or geological barriers even would have existed between Europe and North America at the time that this rhino was. Was supposedly walking around and then dying?
- [08:15]
B
That's a very good question, because that's pretty much the same it is today.
- [08:18]
A
Okay.
- [08:19]
B
We don't think, if you're a secular scientist, you wouldn't think that the world has changed too much from the Oligocene as this was kind of found in. Till today, most of the continental separation already occurred. You already have major waterways. You already had the big Barents Sea and the Greenland Sea and the Arctic Sea. The major part of the Atlantic Ocean was already there. There wasn't a whole lot of movement since then, at least not considerably. So you still have the big barrier. How could this rhino have gotten across from Europe or Asia to even past Greenland to the other side of Greenland?
- [08:53]
A
Because there's an ocean in the way, right?
- [08:55]
B
There's several different waterways, including the big ocean. You got the Barents Sea, for example, the part of the northern Atlantic Ocean. You've got hundreds of miles to get across there. Then you've got some other smaller waterways like the Framing Straight. And then you could also, as they've suggested in the paper, they suggested maybe there was a series of islands that kind of came along that exist in the Atlantic, but there's no evidence of that. That was also suggested a couple years ago for some trees that showed up in the coal beds on the coastal areas of Iceland. And these are trees that don't have a very broad range in terms of their pollen or their, you know, to really extend thousands of miles or in this case, hundreds of miles across. So they also suggested there are these, you know, missing islands that they kind of bounced along, but there's no evidence of these islands. We can do the studies of the ocean. We can look at the. There's no evidence of volcanoes that stuck up along there. We just see deep ocean. And so again, they're stuck with the same problem. And they Ultimately concluded that the rhinos maybe they swam right, they floated across on ice sheets. That was their solution to explain how they got across possibly from Europe and Asia to the Devon island today.
- [10:12]
A
Well, how valid is that as a suggestion?
- [10:15]
B
Well, it's kind of like going back to Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer where you're floating on an ice sheet, going right across, you know, what would the animal eat going across that way? And how could they swim that far? Those distances you're looking at, you know, hundreds of miles depending on the direction you go. So it's really, you know, they're suggesting the impossible. And that's the first impossible thing they suggest is how did this fossil get there? Because they don't believe it was washed in. They don't believe it was moved by any sort of water. They think it had to move there as a living animal and just died in this crater and then got buried. And we finally.
- [10:48]
A
It was so tired from swimming so far.
- [10:51]
B
That could be. But it came by itself apparently. So that's the other.
- [10:55]
A
It got lost.
- [10:56]
B
But they did find, you know, other things with the fossil that were interesting, like these land plants that were very temperate, so much, much warmer climate. Plants were found with this rhino, which fits with the rhino. The rhino would have been, you would think, would have been something that lived in a warmer climate, not in the high Arctic. So that leads us to our second impossibility. How could this animal survive if it lived there? And these plants, if they live there in such cold northern climates where today there's months and months of no sunlight at all and you wouldn't expect to find temperate plants up there. Today there's almost no plants on Devon Island. And so you could argue it might have been a little bit warmer maybe at the time, but it's still very difficult to explain away the lack of sunlight and for these animals to live up there. So that's kind of the second impossibility is how did temperate plant fossils and this particular temperate fossil itself, a rhino, you wouldn't expect. We don't really see them in the Arctic. They might have been woolly rhinos that, that lived in cooler climates, but you wouldn't find them this far north. So it's very unusual.
- [11:57]
A
Well, in this specific rhino it's the same species as one that's over here. Right. So that's also, it's not just related, it is the same rhino. So that causes a problem. And like you mentioned, I mean, this rhino would have been eating temperate vegetation sources and I can't imagine, I mean, swimming from where it was to where it is. I mean, a rhinoceros body I can't imagine would be equipped to deal with the cold in that manner.
- [12:36]
B
Right. And they actually mentioned that, you know, they actually mentioned one of the quotes from the authors that wrote this. In the dispersal via the Nalb, which is the North American land bridge, more recently than the Eocene, has been assumed all but impossible. They even assumed that there's too much water, too many waterways to cross. So that's actually a quote that they admit this really seemed impossible, but yet because they found it there, they have to somehow explain it away. And it's very, very difficult. And then you combine that with the temperate plants that they found with it and you're thinking, how can temperate plants be that far north? We're way up on the, almost the northern west side of Greenland today. There's almost no plants like they found as fossils living there.
- [13:21]
A
It's all dead. Well, okay, you mentioned the North Atlantic land bridge. Let's talk about that. What is the North Atlantic land bridge?
- [13:30]
B
Well, that's that perceived bridge that they somehow walked across. That's these islands that don't exist that you could walk from Europe over to Iceland maybe and then over to Greenland and then over to, you know, what's northern Canada today.
- [13:43]
A
Is there any evidence for this?
- [13:45]
B
Well, that's the problem. There isn't. There really is very little evidence at all. Even in the ocean today, you'd expect to see sunken islands or something, but you don't see that at all. You just see the Atlantic Ridge made new sea floor, but there's, you know, there's some volcanoes, but there's not enough to actually be above the water level by any means. So the only land we really have is Iceland and Svalbard and Iceland, but they're all separated by hundreds of miles of water in each case. So you have to suggest, like they said, that these things might have swam or they even floated on sea ice, which is kind of the Rudolph the Red Nosed Ranger theory, which is just about as mythological as doing this.
- [14:24]
A
Yeah, I was about to say that seems kind of silly. So we have just a bunch of what it sounds like to me, just guesses, a bunch of wild guesses as to how this creature got from here to here, you know, 20 million years removed from when it's supposed to be there.
- [14:41]
B
Right, right, yeah, you know, the distances. And so again, in desperation, they basically kind of said the animal might have swam that far or might have actually floated on sea ice or did a little bit of both. But again, just like trying to transport animals across the ocean today on floating mats or something like that, which some people suggested for dispersal after the flood, it's very difficult to do that without a food source and without fresh water.
- [15:07]
A
Right.
- [15:07]
B
You need some sort of fresh water source. If you're floating out there for a few weeks or a few months, you need some sort of sustenance, including water. So you'd have to have a lot of rain coming down, have to build up in the pools. And their scenario doesn't account for that at all.
- [15:21]
A
So it is just kind of a guess.
- [15:24]
B
In addition to the distances of traveling, they also have to explain away those temperate plant fossils they found with them. And they said in their article, there's a quote. They said the presence of a rhinoceratid in the high Arctic represents a paleoecological puzzle. Though the floor of the Houghton Crater suggests a temperate paleoclimate, there was a near modern light regime with months of winter darkness. So they acknowledge that there's going to be months of winter darkness. And it just doesn't make any sense to have temperate plants up there. So even their article, they, you know, they recognize this conundrum, but then they don't offer any explanation other than swimming. Future research is needed.
- [16:03]
A
Yeah. Oh yes.
- [16:04]
B
So they explain away the first impossibility of getting there by the swimming or kind of in desperation or floating on sea ice. Secondly, they really don't explain it at all. They recognize there's a big problem.
- [16:15]
A
We'll figure it out later.
- [16:16]
B
Figure it out later. That's the plan. Then there's even a third problem.
- [16:19]
A
Yeah. So that third problem, which of course is, as you mentioned, this fossil is remarkably preserved, a 75% preserved. The study reports that there were preserved proteins in the rhino's tooth enamel and describes the bones as three dimensionally preserved and only partially mineralized. Why is this preservation such a big deal? I mean, we've found frozen animals before that are pretty well, you know, preserved. So what's going on?
- [16:51]
B
Well, you know, this claimed 23 million year old rhino still has original proteins found in the teeth enamel. How do you preserve proteins for 23 million years? You might argue, well, it's up in the Arctic, it's been frozen. But the evolutionary scientists don't believe it was frozen all that time. They believe it was a little warmer at one point, even up that far north. And so to have them preserved and have the fossil itself so well preserved, where it's only partially mineralized, we predict at ICR that As they dig into this fossil more, we may hear about some other proteins they find in the bones themselves, not just in the teeth enamel. Because a lot of other specimens we find in the United States, in the Hell Creek cremation, for example, we find lots of preserved proteins and tissues that shouldn't be there. Admittedly they're a little bit older, they're supposed to be 68 million years old or more. And they found other preserved proteins that supposedly go back 500 million years in fossil worms, some of their proteins, but they just keep pushing the impossibility more and more back deeper in the past. And this is just another example of preserved proteins. They are telling us these fossils are young, those fossil worms, they aren't 500 million years old. Those fossils are 4,500, 4,500 years old when the flood happened, same age as these fossils. So this is just an animal that was buried in the receding phase of the flood 4,500 million years ago, versus some of the animals that were buried in the advancing the rising water phase of the flood. So the Tejas or the Cenozoic is what we interpreted ice there as the receding phase of the flood. And so these have been animals that would have been stripped off the highest hills as the water went over the top on day 150 of the flood the Bible talks about, it would have stripped everything right off, right down to the crust. And in Canada, much of Canada was in fact the highest point of North America. It would have been stripped off that and spread all over Greenland, Scandinavia, all together at one point during the pre flood days and the area was the highest hills. Everything kind of thins as you go toward that, telling us it was a high hill. And so once it went over the top, it stripped everything off, including this poor unlucky rhino who wasn't on the ark. And if you weren't on the ark, you became a fossil for pretty much the story for most of these animals, including the dinosaurs. But again you see the impossibility of not only getting this fossil there, according to the evolutionary story, it had to evolve, it had to walk over there somehow or swim over there. Secondly, the climate today isn't conducive for it to live there, nor the plants that are found with it. And then now, third and finally, how do you have preserved proteins, 23 million year old proteins, according to the evolutionary timeline, preserved in this animal. How do those survive? Again, there's no answer for these things. Most evolutionary scientists will say, well, we know they're that old we just don't know how they're preserved. You can go back to, we know this fossil's there, we just don't know how it got there. Did it swim, did it float across? We don't know how it could survive in these temperate climates, but we just know it must have. And so they stick with their story no matter what the evidence and the data show. They just can't give up on their deep time story and evolutionary story. Unfortunately, whereas the Bible tells us about a judgment that took place 4,500 years ago in the flood, that would have been the best way to explain this whole scenario. So those proteins are preserved because they're not that old. The plants are there because they were washed in. The whole ecosystem stripped off those highest hills, including the rhino, was buried and kind of dumped into this crater that formed possibly during the flood as well. And so that explains how those animals got there, how those plants got there. They weren't living there.
- [20:32]
A
Right. They were washing, they were displaced. Yeah.
- [20:35]
B
And again, the whole world might have been a global greenhouse in the pre flood world. So you expect to find more temperature plants washed in as well. And third, and finally again, the idea of them getting there, how do you get these animals there without them being transported in by the flood?
- [20:51]
A
Right.
- [20:51]
B
You know, it doesn't make a lot of sense. No island hopping, no island hopping. There's no evidence of this phantom land bridges at all that they put forth. And there's no evidence of, you know, animals living that high in the Arctic today, or plants, temperate plants living that far north as well. And then of course, the proteins are telling us that we find in all these specimens. There's been over 130 publications now in conventional journals, and this is just one of them that tells us these proteins can't exist for millions of years. It can't even exist for 1 million years, let alone 23 million or 68 million or 500 million. All these things are telling us there really was a global flood that happened just 4,500 years ago like the Bible describes.
- [21:36]
A
Right. And I've heard people say, and maybe this is something that you can speak to as a scientist, I've heard people say, well, maybe these fossil proteins could last for a million years. And then they'll say, well, that's longer than your 6,000 year time span. And my thoughts are, well, a million years is a lot closer to 6,000 than it is to 23 or 500 million. You know, what would you say if someone presented you with that? Well, it still says it could last for almost a million years. What would you say to that?
- [22:19]
B
Well, if you were going to look at this objectively, you didn't have a preconceived idea, and you saw these things and you looked at the empirical studies of decay of these proteins that they find in the teeth, enamel, whatever, doesn't matter, any organic proteins that they find, you would say, without having any preconceived notion that these fossils must be young, they can't be, you might even say, just a thousand years old or a few thousand years old. To me, it's amazing they could survive 4,500 based on the biblical timeline. And if you read the Bible and you didn't know anything about deep time and all this putting the Earth old, you would say the earth is about 6,000 years old. You add up the genealogies, that's what you get. And so the evidence from the fossils is telling us things are thousands of years old. The Bible's telling us 1,000 years old. It's only evolutionary science that's telling us the Earth is old. Earth is millions and billions of years old, and these fossils are millions of years old on top of it. When you look at the objective data, the historical record written in the Bible, which is true history, you go back and get the idea of, you know, if you gave the book to somebody that didn't know anything else, they would say the Earth is young. And if you gave them the evidence from these fossils, showed them the evidence of these fossils decay or these proteins decaying, and showed them what we found, these same proteins we found in these fossils, they would say, these are young. Just is exactly why the founders of all of our sciences back 200 years ago and more, all believed the Earth was young. They had no problem with it at all. It's only in the last 150, 200 years that we've decided, oh, we need some way to explain all life on Earth. And if we can explain all life through some sort of mystical evolution, we need some sort of a deep time to kind of hide behind, to say this could happen given enough time. But as many people have shown in the past, even the probability of that happening with unlimited time is impossible.
- [24:13]
A
Right. Okay. Wow. I'm just thinking about this from a perspective, just like a logical perspective. If you're looking at this specimen, this rhino, and you're like, wow, this isn't where it's supposed to be, but everything else lines up. Maybe it does look 23 million years old. Maybe it doesn't have the Temperate plants. Maybe it's just the rhino fossil and it's in the wrong spot. And then it's like, well, maybe we can figure this out. Or maybe the rhino is in Europe and it does have the temperate plants. But it's like there's three separate lines of data that don't line up. Like, you can kind of maybe explain away one or two, or be like, hey, we don't know, we'll figure it out. But when there's three that all clearly point in one direction, what do you think? And you're not a mind reader, but, like, what do you think is going through their minds when they're trying to explain this away? Why are they so unwilling to just look at that data and be like, wow, maybe what we're thinking is wrong?
- [25:19]
B
Well, I think maybe that does pass through their minds a little bit. They might, you know, as a few of them might go, this seems really odd. And you can see that from the quotes that they say in their paper that something's not right here. We thought this was impossible. But like you point out, when you have three impossible things stacked on top of each other, the probabilities of that actually occurring are basically slim to none. And so it makes it even worse because they have to explain the impossibility of getting there somehow. Walking over and floating on ice or swimming across hundreds of miles of open ocean, even what they believed during the Oligocene, you had pretty much the plates were in the same place and the continent's in the same place as today. Secondly, the climate wouldn't be much different. You'd be far north. And so how do you have, you know, temperate plants living that far north along with this rhino? And then third, and finally, how do you preserve those proteins that are found in it? And there's probably going to be more proteins found in the bones once they start really looking at the bones. Maybe they don't want to look at the bones for that reason.
- [26:14]
A
Right. Because we also know that, like, preservation requires, like, rapid burial. Right?
- [26:20]
B
Yeah. When you stack these all up, I mean, there's three impossibilities that coincide. It's just. It doesn't make any sense. So I'm sure some of them probably think about, well, this is kind of weird, but that's the only way to explain it. They have to stay within their paradigm of deep time and evolution. And even in this case, they're suggesting stasis, which is common in the fossil record. You find a rhino in Europe and Asia that's older and 20 million years later, you find it again. So that obviously there's no evolution taking place. You just find a new specimen of the same thing at a different level. And again, the flood explains that better. Because you'd expect to find different animals buried slightly different depths, sometimes different levels in the flood, maybe not considerably different, because that same ecosystem is being buried about the same time all over the world. But you're going to see some variations within the Cenozoic. For example, whether you're looking at stuff in the Eocene versus the Oligocene or the Miocene, there's really not that much difference in the evolutionary worldview. There is. You're looking at 20 million years or more of time. But in terms of the flood, it might have been just a week.
- [27:24]
A
Right. And the flood was not tranquil.
- [27:27]
B
Yeah. And it was probably. And then these were deposited during the receding phase. I believe based on our interpretations of the global stratigraphy all over the world, it's pretty clear that the Cenozoic or the Tejas megasequence, including the fossils, the rocks buried, contain these fossils, those that have been buried in the receding phase. So things were stripped off the highest hills. A lot of your mammals, your camels, your horses, all these things show up in these same rock layers. Even the whales show up in these rock layers. They were being washed in and then kind of buried as the water drained off. So the water was stripping things off right down to the crust and then just burying these sediments on the edges of the continents. And Devon Island's kind of on the edge of North America. It's getting off those islands. It's not surprising we find some of these animals. They found lemurs up in the same general location, lemur like animals. About a year or two ago as well. They found the same lemur down in Wyoming, about the same level. And so they were washed off. In between was the high ground. They were spread both directions. So we see that happening in other animals. And this is just another kind of a surprise to the evolutionary world because of those three impossibilities, impossibility to get it there, impossible to have it living there with these temperate plants as well. And then third and finally, the impossibility of the original proteins found preserved in the teeth enamel. Right to them. When you add it all up, it's pretty difficult to be an evolutionist.
- [28:52]
A
But according to the flood model, not only is it acceptable that all those things are occurring, but it's expected.
- [28:59]
B
Right. That's exactly what you'd expect. That's exactly what we're seeing and in a progressive flood that we've kind of discovered after the research we've been doing at icr. So we have a pretty good model. This is buried in the receding phase, stripped off the highest hills, but the whole ecosystem is stripped off. Just like the trees are ripped off at Mount St. Helens. The whole ecosystem, the plants, everything, all got transported probably in big massive units into these areas and spread all over. So it wouldn't surprise them if they find a few more of these rhinos in different locations. But it's a very difficult place to work in, conduct research, and many of them are still buried underground. You gotta wait for these animals to be exposed by erosion. And that's the problem with fossils everywhere. There's billions more dinosaurs, but they'll never be discovered because they're underneath Nebraska, for example.
- [29:48]
A
Right, let's just dig Nebraska up. Right.
- [29:51]
B
And so all over the world, there's more dinosaurs probably than we'll ever find. It's just not these certain areas. It's just that's where the rocks were tilted up and folded and then he eroded by the receding phase of the flood as well. So most of the mountains were popping up during the ice during the receding phase. And then so that exposed a lot of these dinosaurs, like Dinosaur National Monument. You need to tilt the rocks up to kind of strip enough sediment off to get down to where the dinosaurs were. So in this case, you just found the right level. They happen to be looking in the same area and they see this rhino probably sticking out, and they dug back in and found almost a complete rhino, which. Wow, totally unexpected.
- [30:28]
A
Yeah, well, totally unexpected for them, right? So why is this topic for, you know, for the average Christian who is like, okay, rhino, that's cool, but why is this important? What can the average Christian take away from this?
- [30:46]
B
Well, I think the best takeaway is the flood explains it the best of all these scenarios that the evolutionary world put out there, you know, they basically have to believe in three impossible things, three impossible steps to get there. And again, it isn't just one, it isn't just two. It's three really impossible occurrences. And I think the flood simplifies it all, that it only happened thousands of years ago, that the water, the flood can transport things in, get trapped in this little crater, you know, kind of almost like a little sink that trapped it in and. And didn't have to walk, didn't have to travel and didn't have to swim, didn't have to somehow get there mysteriously and Then also explains those plants better. So I think your average Christian can take heart, I guess, in knowing that the flood was real, that this is just another example. Again. Now that does the flood explain it the best? I feel that's the actual solution to this case. The flood really did deposit this animal and all the fossils pretty much in the world we see today. It was. Most of them were from the flood, except for the uppermost layers where you have Ice Age critters and those, you know, mammoths and mastodons and some woolly rhinos we see later. Those are animals that got off the ark and spread around during the Ice age after the flood. But for the most part, the flood really was real. We can believe the authority of God's word that when he's talking about a judgment for the flood, it was a real judgment.
- [32:10]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Dr. Clary, thank you so much for walking us through this discovery. As we wrap up, what are three key takeaways you'd like listeners to remember about this whole Arctic rhino fossil and what it reveals about history?
- [32:26]
B
Well, the three impossibilities that they put forth are solved by the flood.
- [32:29]
A
Sure.
- [32:30]
B
The possibility of the rhino getting there from Europe and Asia with all the water in between, solved. The idea that you had a temperate climate plants found with the rhino, which suggests that the rhino might have been living with those plants, solved by the flood again, washing them off of the high grounds and transporting not only the rhino, but the plants. And third, and finally, it explains the original proteins found in the enamel, because the flood wasn't that long ago, only four to 500 years ago. So I think really, the, you know, this whole story, this whole research points to the flood more than it points to evolutionary science. Evolutionary science is left baffled with three impossible solutions. Again, it isn't just one. It's two and three stacked on top of each other to explain this particular specimen. But for those of us that are creation flood advocates, this is a minefield of wonderful, wonderful discovery that really shows that the flood explains this the best.
- [33:35]
A
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Clary. If you learned something interesting from this episode, be sure to like and subscribe and share it with someone who wants to stay up to date on new scientific discoveries that affirm the biblical account of creation. You can also support our ministry by joining our members and patrons community. Their names are scrolling on screen right now. One of our viewers had a question for you, Dr. Clary. John P. Jones asks. When I look at the topography of West Virginia when flying there from Dulles Airport, I see very Distinct rows of mountain versus valley terrain. Was this created by retreating waters from the flood? Is that the same for the Grand Canyon?
- [34:17]
B
Well, that's a good question. It goes back to a lot of things. The Appalachian Mountains particularly are a series of almost like accordion like folds. In some cases, they were part of the earliest flood sediments that were deposited as the flood was beginning. So you only see early flood sediments in the Appalachians. And then midway through the flood, we think with the movement of the plates moving rapidly, you kind of form the Appalachians, one of the few mountain ranges that formed early in the flood. Most of the mountain ranges that form towards the end of the flood, but this one formed early. So it formed these rocks and kind of squeezed them almost accordion style. So you see these vertical ridges sticking up and down. But they were affected by the floodwaters. The water went over the top of those, even washed them down. Made the Appalachians much more subdued than the Rockies, for example, because they were run over by the floodwaters. And so there was a lot of receding phase water. You can see the evidence of the receding phase even in the Appalachians in these mountains that you see in West Virginia. And you can actually see some interesting features sometimes where the water goes. Rivers today go right through uplifts. And to do that, you had to have water above come down and then kind of recede right through these cracks and then kind of rips it open. And that's why I believe best explains Grand Canyon as well. So there is a good tie in to that. Grand Canyon, same thing. The ground, the water was receding from the flood in this case. And as the water was going up, the land was coming up from tectonic activity. The cracks formed in the still wet sediments and the water just fell out the crack and just kept deepening that crack over and over and over. So you have 5000ft of, 5000ft of uplift. You have 5000 foot deep canyon that formed. So you don't get the deep canyons in West Virginia in the Appalachians, because the land was already uplifted earlier in the flood, kind of formed those accordion folds and things we see. But the water did go up over the top of that and kind of washed back over and did smooth it all out. So you don't see a lot of jagged peaks like you see in the Rockies, for example. But it is very similar to what happened at Grand Canyon because it was the receding phase did greatly affect it and helped kind of smooth it out in this case, Grand Canyon, because you had 5,000ft of uplift. You also got 5,000ft of down cutting. And there's all these side canyons all the way down. And so you can be pretty sure that it wasn't just a simple flow of water. It was flow in all directions, coming in from different directions, carving these deep canyons all the way along its course. It's an amazing feature that God almost like took his finger and just said, I'm going to show you what I did and show all the rock layers down below that you can't see at the surface. So if it wasn't for Grand Canyon, we wouldn't know about a lot of those rocks until later we started drilling oil wells. And I was able to connect those same sediments all across North America. I was able to collect many of those sediments, connect those all the way to rocks all over the world. And we see the same patterns on every continent at about the same levels and the same time, and the same fossils in them, including fossils like we talked about today in the receding phase, we see rhinos like this in Europe and Asia. We see them in North America all about the same time. In terms of the flood, maybe just a few weeks apart, but it is best explained by the global flood. People need to take their blinders off and really start looking at, like I've got the opportunity to do at icr, look at the whole world, look at the continental geology of every place, not just one area. Most people work one area their whole lives. They work in a certain state or they work in a couple of states, or they work just one continent, but they don't get to see multiple continents. And so it's been a pleasure since I've been here that, you know, it's been. As a geologist, it's been just a real pleasure to look at all the different continents and then to see the similarities. And they all show the same patterns that only can be explained by a global event, which the Bible describes as the global flood. So, I mean, it's a great joy. Geology. Geology can be fun, believe it or not. And you find some cool things in the rocks, like this rhino. And so people think, you know, science, that's no fun, but it is, because it's almost like opening Christmas presents, you know, every time you do a new continent or you find a new discovery like this, that really shows that the flood is the best explanation for this particular rhinoceros fossil that was found. And all the other explanations are you're fighting the impossible, not just one, but three. And so this truly is an amazing discovery and it's amazing to work in creation science and to look at the. Really the. From little one detail like this to the global picture we see again and again and again, everything points to the global flood.
- [38:53]
A
Absolutely. And if our viewers want to take a look at some of your research on the, you know, the megasequences, they can take a look at your book Carved in Stone. We also have a video called Mega Sequences of the Great Flow. And there will be a volume two of Carved in Stone at some point.
- [39:15]
B
Well, yes, the first book covers three continents, and so that was the first kind of half of the study. But we're wrapping up now our seventh continent, which is Antarctica. And there's not a lot of data there because there's still a lot of snow and ice built up all around it. But we're analyzing that so that the second volume will include the other four continents, but they all show the same pattern as the first three. So. But I'm going to at least get it out there, show the data and say, here's what the data show and here's the best interpretation. And the best interpretation is, again, a global flood.
- [39:46]
A
So keep your eye out for volume two of Carved in Stone. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Clary, for being here and thank you for answering the question from John. And thank you, John, for sending in such a great question. If you're watching and have a question you'd like our scientists to answer at the end, end of a future episode, you can submit it using the form linked in the description below. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you next time on the Creation Podcast.