G1 Conference Session 2: Dr. Brian Thomas "Fossils: Evolution or Noah’s Flood"

Hi, I'm Dr. Brian Thomas, and I'm here at the beautiful and lovely Discovery Center at the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas. I'm sorry I couldn't be with you in California. I wanted to be, but you know what?

We're going to praise the Lord for technology. I'm a dinosaur scientist, and I really enjoy the study of fossils. And that began when I was young. And in fact, I was like six years old, and I was in a playground.

I remember I was on a swing set, and I jumped off the swing. You know, you swing yourself out and land and see how far you can land. And I landed into, like, gravel, and I looked at the gravel, and every little piece of gravel was like a little oyster shell.

And I recognized that it was a shell from the ocean, but I'm in the middle of Kansas. And so I picked up one of these little oyster shells that had, like, rock, you know, glommed onto it, and I took it inside.

I said, Mommy, Mommy, what is this? Why are there oyster shells all over the yard here where we're nowhere near a beach? And my mom deflected and said, Well, ask your teacher. So I put it in my lunchbox and got to school the next day and found an opportunity to say, Teach your teacher at school there.

What is this?

And she deflected and said, That is a fossil. But I said, But what does that mean? Where did this come from? And so I've been curious ever since. Now, the answers I started to collect over the years just came passively, like I would get a clue from a TV show, or maybe an article that I read, or maybe something in the textbook, or something that my teachers would have said.

And the answers said something like this. Millions of years ago, there was a vast, shallow sea that covered the middle of the United States. And so all these sea creatures are from when the ocean, you know, was in the middle of.

The U .S.

And so that's why you have these fossils there. And I said, Okay, fine. That explains it. And so I believed in millions of years, and I believed that the fossils represent ancient and extinct creatures.

Fossils and the Question of Evolution or Noah’s Flood

So today we're talking about fossils. Do they represent evolution, or do they represent, like, Noah's Flood? And so I switched over to believing in Noah's Flood from believing that fossils show evolution.

And I'm just going to give you a few basics, reasons why I made that switch. And those reasons started to come out later in life, like, after I got to college. I really rethought, like, how could you get a shell from the sea, turn into a fossil, you know, in the middle of a shallow sea, millions of years ago?

How could that work? And what I began to realize is, basically, it doesn't pass the common sense test. And I'll show you exactly what I mean and what I found. And the way we're going to do that is by looking at specific, pretty common fossils that I've got here just for us to look at.

So we've got this camera set up, and we're just going to talk about, you know, what you can observe and infer by just looking at these fossils. So let's come here, and the first one I've got, it comes in a cute little display box, and it's from China.

And a little Chinese set of fossil fish. And these are pretty common. The most common vertebrate, that's animal with a backbone, is a fish. And you see them all over. So if you have an animal that's got a backbone, it's going to be a fish, more often than not.

Anyway, so here's some lead-beady fish. And you can see, but here's the thing I started to notice. Whether it's these from China or fish from, let's say, the famous Green River Formation in Wyoming and places elsewhere in western United States, look at the fins.

And so I started looking at these fish fins. The tail fin is there. The dorsal fin, you know, it's the pectoral fin right here, the little, you know, it's front flippers and, well, they're fins. But I got to thinking about these, and I realized, after I got older and had a pet fish, my daughter had a pet fish, and the pet fish died.

And what's the first thing that happened to the pet fish? Its fins rotted within hours. They were covered with this white fungus. It was ugly. Anyway, that didn't happen here. And so here we have perfectly preserved, even the thin fins, never covered with fungus, never, this never happened.

So how do you get this? How do you get these animals preserved so quickly? I mean, it had to be quick, right? It had to be fast before the fungus could take hold. And so that began my journey into, I guess, caution or suspicion that what I had been told, the story that I had been told, didn't really fit all the facts.

So I was like, well, if it was millions of years ago in a vast shallow sea, then, you know, why do we have the fossils themselves of fish, for example, why do we have such, you know, such fine preservation?

It had to have happened in a rapid catastrophe, not a slow and gradual everyday life in the ocean scenario. And for that matter, have you been to the ocean? Have you been to the, you're in California, right?

So you've been to the ocean, and are there fossils forming in the bottom of the ocean or in the margin of the coast, where the margin, where the land meets the water? No, no fossils forming anywhere in the ocean today.

So when a fish dies in the ocean, like what happens when it dies in my daughter's fish tank, what happens to it? Well, the first thing is, other fish eat it, turtles eat it, this thing is instant turtle.

Food.

I mean, it's gone. So and then if the turtles don't get it or other fish, then it rots within, I mean, these little fish gone within a week for sure. So they're not turning into fossils, they're getting scavenged, and they're rotting, microbes eat them up.

That did not happen in the past with millions of fishes that got buried in Earth's rocks. So I started to see a really big difference between what I had been told about how these things formed and what I'm seeing in the actual rocks.

So there's my little fishes from China, but you can find fossil fishes everywhere. Look at the details when you see them and ask yourself common sense questions, like if these formed over millions of years, then why don't they form today?

They don't form in lakes, they don't form in streams, they don't form in the oceans. You need some unique set of circumstances, something like a catastrophic covering of mud, and you need that mud to dry out fast.

Otherwise, the fish will rot even down in that mud, even without oxygen.

Cool, huh?

So that was my step, my first step, like, okay, maybe the flood, the flood of Noah or something like that explains what I see better than the stories that I've been told. And that was part of my journey.

And we'll get to why that's so important here at the end. Let's go to another fossil. What's in here? So I keep these in, like, cute little boxes. Oh, here's a fun one. You guys know what that is? This is fossilized poo.

And so we call it a coprolite. And, you know, my dog drops its waste in the backyard, and it's not turning into a fossil. Rabbit droppings in the forest, they're not turning into fossils. They get, in fact, it's soft, it's squishy, and within months, it's biodegraded.

It just turns into soil. But that did not happen here. So this is from a phytosaur, P-H-Y-T-O, not F-I-G-H-T, phytosaur. So anyway, it's a Triassic reptile, and it was like a crocodile, but its nostrils were out on the end of its snout.

And so he made these droppings, and these droppings were collected in rock deposits, it's buried in sediment, and you can brush away the sediment and it reveals these droppings that it left behind.

Wow.

I mean, how do you preserve a fossil, I mean, how do you fossilize a dropping? That does not happen today. Something unique happened in the past, and I'm starting to think more and more in terms of the uniqueness of Noah's flood as it's laid out in scripture.

It says, not just in Genesis 6, 7, and 8, that talks about the Genesis flood, and 9, but I mean, think about 2 Peter, chapter 3. And he says, for these, he talks about these scoffers, and he says, they're willfully ignorant that the world that then was was overflowed with water.

So Peter treats, Peter, the apostle who wrote, who knew the Lord Jesus, he treats Genesis flood as though it was real. So what would you expect? He said the world that then was was destroyed, being overflowed with water.

The world that then was, even Kansas, Kansas was overflowed with flood water, according to the Bible. And no wonder I found those little fossil clams and oysters. Speaking of clams, I've got a great little clam fossil here I want to show you.

This is unique. It's, well, it's, how do I say this? It's common, but it's special to me.

Okay.

So here's the inside of the clam. So this is the clam's soft tissue. Now it's turned into rock. So this is one side of the clam, and there you could see where the two valves were hinged together. You know, the clam shells, the valves.

So you had one valve here, one valve here, and it hinged open and closed like this. In fact, we can see the last remnants of shell material in the form of a little brown stripe and a dot here. So that's shell, clam shell.

But the rest of this is mud that filled inside the clam. Well here's the thing. Think about this. You've been to the beach. You've seen clams at the beach. Do you typically find a clam shell, just the one valve by itself?

Or do you typically find them more often with both valves still joined together? And maybe the clam body has rotten or been eaten. Starfish love to eat clams right out of the shell. So how do we find them?

And the answer that I've discovered on my many walks up and down beaches is I always see them more often with the shells separated, shells separated. So how long does it take for the shells to separate once a clam dies?

We're talking about in terms of hours, not even a day in most cases. So in just hours, there's a little ligament that connects the two valves. And once the muscle that closes that clam shell, once that muscle rots and dissolves in the seawater, then the ligament lasts a little longer, but hours, days at most.

And you've got those shells just and the wave action, of course, is going to tumble those shells, the valves, and they're going to separate. So that's why you see separated. But look at this. The valves must have been still together when this was packed with mud.

I mean, it speaks of rapid, catastrophic burial and injection of mud in replacing the clam's soft body. So it's kind of like a fossilized, you know, dung like we just saw. It's a soft tissue that's been turned to stone.

But in this case, the clam valves were still together. And that gives us a time stamp. And it says, this happened fast. Because any length of time, hours or a day or so, and those valves would have separated and you would have never achieved this shape.

So rapid, catastrophic. Well, where did I find this? This is here in North Texas. And so North Texas was underneath this same rapid, catastrophic, watery burial. Well, what would we expect if the worldwide flood really happened?

I mean, if Peter was right in saying that the whole world that then was got destroyed being overflowed with water, well, we'd expect, you know, sediment brought in by seawater. Creatures buried faster than they could get away from the waters rising.

And we'd expect to find that evidence all over the world. That's exactly what we find up on the land. Sea creatures up on land speak to Noah's Flood. And so the more of this evidence that I saw, rapid, catastrophic burial, the more I realized it's not a series of sedimentary rock layers with fossils in them that tell a story about evolution and how we evolve from worms, which is literally what California textbooks have said.

You evolve from worms whether you like it or not. I mean, talk about the least scientific statement you could make. You evolve from worms. Believe it, believe it. I mean, that's like pulpit pounding from the textbook.

We did not come from worms. Worms were fossilized. Clams were fossilized. But we have worms and clams today. That does not speak to evolution of worms to humans. It speaks to rapid, catastrophic, unique and different from regular life burial in something like Noah's Flood.

Ammonites, Radiocarbon, and Young Fossils

Okay.

Just a couple more. A couple more fossils here.

Okay.

This fossil. Now, I got to tell you, this is one of my absolute favorite fossils right here. And guess who gave it to me out of his goodwill and kindness? Dr. Dan Biddle, who's putting together this very G1 conference.

Years ago, he sent me this. This is an ammonite fossil in a concretion, a concretion. So mud got packed around this ammonite. And so that's what this fossil is. Before I tell you why this is my mostest, favoritest fossil, let me just backtrack and sort of illustrate what an ammonite is.

So an ammonite is an extinct marine shelled creature, lived in a shell. Here's one. I got this one when I was in China. This is a chambered nautilus shell. And so an ammonite was like a chambered nautilus in a lot of ways.

Chambered nautilus, still alive. Ammonites extinct. One of the differences between them was that the chambered nautilus had a different material for its door. It's had a little, has a little door. It opens its door and then out come these tentacles and it's able to, it's a predator and a scavenger.

It's able to swim and grab things like a squid or an octopus. So that's in today's oceans. And then in yesterday's oceans, the pre-flood oceans I have now become convinced, we had ammonites that looked very similar to today's chambered nautilus.

And by the way, chambered nautiloids are buried and fossilized right alongside ammonites in many places of the earth. So they were alive and looked exactly the same back then. These were alive, but for some reason couldn't survive the flood.

In fact, 95 of all the sea creatures that existed, I'd say species level, so all the varieties of creatures, 95 of those were gone, did not survive the flood. And so even sea creatures suffered, suffered, suffered, and only the most, I guess the ones who could tolerate all that sediment and silt and heat, the water got hot.

Those survivors, the 5%, lived through the flood and repopulated the post-flood oceans that we have in our world today. So here we have, looking up close here, we've got the shell material and then we've got a sediment that's packed inside the shell.

And we have pearlescent shell material. This is called Nacre, N-A-C-R-E, and it's, I don't know if you could see how shiny that is, but boy, is it pretty. It's kind of like, it's similar to the material that oysters use to make pearls.

But anyway, so it's a coiled shelled creature and died by the billions, probably by the billions. And they're found in North Texas here. They're found all over the place. And here's one from California, a place called Redding.

And I've never been, but Dr. Biddle did go and he got this one. So if you look close, you can see there's a slightly different color between the concretion, which is dark gray, and this brown shell material.

So there it is. So there's a little ammonite, kind of like that, packed inside there, the little brown coiled up sea creature.

So what?

You say, so what? Why is this? Well, we took some colleagues of mine, took the shell material from inside this, broke it open like we have here, cracked open the concretion. It's like a rock ball. And then inside this concretion is the shelled creature, the ammonite.

They took that little piece of that shell, several pieces, and sent them to radiocarbon dating laboratories. The thing is, though, that this shell is, you know, over 100 million years old, according to conventional wisdom, which has to assign long ages to rock layers, because you need long ages for evolution to do its work.

Well, if the flood formed those layers, then you don't have the time for evolution, because the flood happened just thousands of years ago, and it would have formed all those layers within that one flood year.

Well, we have... So here, let me just explain the radiocarbon result real quick, and then I'll get to the last fossil, and we'll be finished with this session, where I'm trying to show you, basically, some of the science that supports a literal, straightforward reading of what God's Word says about the past, the ancient past.

The flood, and before that, the creation. So the creation and the flood, Peter says the scoffers will mock both of those, they'll mock both of those, and that's the culture we live in today. You believe in creation, you believe in the flood, science has just proved that.

Well, what about the science of forming a fossil? Why don't fossils form today? They formed in the past, the flood explains it, so there's science that does support the.

Flood.

And what about radiocarbon inside a fossil shell that's supposed to be many millions of years old? Radiocarbon has a shelf life, it's got a half-life, anyway, it decays, it turns into nitrogen. It's a radioactive isotope or version of carbon.

It decays into nitrogen. Just let it sit there, and it will turn itself into nitrogen over time. And it's 5 ,730 some odd years is the half-life. So if you have a pound of pure radiocarbon, then after 5 ,730 years, you'll have only a half-pound of pure radiocarbon, and you'll have a half-pound of nitrogen.

Well, maybe it'll weigh a little less because in the decay process, it gives off radiation and particles. So anyway, based on that measured decay rate, we would never expect to find radiocarbon in a sample that's even a million years old, because after, say, 100 ,000 years, in theory, all the radiocarbon, even in a block of radiocarbon the size of the Earth, would have turned itself into nitrogen after 100 ,000 years, in theory, taking today's decay rate.

So by the way, scientists don't use radiocarbon to come up with the ages of millions of years. They use radiocarbon to date archaeological artifacts that they consider are only thousands of years old, not millions.

So here we have a fossil that's supposed to be millions of years old. And if we find that there's radiocarbon in the fossil shell, then we have very young-looking.

Material.

So it looks like—and that's, of course, what we found—published online. You can look at it for free. Just go to the website and—go to the interweb and look at it, and you can see all the details about how the processes that my colleagues went through to radiocarbon date this.

Now the date I'm not concerned about, the date I'm not interested in, what I'm interested in is the fact that it still has any radiocarbon left in it, and it does. And so it looks like it's thousands, not millions of years old, based on the radiocarbon.

I have more to say about that in our dinosaur session, which is coming up later on. Okay, so that's it. We have scientific evidence that supports recent creation, recent flood, thousands, not millions of years ago.

And we've got the—we have fossils, period. I mean, concretions aren't happening today, and animals aren't turning into mud balls that turn into rock and then get deposited on land. It happened in the past, though, and I think the flood might help explain that.

Dinosaur Bone Still Preserving Original Bone and Protein

Well, my last fossil is a chunk of dinosaur bone. And this is typically how we find dinosaur bone, as far as just a chip of it.

It's just a chunk.

So this is a hadrosaur, probably the tibia, and it's sort of the part of the bone, the top end of the leg, and this is going to be its knee up here. Anyway, so you could see—what I wanted you to see is how white this is.

And it's—why is it white? Well, bone is white, and you've got these little black streaks. Well, that's mud and dirt and a little bit of soil. The sediment, you know, it's just dirty from being in sediments, sedimentary rock.

It's a loose sedimentary rock. This came from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, famous for its dinosaur fossils. Now, when I went to my first dinosaur museum, I think I was in Wyoming, and I was like seven years old, and my uncle lived there.

So we were visiting my uncle, and we went in, and there had this big T-Rex, you know, right at the door, and I was scared. I was seven, and there's a giant head with big teeth. And so I was clinging to my mommy, and I was like, what is this?

I recognized that there's like the remnants of an animal, but it's—hopefully it's not still alive, because, boy, is it scary. And I said, you know, what is a fossil? What is this? And seven years old, what do you tell a kid, you know?

So my mom didn't know, and she deflected again, like she did with the oyster in Kansas. And she said, well, let's ask the museum expert. So we walked over to the museum expert, and my mom said, well, my son has a question for you.

And I said, well, what's that? And the lady said, well, it's a fossil. And fossils form, little boy, through millions of years of mineralization, mineralization. So the rock, it's now rock. So the bone is all gone, and it's turned into rock.

So what you see in these fossils is rock in the shape of the bone. Do you understand, little boy?

Uh-huh.

So I'm listening and getting it, you know, and I believed it. That's what I was taught, until I found the real dinosaur fossils. And, guys, it has not turned into minerals at all. You can still see the pore spaces, P-O-R-E.

That means tiny holes that, they're darkened because it's so old, but it looks like fresh bone, the shape of fresh bone. And so you could see, you could see that it hasn't been replaced by mineral. This is the dinosaur bone itself.

So the lady was wrong. Why was she telling me that dinosaur bones are rocks in the shape of bone? And I just, I don't know why. She just wasn't, she just, people don't know. They don't hear these things.

They don't get out and dig for themselves. And so when I saw this, I was like, oh, I've been told another lie, you know, about how these things happen. And it didn't happen over millions of years because it hadn't even been mineralized.

Now, I'm saying, I'm saying this particular sample hasn't been mineralized, but there are that have been mineralized, of course, but some have not been. And, in fact, some have not just the original bone, but what I specialize in is finding original protein still in the bone.

So not just the mineral part of the bone remains, but tiny remnants of the proteins are still inside these fossils. How incredible is that? And to me, that says the timing of the flood is right. God got it right.

He got it right in his word. We can trust what he says. The fossils don't show evolution. They show catastrophic burial. Sea creatures first, lowest in the layers, because the flood would have flooded the creatures that were already down there first.

Later during the flood year, creatures that lived in shallow seas were buried. Lots of shallow sea creatures buried next. And then swamp creatures next. And then on the very top layers, we have continent-dwelling, hard-ground living creatures that were buried in that flood.

So we don't see a progression of evolution. We just see a progression of the series of fossils that were formed in the flood. But you got to think big. You got to think, basically, you have to think to yourself, is it possible that God's word could actually be right about this worldwide flood?

And if you're willing to go there, then the evidence supports exactly what the scripture teaches. And that's what we all do here at the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas. We want to show how the science supports scripture.

And to help you do that, we have lots of resources, including a free monthly magazine called Acts and Facts. And I want to encourage you to sign up for that. You just go to icr .org on your little device or big device.

And icr .org and click sign up. And I want to sign up for this. I want to hear more about these fossils. I want to hear more about the design features in creatures that support the idea of creation, creation in the flood.

The Bible got it right. And every month for free, you can get sort of more faith-building science, science that supports scripture. Well, I hope you have the great rest of your conference. And we'll see you in our next session about dinosaurs.