Aussie Dino Stampede Tramples Long Ages

Researchers just published findings on a decade-long study of one of the biggest dinosaur trackways on earth, located on the west coast of Australia.

The BBC News calls it “Australia’s ‘Jurassic Park.'” First brought to the attention of scientists in 2008 by local aboriginal tribespeople who have known about them for centuries, the Kimberley track site covers some 80 kilometers of coastline along northwest Australia, and includes thousands of tracks from 21 species of dinosaurs. These include stegosaurs (never before seen in Australia) and sauropods with tracks 1.5 meters long—big enough for a man to recline in (see the photo in the article). Lead researcher Steven Salisbury says on Australia’s SBS news site,

“There were five different types of predatory dinosaur tracks, at least six types of tracks from long-necked herbivorous sauropods, four types of tracks from two-legged herbivorous ornithopods, and six types of tracks from armoured dinosaurs.”

Most of Australia’s dinosaur fossils have previously come from the eastern side of the vast country.

The articles claim that dinosaurs roamed this area for over 10 million Darwin Years, but something’s wrong with this picture. The tracks are right on the coastline, often covered up at high tide. Photos show that many of them have crisp, sharp edges. It seems inconceivable that they could look so fresh after so much time passed. Indeed, Tas Walker, associated with Creation Ministries International, pointed out numerous problems with the evolutionary slow-and-gradual picture in his October 2012 CMI article on the tracks:

One clue that we are looking at an unprecedented geological catastrophe is the enormous extent of the sedimentary deposits. Host Mark Horstman explains that the footprints are preserved in the Broome Sandstone, which extends for 200 km along the coastline and is up to 280 metres thick. He says, “At the time this was a vast river plain of muddy swamps and sandbars.” Actually, there was not a lot of mud. Mostly it was fine to very coarse sand with areas of gravel. The Broome Sandstone is known to cover the whole of the Dampier Peninsula. A river plain of such an enormous extent is monstrous compared with the rivers on the earth today. The Broome Sandstone points to an exceptionally large depositional system.

To Walker, the evidence points to dinosaurs running to escape rising flood waters. And this was no ordinary flood; as he describes, the extent of the trackway deposits cannot accommodate a slow, gradual deposition over millions of years. So why wouldn’t scientists follow the evidence where it clearly leads?

There are so many clues in the rocks at that point to the catastrophe of Noah’s Flood, yet Steve Salisbury and his team did not make the connection. They have been trained for years to think in one particular way, and Noah’s Flood is not on their radar. Worse still, if they ever did seriously float that possibility they would almost certainly lose their jobs (see Expelled).

Salisbury’s results are published as the 2016 Memoir of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. The open-access paper includes a comparison with other major dinosaur trackways around the world:

Globally, there is also no other discrete dinosaurian ichnofauna pertaining to a single geological formation that contains as many track types as the Broome Sandstone in the Yanijarri–Lurujarri section of the Dampier Peninsula. Although there are many areas that contain an abundance of tracks and trackways, as best as we have been able to ascertain, none appears to be equal to the Broome Sandstone in terms of the overall diversity of track types that are represented.

The paper makes no mention of evolution, but neither does it mention how the tracks were buried (which must have happened quickly, otherwise they would have degraded). Were these tracks made casually along a broad river plain? Remarkably, the sandstone deposit contains no vertebrate fossils—only some tracks left by some of the largest land vertebrates that ever lived. Salisbury’s team believes the tracks are largely ‘coeval’ (i.e., deposited around the same general time). It would seem challenging to incorporate this evidence into Darwin’s lazy, slow-and-gradual scheme of things.

Update 3/29/17: In other dinosaur news, Science Daily reports that assumptions about how to tell male/female differences in dinosaur bones has been called into question. And in a feature about ichthyosaurs, Nature admits there are no fossil ancestors of these large, successful marine reptiles that “terrorized the ancient seas.” Whatever it was, it had to be a land animal in the evolutionary view. “They totally changed their bodies, biologies and behaviours in order to live in the water,” remarked Stephen Brusatte, which is exactly the problem with whale evolution, too.

Breathes there an evolutionist who can look at evidence like this with an open mind, and conclude that there is something big-league wrong with the consensus view of earth history? Probably not. That’s why creation scientists, accustomed to looking at things fairly from both sides, provide a valuable check on the dogmatism of evolutionists.