#51 UNDERSTANDING THE PRE-FLOOD/POST-FLOOD WORLD + Dr. Marcus Ross

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Hello.

Hello.

Welcome to Biblically Speaking.

My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host.

I am so excited today to bring in a new guest, but before we get to him, I've got a question.

Have you ever wondered if the fossil record actually supports a global flood?

Today I have Dr. Marcus Ross here as a leading paleontologist and expert in young earth creationism to

talk about the flood or pre -flood world, the flood, and a post -flood world.

Dr. Ross, I'm so excited to have you here.

Before we get into the discussion, you've got an amazing background.

Just what you sent over from your bio, it's nothing short of impressive.

You grew up loving dinosaurs, as we all do.

I've got a nephew right now loving dinosaurs, but then you grew up in Rhode Island.

You had your bachelor's in earth science from Penn State, then you got your master's in vertebrate paleontology from

South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and then you got your PhD in environmental science and geoscience.

After that, you taught for 16 years at Liberty University, and now you're the CEO and founder of

a cornerstone educational supply company with your wife.

I'm so excited to have this level of intellect on the show, but the reason I found you is because you were

on my beloved documentary, Is Genesis History, on Amazon Prime.

I saw you there and I was like, I've got to talk to this guy.

Now that you're here, I'm a little starstruck, and I'm so glad that you are.

How are you today?

I'm doing very well, and thanks for such a gracious introduction, Cassian.

We'll see at the end of this who's the smartest person around here, but thank you so much for joining me.

I really appreciate your channel and all the people that you bring on, and the fun that I see when I've

watched some of your episodes of just the joy and the interest and the fun

that your program brings out.

Thank you for bringing me along, and we'll see if we can have some fun on this one too.

Absolutely.

I think it's so interesting when you have somebody within the scientific field, like paleontology,

talking about God and talking about the Bible, and so rarely do we get opportunities for scientists who

are, I would say, commonly agnostic, commonly atheistic, to say,

here's the bridge between the word of God and what we've seen in science.

We're going to be getting into the flood, the ice age, and the fossil record, and what that actually tells us about the Earth's history

and how that's echoed in the Bible.

It's going to be a great discussion.

Jumping right into it, life before the flood, what was the pre -flood world like?

That's a great question.

The clues that we have about what the world was like before the flood are what we have preserved in the flood

and what we have from the record of the Bible itself.

To set this up for your audience, I'm a young Earth creationist, and you mentioned that the film is

Genesis History.

That was a film that brought a bunch of scholars together in order to talk about young Earth creation,

and not so much as a reaction against evolution or anything like that, but actually to put forward a proposal,

a model for understanding Earth history from a young Earth creationist perspective.

One of the things that I certainly tried to do, and many of my colleagues in young Earth creationism that I'm good friends with,

I think evolution in the sense of writ large from single -celled organisms all the way up through

humans and elephants and oak trees is incorrect.

I think that it's incorrectly grounded scientifically as well as theologically and biblically.

I hope to see an integration of the biblical text on the one hand and the world of science.

On the other.

I think that young Earth creationism meshes those two together.

For your audience, just a quick primer, a couple of important aspects of what a young Earth creationist believes.

They believe that God created the world in six days, much as we experience days, light and dark

periods of time, roughly 24 hours.

They believe that that was done recently, within the past few thousands of years, and that's obtained by looking at the

genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11, connecting those to Abram, and it kind of leads you back.

You can look at those very tight, you can look at them a little bit more loose, but no matter what, the history of Earth

coincides with the history of humanity, which was created on the sixth day of that creation week.

And so who were those people that were created on the sixth day?

That'd be Adam and Eve.

So young Earth creation perspective affirms a historical, real Adam and Eve, whose

temptation and fall into sin in the garden brought forth consequences not only for humans,

but also for the entirety of the creation.

As the stewards, as the one who were put in dominion over the world, our failure had

reverberations further out.

And then lastly, we might say that young Earth creationists affirm a global worldwide flood

at the time of Noah that completely reshaped the world, killing off all of the land dwelling, air

breathing animals and people that happened to be around at that time, and effectively just

resetting the world.

It was in many ways, especially as you read the Bible theologically, a recreation of the world.

And so those are some of the key aspects that bring someone to a young Earth creation perspective.

All young Earth creationists are going to agree on that set.

We'll have our own internal disagreements about how the flood operated or when the flood started and ended,

or how many or few species might be in that, say, a created kind for that matter.

But those would be the sorts of things.

So getting back to your question, what was the pre -flood world like, think of the world as pre -flood world,

destroyed in the flood, and then the world that we live in now is this post -flood, this kind of disaster, post

-disaster sort of world.

What we get from the pre -flood world is the few clues that we have from scripture, but also the clues that we have

from those flood rocks that are taking out communities of organisms and burying them

in some kind of sequence.

So from that, from those two things, some things that we can come along with is that the original creation

was deemed by God as good and very good, and we can see that in the closing verses of Genesis 1,

verse 24 and verse 31, for example.

We can also see that it was highly diverse.

God had said that he wanted to create animals and plants of various types according to their

kinds.

So there are multiple sorts of things.

And when we look at the geological record, we can see that there are huge diversities and varieties of different sorts of things, many of

which are not around with us today.

So we might be able to even say that the pre -flood world was more highly diverse and had a wider

variety of different types of organisms than what we experience in our world today.

That's actually a wild thought to think, because we think the reverse, sorry to cut you off, but it's almost like, okay, we started with

simplicity and it's evolved into how diverse we have it today, but you're suggesting the opposite, that

God created everything right at the beginning, right from the get -go.

So it started with a lot more than what we had today, because like you said, we're in a post -global catastrophe

world.

This is a post -global flood, this is the destruction aftermath, so we're going to have less diversity than we did to begin

with.

That's a really good observation.

Thinking about the contrast between a evolutionary perspective, which is going to start with obviously the world

extremely ancient, but you start off with a handful of original life

forms that are just singular cells, and over the course of many billions of years, they're supposed to evolve and diversify

into everything that we see in the world today, plus everything that's in the fossil record.

And so, yeah, you start with very little and you end up with a whole bunch, whereas from a young earth creationist

perspective, God creates an initial vast diversity of organisms, of which right now we only

have a subset of.

Absolutely.

Do you have any apologetic for the way that evolution does not work in your belief

system for the young earth creation?

Because I know that a lot of people have bought into this Darwinism and survival of the fittest and whatever

works keeps growing on.

I think that we've all bought into that because it makes sense.

I could see the logic there.

But for you, as a young earth creationist, how have you, in some way, talked yourself out of that

to say that evolution does not make sense?

Yeah.

And so what we might want to do first is recognize that evolution can mean a lot of different things.

I've already mentioned one definition of evolution, which involves the common ancestry of everything that has ever lived on earth back

down to those first few cells.

But also we might look at evolution on a much smaller scale that is looking at how field mice in some

population are adapting to a change in annual amounts of precipitation that they

have or new invasive species that are coming in and having to adapt.

Can I eat this?

Can I not?

What does that do?

That will have an effect on their population.

So that latter sort of thing are things that young earth creationists don't have any issue with whatsoever.

There are components of evolution that we completely embrace that populations and species can change over time

and can even change into new species, even new genera.

But we do think that those variations can only go so far before they kind

of hit some sort of, if you will, genetic or developmental barriers that keep them within a certain set of

lanes.

And that that ability to diversify is not so broad as Darwin

certainly envisioned it was and as modern evolutionists think that adaptability is something that will continue to be able to produce

all manner of new things that in the evolution of life you can go from reptilian types of organisms

into mammals if you just give yourself enough time in the right conditions and the right luck, if you will.

Whereas a young earth creationist is going to say, no, there are actually lots of different kinds of reptiles, lots of different kinds of mammals, and they

have the ability to diversify and evolve in a small sense, but not in this

massive unfolding of all life over time.

So there's, you know, there's actually a bit of agreement.

And so therefore, some of the arguments against young earth creationists like, oh, you don't believe in evolution and we can see it because

of, you know, this color change that's happened on these moths.

And you say, actually, as a young earth creationist, that's no issue at all.

My own PhD advisor one time said, regarding these sorts of small scale things, he said, you know, those are a

stuff of evolution.

But are those the stuff of evolution?

He's he's looking for what's the mechanism that brings big changes, not tinkers around and

reshuffles the genetic deck, so to speak.

So as a young earth creationist and even speaking as a scientist, I don't really see

the genetic capacity in what we what we have to be able to unfold new

forms in this kind of way.

We seem to be plastic and yet still restricted into

these sorts of lanes of diversification.

You can diversify finches into lots of different types of finches and their beaks can be bigger and they can be smaller and their coloration can be more red

and more yellow, more blue, you know, maybe not blue, but red and yellow and brown.

But you're not going to be able to, over time, push that finch into something more like a hawk

or a hummingbird or a radically different kind.

This is such a good distinction in what the scalability of evolution can look like, because I agree.

I think that it is a generalistic way to approach that term of evolution means this like I will

one day become a different being because if I just give it enough time versus like the scalability of like, well, within this type of

scale, evolution is possible, but you can't generalize that all evolution is possible with

the sense of understanding creation, the level of complexity that we started with and how, yes, the

survival of the fittest, like with somebody with one attribute, if we just keep reproducing that one attribute that is unique,

you know, a bunch of blue eyed people only mate with blue eyed people, we're probably going to have a lot more blue eyed people.

I mean, I don't have to get into like the genetics and, you know, dominant genes, but that does make sense.

And this line that you're drawing of, we don't go from fish to mammals, that's a pretty big

jump that we're kind of reaching, despite that millions of years that they're claiming.

Is there an aspect to your research that also supports just the earth isn't millions of

years old?

There are, I think, some some good evidences that the earth is much younger than commonly claimed.

And I'll also back that up a little bit by saying there's also some very good arguments that the earth is ancient.

So as somebody who's gone through training in the biological, geological and paleontological

sciences, especially geology and paleontology, you know, there is no way to escape this art, the ideas of evolution,

or a deep age and ancestry to the earth itself.

And so there are hard questions for young earth creationists that we still need more answers to, especially

in areas of like radiometric dating.

We have some good leads on some answers to that, but we don't have a full perspective.

And actually, for me, as a young earth creationist, that's exciting, right?

Because if we don't have all the answers, there is more to discover, right?

There's more to God's world to find.

And you know, if everything was solved, then we wouldn't have this conversation, right?

It would be in all the textbooks and everything would be done.

But the reality is God has created a big and amazing world out there that only he knows the full functionality of

it.

He only knows the book of Job, right?

Talking to Job, do you have any idea what I am doing?

No, you don't.

Well, this is all going on.

But to answer your question with a couple of just, you know, kind of quick bullet points over here.

Hit it with the stats.

You know, a good number of reasons to think scientifically that the earth might be younger than is

commonly claimed.

And for that, we might think about, well, one, we've got

carbon -14.

One of the common radioactive dating methods is carbon -14.

That's usually used in order to date recent items.

Things that are in the last 30, 40, 50 ,000 years, maybe, you know, 60 at the most.

But it's archaeological stuff and it's not paleontology and it's not geology stuff because carbon decays

extremely quickly compared to this presumed long age of the earth.

But when we go into the fossil record, we do find that there is carbon -14 and what seems to be

not contaminated carbon -14, but original carbon -14 or at least carbon -14 that hasn't been put there by

people in all of our fossil fuels, our coal, oil,

natural gas, even strangely enough, diamonds that are supposed to be several billion years in

age.

And what I really love about the carbon -14 studies is they were actually engaged by young earth creationists.

They thought up of an idea, several ideas of where would we find carbon -14.

Let's go look at it.

Let's get samples, send them off to labs that are independent of us.

So nobody can accuse us of running the samples and doing things wrong.

We send them off to standard carbon -14 labs and they came back with results that challenged the idea that these

rocks were actually incredibly ancient.

Instead, they looked like they were thousands of years old.

And that's kind of a head -scratcher because a rock can't be both 57

,000 years old and 2 .4 billion years old at the same time.

It's one or the other or neither, right?

And something else is going on.

And that was an aspect of what was called the rate project, which was run back in the early 2000s.

An interesting one in paleontology, my own discipline, especially from the work of Leonard Brandon R.

Chadwick, is that there is very little evidence in the fossil record of critters

running around in the mud and making little tracks and trails compared to what would be expected if the earth was

incredibly ancient.

In paleontology, we call this bioturbation.

So bio meaning life, so you get critters, turbid, something is like cloudy and stirred.

Up.

So bioturbation is about how animals stir up the dirt, let's say, at the bottom of the ocean as they're running around looking for

food or digging protection tunnels.

And typically on the seafloor today, if you were to go out to the Atlantic seaboard where I live,

you could get yourself a meter by meter plot worth of ocean floor and you would

find that there's no nice little layers in it at all because the last set of layers that were made by a storm

that came through the month before had been obliterated by all these animals running around inside the dirt and

inside the sediment looking for food.

And so when we go to the fossil record, however, when we go to the rock record, we find that sedimentary rocks are very finely layered

everywhere, all over the place.

And in very, very few locations do we find that kind of extensive bioturbation.

That's the sort of thing that I would expect if the rock record is accumulated very, very quickly and organisms

don't have time to go burrow through stuff because they're too busy dying.

And then every once in a while, after a layer has been laid down and things calm down for a little bit, the critters that are in that uppermost

layer have an opportunity to start trying to survive again.

But then they get buried by successive layers and they get trapped in there.

So you get these occasional bioturbation layers.

But compared to what we see in the modern world, which is supposed to be what we use as our analog for studying deep time,

the modern world is filled with bioturbated sediments and the rock record has fantastically few

by way of comparison.

So this is leading us into a perfect segue into the flood.

So thank you.

What you're saying, I mean, like pretend I'm five years old.

You're saying that the trauma of how quickly the water was settling because of the flood

essentially ruined any homes, any habitation that any animals that were currently living in the

ocean.

Now we've got millions more gallons from the rain and the melting, this entire global flood.

The mountains are buried in the sea.

So so much more water.

If you're a fish, if you're Nemo, you're not able to create home.

If you're a lobster, you can't create it.

There's too much water movement.

There's too much sediment coming down and that sediment is just stacking on top of each other.

And you're saying that you can look at the rock record and that shows a quick development of that rock

record without any like life in it.

Is that what you're saying?

Or am I totally off?

No, that's a that's a great summary.

Yeah.

The rate at which all the sand and the mud and the silt and the clay that's pouring down to the bottom of the

ocean from all the chaos up above is accumulating so fast that organisms don't

have time to behave like normal organisms.

They're being buried and compressed by the additional layers of sediment that are now laying down on top of

them.

So they don't have the space and they don't have the ability to start moving around.

They're under too much pressure and they die in there.

And then when conditions change, because the flood is a year long event, it's a long time.

There are going to be pauses in the action of the flood, so to speak.

When those pauses happen, you've got this big stack that's been made and then we have a little bit of a pause.

Anything that's in that mud up at the pause that's still alive can be like, well, OK, I'm alive.

Maybe I should eat something.

Right.

You start looking around.

Maybe I should build a burrow.

Maybe I should try and tunnel upward.

Maybe there's a little bit more rock, you know, not rock yet, but still mud and sediment above.

And they're like, I got to get up.

So maybe we're going to try and go upward this way.

And that might happen for the span of several hours or a day or something like that.

But then new material from a new wave of erosion on the continent starts flowing back down

into where these critters are and buries them and now compresses all that stuff that they were in and they can't get out.

And so you get these little windows where bioturbation happens or happened.

But most of the rock record shows little to none of that.

And again, that's really surprising, because when we look at the world today, which is what we are supposed to

use in geology to understand the past, we look at the world today, bioturbation is

incredibly common.

Basically, if it's not been thoroughly bioturbated, that's the thing that needs an explanation.

That's that's the issue of like, hey, what's wrong with this environment that there's no critters here?

And yet when we look at the rock record, most of the environment show none of the evidence of organisms.

And yet they're in places, they're deposited in places where we would absolutely expect them and, in fact, have

lots of fossils of them.

So, yeah, it's a it's a good indicator of just how rapid a pace the flood was

depositing things, meters every couple of hours.

That's I mean, there's no way of getting out of that.

Whoa, the flood, that's kind of the point.

There's no way of getting out.

Whoa, I like how real that was.

I can actually like picture that.

Yeah, because it's pretty unfathomable to have like hundreds of feet of water, thousands of feet of water.

You mentioned kind of like the areas that we see this.

Is it not like spread all over the world?

Are there just pockets where we see this type of fossilization?

So let's take an example where I'm at in Lynchburg, Virginia.

If I head over the hills to my west, I get into what's called the Valley and Ridge province.

If any of your listeners and watchers have driven on Interstate 81, they will be

driving in the in one of the valleys of the Valley and Ridge province.

And they're driving the same rock from like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, all the way down to Georgia.

It's crazy.

It's like the same exact rock.

So as you get into those areas, you've got sedimentary rocks like sandstones, shales,

limestones.

And as we look at those, we geologists will try to figure out how thick is this unit.

They'll use measurement staffs and things like that to try and measure out thicknesses.

We might have 10 ,000 feet worth of sediment in this area.

And you don't think that it's there because you're like, well, the mountains in the in the Appalachians aren't that high, right?

A couple thousand feet around.

But the rocks are all tilted this way.

So you actually are going through thousands and thousands of feet of sediment.

It's just that all the rocks are stacked this way.

They used to be this way and they've been tilted and they've been eroded all through the

processes going on during the flood.

So, yeah, it's the scale is hard to imagine.

Yeah, the Appalachians could have been basically as big as the Himalayas.

They were probably being eroded as they were rising up.

But nonetheless, they you look at one ridge where the rocks are tilted this way and you look at the Atlantic Valley and then there's rocks on the other ridge

that are tilted this way and you kind of go, oh, wait, those used to do this.

Yeah.

Does that have to do anything with tectonic plates?

It does.

And good for you.

Tectonic plates.

That's awesome, right?

Those are the big slabs of the Earth's crust that are moving side by side or towards or away from one

another.

And so North America and Africa, probably early on in the flood, shortly after its

beginning, collided with one another.

And when they did that collision, buckled the land, pushing it upward, but also basically made these

big folds and wrinkles in the landscapes, kind of like if you had a tablecloth on your

table and you push it, right, you end up seeing those wrinkles and the wrinkles don't go in the same direction

that your hands go.

They go perpendicular to that.

They go across the table.

Oh, that's a great visual.

Yeah.

So now you get the idea, OK, if I'm pushing this way, you know, my wrinkles are oriented in this direction.

So when we look at the Appalachians, if we look at the Scandinavian highlands, if we look at the Atlas Mountains of Morocco,

these are all components actually of a single mountain chain that used to be together when Africa, North America and Europe were all

smashed into one.

You can follow the trend line through all of those countries and they have similar kinds of rocks and similar kinds of fossils.

And then it was part of the classic evidence for continental drift as it was proposed by Wagner, sorry,

yeah, Wagner, and then later adopted into a program we call Plate Tectonics today.

So, yeah, Plate Tectonics is why we have wrinkled rocks in the Appalachians.

It's why we have volcanoes where you happen to live in Hawaii.

The Pacific Plate is riding over top of like this jet of lava that's poking, trying to poke its way through

the crust.

And every time it does poke its way up through, it makes a volcano.

And as the crust moves away, it just leaves the volcanoes that are stuck on top of it.

As one, two, three, four.

And so, yeah, the plate is carrying away the volcanoes from the jet of lava.

Whoa, that was so easy to understand.

Great.

That's the advantage of having taught non -major science classes for 16 years.

It's like we've got to make this interesting and fun and easy.

I used to take like a marker and just bleed it through a piece of paper and slide the paper and you'd see the marker bits come through and it would show

you, you can tell the direction of where the plates have gone on the basis of the markers.

And when you knew which spot turned up first.

So, yeah.

Well, you mentioned your northwest are the old ones and the islands to your southeast are the

young ones.

The plate is moving to the north and west and making islands.

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Oh, OK.

OK, so I think I'm on the newest one, if I'm on Oahu, maybe right in the middle.

I don't know.

I got to look at them on a map.

So the Big Island is the newest and everything to the north and west of that used to be where

that island was, but has been trundled over to the north and west of this as the Pacific Plate migrates

that direction.

My gosh.

So the Big Island moves, we'll have another island to its southeast.

That's amazing.

I'm glad we'll have more Hawaiian islands.

You kind of mentioned when all the continents were together.

Does that mean Pangaea is biblical?

It's a thing.

Now, I wouldn't say it's biblical because the Bible doesn't talk about it.

Right.

It never says anything about this.

In Genesis one, it talks about all the seas were gathered together.

So some people have thought, oh, that means all the land was in one place.

I think that might be reading a little bit too much into just the seas are off of the land.

We even have basically one ocean today, but we call it five oceans.

Right.

So we have lots of continents and we have one actual world ocean.

So there's a couple of different ways that you can look at that scientifically.

But from the standpoint of a modern young earth creationist, we believe that Pangaea formed during the early stages of the

flood and then tore apart a little bit after that.

And the continents have migrated from that position to their current ones during the flood and

over some period of time during the post -flood world as well.

Well, OK, so post -flood world, it looks like a lot different than that pre -flood world.

That pre -flood world seems like an Eden, you know, very diverse, very lush.

And then it's all wiped out.

And then we have these scientific moments like mass extinctions,

ice age.

What's the timeline on that post -flood?

That's a good question, and that's an area of debate within young earth creationism as far as the precise dating and

how we might look at that.

But nonetheless, pretty much all young earth creationists are in agreement that there was an ice age

that followed after the flood.

So the ice age is part of the post -flood world.

And we can see part of that because the types of gravels and things like that, that the ice

age glaciers left behind are on top of all the other geology that

was formed during the flood and even some geology that was formed after the flood.

This is the icing on the cake.

Like literally, if you think about a layer cake, geological layers, this is the icing on top.

And this icing isn't even on all the top everywhere.

We hear the ice age and we think like, oh, the whole world was a giant ice ball.

No, if you lived in southern Mexico, you would not know you were in an ice age.

You're in the tropics.

It's still tropical.

It's still hot.

But if you were in Ohio, you would have been right up against the ice sheet, perhaps

even in the ice sheet, depending on where it was pulsing at the time.

So there are certain parts of, say, North America where I grew up in Rhode Island at one point was completely covered.

At other points was not.

You can think of Long Island south of New York and Connecticut as like the end of where the

glaciers actually got in the northeast.

That is basically a giant dump zone for the end of a glacier.

Oh, boy.

OK, a couple of questions there with the ice age, I get that it was not like a total ice ball, like a water ball and now ice

ball.

But was it really just post -flood when you get to a certain latitude that just all became

frozen post -flood?

A lot of it did, but not all of it.

So in North America, we had a lot of the northern hemisphere, a lot of North and North America was completely covered.

We had two like really major areas where glaciers were moving and flowing from the north to the

south.

And but there were places even between them where occasionally there were like these corridors

that people could move through.

So when the first Native Americans came to North America, as far as we know, there's some questions about when this

happened.

But we do know that at least the conventionally thought of earliest peoples

were basically following bison herds.

And we think about the American bison, right?

It's not American.

It was an immigrant from Siberia.

You know, it came from Mongolia and China.

We're still getting stuff from China, you know, but it's toys now.

But basically, Alaska and Siberia used to be a completely connected

giant landmass.

There was no break between them whatsoever.

And even today in the Bering Strait, there are places that are only a couple of tens of feet below sea level before you hit

ground again.

So it doesn't take much drop in the level of the ocean to expose a

connection point between Asia and North America.

So during the Ice Age, what you can think of is as the glaciers build up, they are building up by

borrowing water from the oceans.

So they take the water from the oceans, they put it up on land as ice cubes, giant, huge ice cubes that we call glaciers.

And as that happens, sea level goes down because we're putting the sea water like this.

And so that drop in sea level is what allows people to then and bison to come across

the Bering Strait.

Because they're walking on the ocean floor that has been kind of drained.

That's right.

All of that is peeled off away and is now no longer ocean floor.

Doesn't look anything like ocean floor.

It's just land and animals are walking and grazing and migrating.

And it's a huge area.

I mean, it's, you know, 500 miles across, like from north to south, 500

miles or more.

And so like these folks don't even know that they're crossing into a new continent.

It just doesn't look like that.

Got it.

And then you just follow that down through a nice little corridor between a couple of these ice sheets.

And they end up either going towards California or they end up going on the other side of the Rockies and

end up into the Great Plains and then migrate across North America with all the bison and everything else that came.

Across.

Yeah, we're kind of getting into that after the flood.

Got it.

Yeah.

I'm just thinking, if I'm Noah, how soon after a total global flood am I dealing

with a total global ice age?

That seems pretty rough.

Or is that like a totally different lifetime?

And there's Noah and then it's 500 years later that we see that ice age.

That's a really good question.

So for most young Earth creationists, they think that this is happening in a very tight window.

Most of them are going to say that between Noah and Abram is about 390 years, according to the numbers

that we see in Genesis, Genesis 11 in our modern Bibles.

They're adding up these dates from the Masoretic text, right, the Hebrew Old Testament.

If you look at the dates from the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, those numbers are all different.

And you end up with about a thousand extra years between Noah and Abram.

And then it gets even worse, because if you look at the Samaritan Pentateuch, its numbers are different, too.

So we've got like three different chronological sets.

And, you know, we don't know exactly which one is correct.

The Masoretic numbers are almost always better than these other translations, just because they're actually words that

are translated in Hebrew.

It's not like we would put a number 150.

They have to write 150.

And if that gets messed up in translation, then that, you know, it's like somebody forgot the hundred.

They just put 50 or, you know, what have you.

So, you know, how do we take those?

Do we take those chronologies very, very tight so that everybody's son, you know, is coming up and we add

these numbers directly?

Or is there some play in, you know, missing generations, missing time?

And that's where we get into some stuff that you and I don't need to worry about.

But, you know, no matter what for young Earth creationists, you only have hundreds to, let's say,

even 2000 years or something like that if you want it to be kind of flexible with stuff.

So Noah might or might not be alive to see some of those sorts of things.

But living in Mesopotamia, he wouldn't have noticed the Ice Age.

It wouldn't have gotten down to those areas, wouldn't have gotten that far.

It would have just been it would have just been ringing around, you know, say at most about the

45th to 50th north and south latitude.

So you would have had big glaciers on mountains coming down off of the Alps and off of the Himalayas

and the Rockies.

But those would have been isolated and not part of the giant glacial ice sheets that are the northern

half of North America or good chunks of northern Europe.

But southern Europe, like Italy, you know, down by the boot in Sicily, no Ice Age there.

It's so interesting to have you talk so openly about these like ice ages.

And I want to ask about mass extinctions and tectonic plates and then kind of reference like biblically same time

as Noah to Abraham within that's kind of like 500, 300 to 500 year period.

But, you know, Noah wasn't recognizing this.

Maybe his like descendants and some of his children would have seen it.

And it's so crazy to have you talk about both without one negating the other

and just thinking like Noah's descendants were a part of this like massive world history that we were taught in science

class.

So to me, it would have to have been like Noah wouldn't have seen mass extinction.

That would have been too fresh after the flood.

It's a good question.

And that's also going to depend on what we do with where the flood ends in those layers of rock on the geological

column, which is a whole big can of worms and young earth creationism.

We won't go there.

But, you know, how much of the fossil record is actually post -flood will impact whether we think that

Noah actually may have seen radical shifts and turnovers between the types of animals that came

off of the Ark and what they ended up diversifying into as part of that limited but still

extensive evolution, so to speak, right, the diversification within their kinds.

What did the first cats coming off of the Ark look like?

How many were there?

Right.

Do we have one cat kind or do we have a couple?

What did it look like?

And what does that compare with the types of cats that we have alive today, which is about 54 to 58 species

of cats?

That's a lot of cats.

And most of them are small, but some of them are big.

Were they all descended from an original Ark -born pair?

And what about some of the other cats that we see in the fossil record?

And we can ask that same question with camels and with, you know, different lizard groups like skinks and all these

types of things.

And how much did Noah and his immediate descendants see in terms of turnover and change?

And like, you know, those guys look a little different than they did 20 years ago.

And it's not just because I'm old and, you know, crotchety now.

I'm pretty sure those aren't the same things that I used to see.

Right.

So, yeah, it could be that there was substantial changes in a very short period of time

bringing us up to the world that we experience now.

Interesting.

Does your data and like what you know about the Bible support mass extinctions, or is that something that just

scientists kind of support?

Because if I follow the logic that you come off of an Ark with not that many animals, a mass extinction could have

easily wiped out everything that came off of the Ark, right?

Sure.

Yeah.

And actually, extinction was something that people really wrestled with a lot going back to the

late 17 and early 1800s.

You can even see Thomas Jefferson holding on to this idea that things haven't gone extinct yet as he sends

Lewis and Clark out on their expedition to the Pacific Northwest.

In private letters, he was hoping that they would discover things like giant cave

lions and woolly, you know, basically like a woolly mammoth or woolly rhinoceros type of thing.

They believed at that time in what was called a principle of plentitude, the idea that what God created, that he

filled the world.

Right.

They told be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth.

They filled the earth and God would not allow any of his creations to completely and utterly die off.

Now, that's not something the Bible ever says, but it was an idea that was en

vogue at the time.

And so the discovery of the first extinct animals, especially things like marine reptiles.

I studied mosasaurs, big swimming marine reptiles for my Ph .D.

And they were part of the the early evidence group of things that were completely different from

anything alive today and got early scientists like George Cuvier thinking about the concept

of extinction and saying, yeah, there are things in the rocks that don't exist anymore.

And this principle of plentitude is incorrect.

And that was really jarring to folks because the Bible doesn't say yay or nay on extinction.

But people just kind of thought, well, you know, whatever we have around today is what was there in the past.

Right.

We have a tendency to do that around ourselves.

We tend to see the past in light of our present.

And the example I would give to my students most often for that was the Sistine Chapel.

Right.

You and I know what Adam looks like.

He looks like a white guy.

Right.

Did he?

Did he really?

But, you know, if you're but if you're Michelangelo and you're painting Adam on the Sistine Chapel in

the seat of Rome, you know, how are you going to illustrate Adam?

Well, everybody that you know is an Italian.

Right.

You don't have a huge.

And so you you illustrate it to reflect the knowledge that you have, but also to connect it to the people

around you.

And, you know, it's very unlikely that Adam looked like that.

And we certainly know that God isn't a big white guy with a long, flowing beard either.

But there he is on the Sistine Chapel.

So that that's something that we, I think, in the historical sciences, for someone like me who thinks

about paleontology and these types of biblical connections a lot, has to try and guard against is is

this kind of, I don't want to say arrogance, but just this kind of blinders that we have of the present world.

And that gets back to geology, too, because geology is about understanding the past from what I

see right now.

And part of that is legitimate.

But we can't allow the blinders of the present to keep us from anticipating or considering

options that are far outside of our experience, major catastrophes that could wholly

reshape the world.

And if we've got just our little blinders on that, this is the way the animals in the seafloor operate today.

Therefore, when I go in the fossil record, I'm going to expect to see the same thing.

And you don't.

You go, wait a minute.

Well, what if the past wasn't actually like the present?

What if the only way to understand the present is through the past, not the other way.

Around?

Oh, my gosh.

Oh, my gosh.

OK, I'm like, which one do we focus on first?

Because you brought up so much.

And I think the first thing is I want to talk about people and how they

kind of descended from Noah and how they've evolved and kind of to combat that Neanderthal belief.

But also you mentioned dinosaurs.

So we got to talk about that.

Which one do you want to go into first?

Well, you know, I'm a paleontologist, and the reason I'm a paleontologist is that I'm.

Not a people person.

You know, I don't like them.

I prefer to be.

No, I'm just kidding.

So well, we'll hit.

Well, there's so much fun stuff.

That's the problem for me is like when I was a kid, people would say, oh, what's your favorite dinosaur?

I'm like, that's impossible.

I don't have a favorite dinosaur.

I have like a favorite dinosaur.

Every family of dinosaurs is out there, because I was that kind of nerd as that dorky little kid.

Now I'm that dorky kind of dad.

But I think even before dinosaurs, like so dinosaurs were on the ark if they.

Oh, like all of them.

Right.

So we have in the fossil record probably somewhere if our understanding of what a kind

might represent biblically, when I look at the fossil record, somewhere around 50 to 70 different

dinosaur kinds, I think would be reasonable to to anticipate.

And if you know what we see in creation is God creates according to kinds.

And then in the account of the flood, God brings animals to Noah according to their

kinds.

And so the language is very similar.

It's pretty much identical between those two chapters.

So I would expect that God would bring two of every kind of the land dwelling, air -breathing critters, because that's what

he made at the beginning.

I mean, it's possible that God could could bring a subset of that.

But I don't think that's a great read of of the Bible.

So if dinosaurs are created on days five and six

and God brings them to Noah at the ark, they've got to be brought on.

I think that they go extinct very quickly after the floods of wrapping back over to extinction.

Dinosaurs might have gone out very, very extinct very quickly, in part because their particular ecology that

supported their food web collapsed and did not rebuild immediately after the flood.

Hmm.

Right.

If we think they have just like eating the cats and the dogs that came out of.

The ark, some of the carnivores may have, but many dinosaurs are not carnivorous.

We tend to think about the carnivores all the time.

Duh.

Oh, my gosh.

But we have lots of herbivorous dinosaurs and their diet is going to be tied to specific types of plants that

we find in association with them in the rock units.

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Now back to the show.

So with that logic, wouldn't that have killed all the herbivores that herbivores that came off of the ark?

Not all of them.

So let's let's think of it this way.

We talked about the world being a post -disaster, post -catastrophic world.

The world that we live in now is the disaster afterwards, right?

When you look at a forest, like a major forest fire that burns everything down to the ground,

there is a series of progressions that that ecology will begin to go through if you live in, say, temperate

North America.

And it'll start off with grasses and low lying shrubs that will overtake this area that used to be completely

forest.

And they will establish the soil.

They will start holding on to the to the dirt.

They will establish locations and different types of animals will come in and feed in those areas that don't feed on other

stuff because they eat grasses and leaves from small plants.

They're not, you know, the squirrels aren't finding acorns.

There's no oak trees.

Right.

So you're not going to have certain types of organisms in that environment and you are going to have other ones.

So you had squirrels and oak trees before.

Now you don't because you have this post -disaster flora.

Then after a while, you're going to get some low lying trees, especially things like birch, you know, your thin paper birch

trees and stuff like that.

Then you're going to end up with pine trees later on.

Then the pine trees acidify the soil so much that they crowd out their own seeds.

And what does really well in good acidic soil?

Maple and oak and other things like that.

So you've got this progression that's going to take decades and decades to progress.

But what happens if you stopped it?

What happens if there were the forest fire was so bad that there are no oak trees anywhere in the in the area and all

you ever end up with now is a pine forest?

You're not going to get the same groups of animals in that area anymore because they're going to be

certain sorts of resources that are no longer available to them.

Because that the first things that sprouted up can support the animals that eat that stuff.

But the things that take decades to grow, that's no food for the animals that eat that food.

That's right.

And if if something happens to, say, the oak trees, they get a blight or something like that, some sort of fungus that

keeps them from growing in, then you will never even get back to the way that it was.

You will stop at the pine forest.

And all of the creatures that are dependent on oak, maple, elm.

Won't ever be there.

You're never going to find them in that ecology again.

So scale that up then and think about what happens to the earth if certain environments and certain plant

communities and things like that never reestablish themselves, then the entire ecosystems that

are built around those plants collapse before they ever have a chance to start.

And so for dinosaurs that are used to eating different types of plant material than what we see around today, they were

eating very unusual plants that we see in the fossil record.

And today are only like these tiny little things.

That's not enough.

And so if you can't feed those herbivores and you have carnivores that are accustomed to going after these

guys, they might be too specialized to go after other things.

And the carnivores die out, too.

And that opens up ecology for other types of creatures to then go in and invade.

So it could be that in the post -catastrophe world, there are whole sets of ecologies that

never got themselves off of the ground.

The Ark is an opportunity for survival.

But it is not a guarantee after the gates open that everything will be the same as it.

Was.

Oh, wow.

That's not even I didn't even think about that because, oh gosh, because you're right.

I think of like what does a pre -flood beginning of the creation look

like?

It's got giant mushrooms and giant plants and these things that don't exist today.

You know, we've got these like baobab trees in Africa.

And those are the craziest things you ever see.

But a lot of species that once supported species that are no longer here are also no longer here.

Kind of like what you just said, that we we have to use the past to determine or we can't look at what exists today

and say all of the things we see that exist today existed back then.

It like it has evolved.

That is wow.

That is my mind is doing backflips.

I told you this would happen.

OK, that makes a lot of sense for dinosaurs, which is wild because you would think, you know, what else

didn't survive?

We just think of dinosaurs.

But what other animals didn't make it because the ecosystem didn't support it?

There's so many. There's so many.

It's like you don't know what you don't know.

Yeah.

Well, dinosaurs get all the billing.

But I can tell you as a vertebrate paleontologist, there's so many other kinds of animals out there besides dinosaurs.

Right.

So I mentioned it's probably like 50 to 70 different kinds of dinosaurs.

But in the fossil record, we also have 50 different families of crocodilians, 50 different families of

crocodilians, including one that at least one that was probably herbivorous and eating basically like potatoes, like these roots and tubers.

And it was all extra armored because it was small and it was weak and it wasn't aggressive.

And yet we have other crocodiles that are swimming in the ocean, like fully marine, would have looked like a croc whale type

of thing.

Crazy stuff in the fossil record.

And a lot of it is gone.

So, yeah, we live in a depopulate world compared to the world that existed before the flood.

And, you know, from a biblical standpoint, the same with humans, you know, there aren't the same types of

humans, would you say?

I'm kind of going on a limb hoping you'd correct me here of like the humans that existed before the flood don't exist today.

Yeah.

You know, that's that's a hard challenge for young earth creationism.

Right.

One of the one of the questions that is perennially asked is where are the human beings in the fossil record?

And we don't really have any that I think that are in the fossil record that's formed during the flood.

I don't know.

Yeah.

The things that we have are things like Neanderthals or Homo erectus, a variety of others.

We've got about 12 or so different species of Homo, you know, the species to which we belong that I might consider all

part and parcel of Adam's family tree and more specifically Noah's family tree post flood.

Those are all in post flood sedimentary deposits.

They're in these little isolated locations in Africa, like the glaciers, sitting on top of

everything else.

Right.

These little little bits of icing on the cake.

They're not from the flood.

They're after everything's already done.

And so for so, for example, when we think about Neanderthals, we tend to think about like cavemen, right?

Right.

And that's because some of their fossil remains are found in caves.

Well, those caves are made up of limestones, usually, that were made during the flood.

The actual rock itself was made during the flood.

So you've got these limestones made during the flood.

Other rocks were on top of them.

They eventually get eroded down, you know, during the flood, things get lifted up.

But eventually the waters peel off.

You've got groundwater in here that creates caves inside.

Eventually the rock is exposed and the cave is exposed.

And then people like Neanderthals come in and they live in those caves.

And, you know, so did Abraham, right?

He buried Sarah in a cave.

In Genesis, right?

So we know that people were using caves.

We used caves all the time.

But there's evidence that they were living in there.

There might be evidence of fire and char marks, processing animal remains for food,

artwork, you know, various types of things.

So that's not the sort of thing that you do during the middle of a global flood.

You know, you're not, you're not making artwork.

You know, so, and it doesn't look like this is stuff that was been washed in by some catastrophe.

This looks stuff that was like lived in.

So those are some of the clues that we have that these deposits are actually after the flood, which would place them after

Noah.

The Neanderthals, Homo erectus, et cetera, would be descendants of Noah's family.

And all of those different types of forms that we see of ourselves and these other ones actually would lead us to an interesting

question of what did Noah actually look like?

Right.

Because again, the present is not necessarily the key to understanding the past.

So this is kind of this funny place.

Where, is this where evolution is happening?

Amongst human beings as well?

Yes.

Very likely that, you know, as we see the different physical forms between ourselves, Neanderthals, Homo erectus,

Homo floresiensis, a dwarf population that was only about three and a half feet tall.

We got three skeletons of these fully adult people that are only three and a half feet tall and they

look odd compared to us.

And there's plenty of others, Heidelbergensis and whatnot.

And you kind of look around at that and you say, okay, so if all of these are in the post flood world,

does that mean that they are all offshoots of Homo sapiens?

Or is our particular physical form a later development?

And these actually look more like what Noah and his family would have recognized.

It's entirely possible.

We know from genetics that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred with one another.

And those would be two different species.

Typically you define species as populations that don't interbreed and the Neanderthal physical form is pretty

consistent and characteristic and it's different from ours.

So as a paleontologist, you don't usually get the opportunity to use a genetic definition

or that kind of species definition that is talking about interbreeding.

Because if I take a pair of trilobites and I put them in a drawer in the museum overnight and I play some soft music, candlelight, you know, when

I'm watching a movie, there aren't going to be more trilobites the next day.

You don't get to test to see if they're part of the same species by mating because they're.

Fossils.

So paleontologists like myself, we have to identify species on the basis of the physical form of the animal,

of the remains.

So we call that a morpho species, morph form, right?

And so, you know, why is T -Rex T -Rex?

Well, it's because there's characteristic fossils that look like this, that look very different from these other things over here.

So Neanderthals look different from us, but the kicker was young earth creationists were expecting

there to be evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens for a hundred years.

I can go back to 1921 and read you a passage from an early young earth creationist saying about Neanderthals that they

were humans.

And yet the evolutionary community, for the most part, for a long time said, no, they're completely separate.

We have nothing to do with one another, totally different species.

And the young earth creation community was saying, we expect there to be evidence of interbreeding.

And ultimately, it would be Svante Pablo and his team of anthropologists who are not young earth creationists,

but they were able to isolate and sequence DNA from Neanderthal bones.

And when they did, they found out that Neanderthals and us have points in common.

Not just like common because we're supposed to come from a common ancestor, but no, common from interbreeding.

And that you and I and nearly everybody on the world who lives outside of sub -Saharan Africa

has somewhere between one and three percent of our, you know, one in four, maybe

depends on whose study, but somewhere between one and four percent of our genome comes from Neanderthals.

And Neanderthal fossils have homo sapiens genomes.

And then there's this other group called the Denisovans.

We don't even have good skeletons of them.

And, but we have enough genetic information to know that they were mating with both the Neanderthals and us.

So we've got a little cluster here.

OK, so that would be a species, except for they all, you know, at least with us and Neanderthals, we definitely look different

and we don't seem to have been mating all the time.

But when we did meet up with one another, yeah, kind of like a mule.

Well, there may actually be some evidence that that the Neanderthals especially

were not able to breed very successfully with us and produce children.

So one of the things that's really interesting is there's no Neanderthal

material.

Excuse me.

Sorry.

We have no evidence of Neanderthal genetics in the male Y chromosome.

So it seems we're not positive about this, but it seems possible that male

Neanderthals were unsuccessful in mating with female homo sapiens.

But that male homo sapiens were successful with mating with female Neanderthals.

So that's interesting.

And we also have some clues that Neanderthal populations themselves tend to be very small and very isolated.

They might have had breeding problems of their own and not been very successful at having.

Children.

And then when you add on the differences between us and them, it became very difficult to have hybrids,

at least in one direction.

And we see that in the natural world with species that can be even very, very close to one another.

You mentioned a mule, right?

A horse and a donkey can mate and literally

999 times out of 1000, that animal is sterile and one out of 1000 of them is not

sterile.

So, you know, for the most part, that gives us good indication of saying, yeah, we can consider these species.

But a young earth creationist would also say, yeah, but they're still part of the same kind.

They can mate.

They can have offspring.

Physically, they're very similar.

Their genetics are actually pretty close.

There's just these places where they break and these broken zones or these kind of mismatched areas are relatively

small, but they are impactful.

And that's part of that diversification that happens.

As things diversify, they become less like other things.

It becomes more difficult to breed back with a population that's gone in a different direction.

Than you.

But it doesn't mean that you didn't start off from an original set of parents.

True. True, true, true.

Is the hypothesis here that pre -flood Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were interbreeding

or is it more so that Neanderthals were on the Ark and then continued to interbreed with humans

once they got off the Ark?

Neanderthals were part of the kinds that came on and then they just interbreeded with the new population of Noah's family.

Yeah.

So we know from scripture that Noah's family was the only thing brought on board the Ark,.

Right?

It was Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their three wives.

And that's attested several places in scripture that reaffirm what's there in Genesis.

So the Neanderthals are going to be a post -flood development.

They're going to be a people group that emerges out of those eight.

So they're not like a separate group or anything.

And we don't know what Noah and his family exactly looked like.

They could have looked more like Neanderthals than they looked like us.

They could have looked more like Homo erectus than either Neanderthal or us, right?

We don't actually know.

But whatever it was that Noah and his family looked like was capable of generating the diversity of

Homo species that we find in the fossil record afterwards.

All descendants of Noah, but people groups that went off on their own and went in different directions

and sometimes never saw each other ever again.

Or sometimes did and went, oh, you're cute enough.

You know, we'll marry and have some kids.

Um, so yeah, what, what exactly Noah looked like is, is, you know, getting back to that Sistine Chapel, you know,

Adam's a white guy.

Yeah, maybe not.

Adam's a Homo sapien?

Open question, actually.

What I love about this discussion is that it opens up these possibilities, but it also opens up what we

were taught for so long.

You know, if we're considering this, then we have to reconsider everything we've been taught, especially in

light of our faith.

Yeah, and those reconsiderations are good, right?

There are actually things that challenge us a little bit when we discover new things about the world around us.

We need to go back and check the things that we think we know.

And a lot of times they still check out, you know, gravity still works.

And Newton's laws for gravity work where we are.

They just don't work, you know, in the core of a star or a black hole, right?

Other, you know, those laws break down at certain scales.

And so, you know, we need Einsteinian relativity.

We need quantum theory in order to explain various kind of levels of how the universe is operating.

But for you and me, you know, the algebra that we used in high school, as bad as those memories might be,

you know, it still kind of works on a practical level.

Yeah.

And likewise, when we make new discoveries in the world about fossil creatures or about rock units or about

biology, it can cause us to go back and say, you know, the story that I think I know, is that still

correct?

Or does it need some modification?

Does this force me to reinterpret scripture?

Well, we need to be careful not to let external things drive our interpretation of scripture.

That's bad, right?

If you come to the Bible with something and say the Bible is going to have to mean this because of these external things,

that's a bad approach to scripture.

On the other hand, if you have a idea that you think you've derived from scripture and it's being challenged by something

else, then it's fair enough to go back to the Bible and to the scientific data and say, did I derive those ideas correctly?

And see if they meet together.

Or if it turns out that, yeah, I derived this from the Bible, but I actually have some other options that might allow

this to exist.

Okay, that's good enough.

You know, we want faith and science to be things that are in, I mean, in this, they often talk about them being in

conversation with one another, but it is an asymmetric conversation because the Bible is the inspired word of God.

It's actually a communication of God to the world.

And it's written in language that we can read, understand, that smart people that show up on your

program can help us interpret, right?

Because they know the languages and they know the context in which things were written.

They know the history of what was going on at the time.

Alta Shazar is doing this, that, or the other thing.

And so it is asymmetrical because God is providing a specific communication to us.

Whereas the natural world, right, these images behind me of Ammonites and things like that, they don't communicate

with language.

They don't provide us a story.

They provide us with data.

And from that data, we create stories.

And we hope that those stories are close to correct.

That's what a scientific hypothesis is.

It's a story about something that we think is approximating the

history of that thing or how they behave, right?

If you're looking at critters under a microscope.

But the natural world doesn't provide us with statement types of claims like the word of.

God does.

And so that dialogue, that interface where the Bible and science are together needs to be

led by scripture, in my view.

But scripture can also learn and be illuminated in ways that we wouldn't know otherwise

without the data of the natural world.

God expects us to discover.

He put us in charge of this place as to have dominion.

To have dominion means you must learn what's out there in order to be a good steward.

That was phenomenal.

I love the intersection and just the guidance.

This was just a perfect way to end on alignment.

And thank you for your wisdom.

Tell me, how can people get connected with you, what you're doing, learn from you more, go to events, buy some

educational supplies from you?

How do they get in connect with you?

Sure.

The shameless plugs, right?

Well, thinking of what we were just discussing with Adam and these fossil animals and things

like that, I was privileged to be part of this book called Perspectives on the Historical Adam and Eve,

Four Views.

I represent a young earth creation perspective in this book.

The other three perspectives are basically theistic evolutionary perspectives of a few different flavors and varieties.

Maybe old earth creation for one of them, but primarily all from an ancient earth and most of them from

evolution.

If you want to know where the current debate is right now within evangelicalism about Adam's

historicity, that would be the place to go.

So again, that's called Perspectives on the Historical Adam and Eve.

That just came out this past summer.

Congratulations. I'll link it in the show notes.

Thank you very much.

It was a privilege to be part of it.

And you can actually see my presentation about that to the Evangelical Theological Society if you Google my name,

Marcus Ross, with ETS and William Wayne Craig's

organization, Reasonable.

Faith.

They were kind enough to actually film the whole session.

And so they've got up a series of videos of the presenters for those four views and all the Q

&A that happened afterwards.

You get to see some of the feisty little dueling that happens afterwards.

As far as other things, you mentioned the movie is Genesis History.

I can definitely recommend that others go and find that.

It's available free to watch on YouTube.

It was the fifth highest grossing documentary of 2017.

It did phenomenal.

It was a nationwide theatrical release and it's beautiful.

It's just a beautifully shot video.

You will love it.

And if somebody is interested in seeing or coming by our website, it is cornerstone

-edsupply .com.

And my wife likes to say, we're the stuff people.

So when your curriculum says, go get some stuff to do your science, that's us.

We've got the beakers, the labware, we got the dead animals, and we have rocks and fossils.

And so you can pick up outstanding geology education kits.

It's one of our specializations because you do what you know.

And so we make all kinds of stuff for homeschool co -ops, for high school, even colleges and.

Universities.

So those are a few places to kind of see what's going on.

Sign up for our newsletter and find out what's going on.

I'll be speaking in Massachusetts at an upcoming origins conference there

later this month in March.

So if you're in the Springfield, Massachusetts area, take a look.

Awesome.

So much to get involved in.

Dr. Ross, thank you so much for coming on the show.

This was illuminating and such a joy.

Oh, that's very kind of you.

Thank you so much for having me on, Cassie.

And it was a great time.

What a pleasure.

God bless.