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Fossilised fish, with another that had just been swallowed. |
FOSSIL FORMATION
It is an indisputable fact that fossils are not being formed today; for when an animal dies, its carcass is soon destroyed by predation or decomposition. Present seabeds are not littered with dead fish that are slowly being buried by mud, which in turn is changing into rock. Yet there are fossil deposits where hundreds or thousands of remains are entombed together in a small area. Also, almost all fossils are of animals apparently in the prime of life. There are examples of fish with recent food in their stomachs, or even frozen in the act of catching another. Healthy horseshoe crabs are trapped as they leave the water in pursuance of their normal lifestyle. In some cases even the finest surface detail of animals and leaves are preserved, indicating that they had not undergone any decomposition prior to burial.31
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Fossilised fish, with another that had just been swallowed. |
What these findings suggest is that rather than fossilisation being a gradual process in which creatures over millions of years get covered by sediment, it was a sudden, catastrophic event. This event must have involved huge movements of water, which produced the sediments in which the fossils were entombed. This movement could also have resulted in a certain amount of sorting of the creatures on the basis of size or habitat.
Reference
31 Notably in the Burgess shale deposits in the Canadian Rockies.