Favorite Episode: Fossils, the Flood, Ice Age, Dinosaurs, and Cavemen + Dr. Marcus Ross

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

We live in a depauperate world compared to the world that existed before the flood.

So dinosaurs were on the ark?

Like all of them?

I think that they go extinct very quickly after the floods.

Wow, that is, my mind is doing backflips. I told you this would happen.

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?

You kind of mentioned when all the continents were together. Does that mean Pangea is biblical?

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Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier.

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The Pre-Flood World and the Flood in Scripture

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.

The reason I found you was 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. Jumping right into it, life before the flood, what was the pre-flood world like?

Thinking 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 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.

It's almost like, okay, we started with simplicity and it's evolved into, you know, 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, that we're going to have less diversity than we did to begin with.

That's a really good observation, you know, thinking about the contrast between a evolutionary perspective, which is going to start with, obviously, the world extremely ancient, but you start off with, you know, 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.

Absolutely.

Do you have any apologetic for the way that evolution does not work in your belief system for the Young Earth creation?

Yeah.

So what we might want to do first is recognize that, you know, 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 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, 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. 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. And this line that you're drawing of, we don't go from fish to mammals, that's a pretty big jump. Is there an aspect to your research that also supports just the Earth isn't millions of years old?

There are, I think, some good evidences that the Earth is much younger than commonly claimed. I'll also back that up a little bit by saying there's also some very good arguments that the Earth is ancient.

There is no way to escape the ideas of evolution or a deep age and ancestry to the Earth itself. 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. 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 in 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, 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?

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 Brand and Art 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 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 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, 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 by successive layers and they get trapped in there.

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 floods.

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 now 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 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 of 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 gonna 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, okay, 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 gotta get up. So maybe we're gonna 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. And with the flood, that's kind of the point. There's no way of getting out.

Pangaea, the Ice Age, and the Post-Flood World

Whoa, I like how real that was. I can actually picture that. 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.

In Genesis 1, 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 it.

It's just the seas are off of the land. We even have basically one ocean today, but we call it five oceans, right? 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, okay.

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

Oh boy.

Okay. 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 North America was completely covered. We had two like really major areas where glaciers were moving and flowing from the North to the South.

But there were places even between them where occasionally there were like, you know, these quarters that people could move through. Basically, Alaska and Siberia used to be a completely connected giant landmass.

There was no break between them whatsoever. 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 seawater like this.

So 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. It doesn't look anything like ocean floor. It's just land.

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'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 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. So, you know, how do we take those? 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 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.

You know, how 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? We can ask that same question with camels.

And with, you know,.

Different wizard 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?

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.

Mass Extinctions, Dinosaurs, and the Limits of Fossil Evidence

Yeah, the discovery of the first extinct animals, especially things like marine reptiles. I studied mosasaurs, big swimming marine reptiles for my PhD, and they were part of the early evidence group of things that were completely different from anything alive today and got early scientists like Georges 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 Michelangelo and you're painting Adam on the Sistine Chapel in the seat of Rome, 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 illustrate it to reflect the knowledge that you have, but also to connect it to the people around you. 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. 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. But 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, so dinosaurs were on the Ark if they like all of them?

Right.

When I look at the fossil record, somewhere around 50 to 70 different dinosaur kinds, I think would be reasonable to anticipate 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.

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 flood. So 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.

If we think about this world...

What if they have just like eaten 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. And those plants are not the types of plants that are common today.

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

Not all of them.

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

That is...

Wow, that is... My mind is doing backflips. I told you this would happen. Okay, 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. Crazy stuff in the fossil record. And a lot of it is gone.

So, yeah, we live in a depauperate world compared to the world that existed before the Flood.

And, you know, from a biblical standpoint, the same with humans, you know, 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 bits of icing on the cake. They're not from the Flood. Thereafter, everything's already done.

So, for example,.

When we think about Neanderthals, we tend to think about like cavemen.

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 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 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, 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.

You kind of look around at that and you say, OK, 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, you know, that kind of species definition that is talking about interbreeding.

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 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 lived 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.

Kind of like a mule.

Well, there may actually be some evidence that the Neanderthals, especially, were not able to breed very successfully with us and produce 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.