Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments

"Since there were likely hundreds of such oscillations early in the Flood, such a scenario could repeat many times. This would account for several levels of dinosaur tracks in an area." — Michael Oard, 2014¹

"In Korea, there is one locality where as many as 300 successive horizons have been counted, through a vertical thickness exceeding 110 m." — Paul Garner and four other young-earth geologists, 2003²

Summary

Dinosaur tracks, eggs, dung and scavenged carcasses lie inside rock that most young-earth geologists assign to Noah's Flood.  Live animals made them, so the ground they lie on was dry, or nearly dry, while the Flood was under way.  Michael Oard's "Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments" model, BEDS for short, is the young-earth answer to all of them, and this article prices it.  The inputs come from three sibling articles that measured what each kind of trace needs:  Fossil Tracks and Trackways, Fossil Nests and Eggs, and Coprolites, Gut Contents, and Feeding Traces.  The rule is superposition only:  a horizon higher in one section came later, and no radiometric date is used.

The verdict.  BEDS fits a single fast surface.  It is unfinished for track horizons stacked by the hundreds and for bones bored by insects or worms.  It fails for nests.  The model's weak point is the one thing it has never stated in numbers:  how long a surface stays dry, and how often the same ground can come up again.

1. What BEDS says, in Oard's words. The water level "would fluctuate up and down as it rose in the first half of the Flood," from "tides, uplift and sinking of the earth's crust, and other mechanisms."¹ In 2002 he listed four mechanisms: tides, tsunamis, vertical tectonic uplift, and troughs in fast shallow currents.³ Swimming dinosaurs, or animals from higher ground nearby, climbed onto the exposed mud to make tracks, lay eggs and scavenge. The next rise buried what they left.¹ He dates all of it before Day 150, and the eggs and tracks to "between Day 40 and about Day 120."⁴ His book allows each animal its "final hours or days" on the exposed sediment.⁵ He allows "hundreds of such oscillations,"¹ exposures of up to 10,000 square kilometres,⁶ and he extends the model to Cenozoic bird and mammal tracks and the giant Nebraska beaver burrows.⁷
2. The young-earth camp is split. Paul Garner and four colleagues "are unable to conceive of a Flood so catastrophic as to lay down kilometres of sediment while at the same time allowing terrestrial animals 'temporarily to survive'," and place most of the fossil record after the Flood.² Chad Arment, writing in Answers in Genesis's research journal, says Oard's beaver-burrow horizons "didn't 'briefly' occur during the Flood."⁸ Timothy Clarey of ICR keeps the dinosaurs on dry land until "possibly around Day 100," which shortens the window for the Cretaceous nests.⁹ ICR's own palaeontology paper admits "a bit of difficulty" with Cenozoic trackways.¹⁰
3. The four mechanisms supply different exposures. A tide uncovers a patch of ground for less than one twelve-hour cycle, then floods it again at the next high water.¹¹ A tsunami's trough lasts minutes, since its period runs from about five minutes to two hours.¹² Only a rise of the crust itself could keep ground dry for weeks or months, and no young-earth source has modelled one. So the mechanism a site needs depends on what its surface records.
4. One nest outruns the window. Daily growth lines in the teeth of a Hypacrosaurus embryo from Devil's Coulee, Alberta, count 99 days of tooth growth. Adding the time before the teeth began, at the lowest crocodile value, gives 171 days.¹³ The counted part alone is longer than Oard's 80-day window for eggs. The full figure is longer than the whole 150 days. The only young-earth reply in print is that stressed mothers held their eggs longer than usual.¹⁴ To fit 80 days, a mother would have had to carry them for at least 92 days. No bird or crocodile does anything like that.
5. Stacks multiply the bill. The Jindong Formation of Korea holds dinosaur tracks "at as many as 160 distinct horizons," by its excavators' count.¹⁵ Young-earth critics cite one locality with 300 horizons in 110 metres.² At one exposure per low tide, 160 horizons take 83 days and 300 take 155. So the lower count fits Oard's wider window only if every low tide at that spot laid a bed and was walked on, and the higher count fits no window. If the horizons carry mud cracks, which Oard's own photograph puts at "a day or two after rain," they need 160 to 300 days.⁶ Six nesting beds at Auca Mahuevo leave 13 days each in 80 days, and nine at Pinyes in Spain leave 9.¹⁶ No measured dinosaur incubation is that short.
6. The single surfaces fit. A trackway takes minutes to make and a track survives about a day.¹⁷ Kvale's Sundance megatracksite in Wyoming, at 150,000 prints a square kilometre over 7.5 square kilometres, needs only about a hundred animals walking ten kilometres each.¹⁸¹⁶ Dung buried at once costs nothing, and dung worked by beetles costs about a day. Here the young-earth side is right that fast burial is what preserved the traces, and the mainstream agrees.
7. The escapes, and what each costs. Egg retention moves the nest's months inside the mother and has no living archosaur analogue. Bones bored before the Flood and carried in cost nothing, and could be tested by counting articulated skeletons with borings. Tracks made in minutes on just-drained mud are possible where the horizon shows no drying. Exposures on different sites can overlap in time, so the window applies to each section, not to the whole earth. This article prices each section separately for that reason.

Part 1: The model in its own words

The problem as Oard states it

Michael Oard, a retired meteorologist who writes on Flood geology for Creation Ministries International, puts the difficulty plainly.  "Above and below each surface on which the tracks and eggs are found (their geological horizon) are sediments that creation geologists maintain were deposited by the Flood. How could dinosaurs be walking around making tracks and laying eggs during a global deluge?"⁶  He adds the scavenged bonebeds, with tooth marks and shed teeth, and sets the deadline:  "A consistent creationist interpretation means all this activity occurred before Day 150 during the Flood year (when the waters reached their peak)."⁶  The deadline comes from Genesis 7:  by Day 150 every air-breathing animal outside the Ark had died.  Oard accepts Day 150 "as the maximum allowable time for terrestrial life to exist outside the Ark."⁷

What causes the exposures

Oard's answer is that the Flood did not rise smoothly.  In 2002 he named "at least four mechanisms that would temporarily expose freshly deposited Flood sediment while the water continued a net global rise. These are: 1) tidal oscillations, 2) tsunamis, 3) vertical tectonic uplift, and 4) the dynamics of rapid Flood currents in relatively shallow water that would cause the sea level to fall in 'troughs'."³  In 2014 the list was "tides, uplift and sinking of the earth's crust, and other mechanisms including effects of the earth's rotation."¹  In 2016 it was "tides, tsunamis, nearby as well as distant tectonics, and other mechanisms."⁴

The sequence is the same in every version.  "In areas with rapid deposition of sediments, a brief drop in the level of the Floodwaters would expose a flat bedding plane (BEDS). Dinosaurs swimming or on higher land nearby could move onto the BEDS and thus make tracks, lay eggs, and scavenge dead dinosaurs."¹  Then the water rose again, "any dinosaur features would be rapidly covered by fresh sediment, preserving them," and later "those new sediments could again be temporarily exposed."⁶  The model's name, Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments, describes that cycle.

When, how long, and how often

When.  Oard places "the dinosaur eggs and tracks" "between Day 40 and about Day 120 of the Flood."  Before Day 40, "the rain would have washed away the tracks and eggs."⁴  The outer limit is Day 150.  So the window is 80 days on his narrower statement and 110 days on his wider one.  In 1995 he wrote that he favoured 150 days because of "dinosaur tracks on thousands of meters of Flood sediments and baby dinosaurs hatched from eggs," as Paul Garner quotes him.¹⁹  This article prices all three:  80, 110 and 150 days.

How long.  The 2011 book Dinosaur Challenges and Mysteries gives the clearest statement, as Brian Thomas quotes it from page 115:  "If there were places that were submerged, covered by sediment, and then re-emerged for a short time, then all the dinosaur data can be explained by their final hours or days being spent on the freshly-laid-and-then-exposed flat Flood sediments."⁵  At Lark Quarry in Queensland he reads the water going up and down "in seconds."¹  In 2016 he widened it:  the floodwater "oscillated up and down with different amplitudes and lengths of time of exposure," and "There would be different lengths of time that the sediments would be exposed."⁴  He gives no upper figure anywhere this article could find.

How often.  "Since there were likely hundreds of such oscillations early in the Flood, such a scenario could repeat many times. This would account for several levels of dinosaur tracks in an area."¹  "Therefore tracks, as well as eggs, and scavenged bonebeds, can occur at multiple levels in an area."⁶

How big.  One exposure "could represent a small or large area of exposure, for instance up to 10,000 km2 (4,000 miles2)."⁶

How far up the column.  Oard does not stop at the dinosaurs.  "Like dinosaur tracks, bird and mammal tracks, as well as the Devil's corkscrews, represent animal activity during the Flood, before Day 150.  Such tracks were made on "briefly exposed diluvial sediments" (BEDS) during fluctuations in relative sea level during the Flooding Stage."⁷  The Devil's corkscrews are the spiral burrows of the beaver Palaeocastor in Nebraska, high in the Cenozoic.  He has since used BEDS for coal as well:  log mats settled on exposed sediment and "Dinosaurs that had not yet drowned would swim to this island of brief safety."²⁰  So on Oard's own scope, every land-surface horizon from the lowest track-bearing rock to the Cenozoic beaver burrows must fit before Day 150 at the place where it lies.

Who walked on them

"Some dinosaurs would be able to swim for a while and then get on these exposed sediments making tracks and laying eggs before finally succumbing to the Flood."³  In 2023:  "Dinosaurs that could swim could land on such an area and remain for a time until it was flooded again."⁶  Brian Thomas, reviewing the book, summarised the picture as creatures "truly on their last legs, treading water for perhaps hours before finally being able to step in submerged mud when waters lowered."⁵

The rest of the young-earth camp

The young-earth literature does not speak with one voice, and the dissent is the best criticism of BEDS in print.

Paul Garner, 1996.  Writing in the same journal as Oard, Garner answered Oard's 150 days directly:  "How are we to accommodate several successive nest-building periods within 150 days, remembering that we also have to leave sufficient time for the rest of the Mesozoic, the entire Palaeozoic, and possibly a considerable portion of the Proterozoic to be deposited before the dinosaurs can even begin to build the first nest?"¹⁹  His conclusion was that "The Flood/post-Flood boundary should therefore be sought in the pre-Triassic record."¹⁹  That moves the dinosaurs after the Flood.  The cost of that move is argued in The Flood/Post-Flood Boundary and is not repeated here.

Garner, Garton, Johnston, Robinson and Tyler, 2003.  Five British young-earth geologists cited the Korean section with 300 horizons in 110 metres and wrote:  "Somehow we are to imagine the beasts surviving wave after wave of deluge and returning to the same spot, notwithstanding that it was under shallow water and thus not even visible to them."²  They called small changes in floodwater level "merely an ad hoc postulation of possible circumstances at one particular moment."²

John Woodmorappe and Oard, replying in the same issue.  "The repeated emergence and submergence of vast land areas is not at all ad hoc. It is common sense."²  On the 300 Korean horizons they asked whether the field evidence "actually require[s] 300 successive events, or is it a composite of much fewer events occurring laterally in area and simultaneously in time?"  They proposed that the dinosaurs could "simply keep stepping upward as the water kept flowing while progressively more sediment accumulated around their toes," like people stepping onto deepening snow.²  That reply is the most specific mechanism any young-earth writer has offered for a stacked track section, and Part 4 prices it.

Chad Arment, 2023.  In Answers in Genesis's research journal, Arment took up Oard's claim about the beaver burrows:  "Clearly, extensive plant growth, episodic and vertically staggered burrow formation, and a large terrestrial beaver population demonstrate that this phenomenon didn't "briefly" occur during the Flood."⁸  He accepts that burrows in Permian to Cretaceous rock are Flood-time escape burrows, so his objection is to the Nebraska horizons, not to BEDS everywhere.

Michael Surtees, 2023.  At the Ninth International Conference on Creationism, Surtees, a zoologist, stated the cost of the in-Flood reading in one line:  "This model requires the survival of dinosaurs during the cataclysmic onset of the flood and then for several months, before leaving footprints in newly deposited sediments."  Repeating that for each track-bearing layer "appears highly improbable," and his alternative is that Mesozoic tracks and fossils "record the dispersal and diversification of the original dinosaur kinds which came off Noah's ark."²¹

Timothy Clarey and ICR.  ICR's model needs less of BEDS because it keeps the dinosaurs on unflooded land for most of the window.  "Our mapping suggests dinosaurs did not become inundated until well into the Flood year, possibly around Day 100. Dinosaurs and their entire ecosystem were 'high and dry' while the earliest megasequences were being deposited."⁹  Clarey and Werner date the Zuni megasequence, which holds the Jurassic and Cretaceous dinosaur beds, "from about Day 90 of the Flood to Day 150 of the Flood."²²  Tomkins and Clarey say "the Zuni likely began about Day 100 of the Flood."¹⁰  For tracks inside marine rock, Clarey invokes "tsunami-like ocean waves to wash in and out during the Flood's advance, leaving some areas above water for brief moments,"²³ which is BEDS by another name.  ICR concedes that "Our interpretation still has a bit of difficulty explaining the trackways and footprints found in some layers of the Cenozoic."¹⁰  On ICR's dates, every Cretaceous nest site must fit inside 50 to 60 days, which is a tighter window than Oard's.

Creation Ministries International, 2023.  The one young-earth answer found to the length of incubation is egg retention:  "Some pregnant dinosaurs under stress may have retained fertilized eggs longer than usual, allowing the embryo to reach the point of hatching shortly after being laid."¹⁴  The same article allows that "Infrequently, an uplifted surface could have stayed exposed for long enough to allow the hatchlings to develop for a time."

Part 2: What one surface needs

The three sibling articles measured what each kind of land-surface trace needs from the ground it lies on.  This part gathers their numbers in one table, so that Part 4 can add them up.  Each figure is a minimum for one horizon, set by a living animal or a process that can be watched today.  "Hard" means the number is measured on the trace itself or on the same process.  "Soft" means it is borrowed from a different animal, or depends on an assumption the young-earth side can reject.

How long a track takes, and how long it lasts

A footprint takes a moment to make.  A field experiment on the mud of Lake Turkana found that each fossil trackway at Ileret "represents minutes to no more than a few days in the lives of the individuals moving across these paleolandscapes."¹⁷  The same experiment measured how quickly fresh prints decay:  sharp features lasted "an average of only 1.3 days," and "53% were completely obliterated within one week."¹⁷  Oard agrees that "exposed tracks erode away within days to a few weeks."⁶  So a track surface must be buried within about a day or two of the print.  That suits BEDS, which buries every surface fast.

The harder question is how long the surface was exposed before the print.  A footprint forms only in a narrow band of firmness.  Peter Falkingham's simulations found "a 'Goldilocks' quality where only a narrow range of loads could produce tracks."²⁴  The band widens "when a substrate is exposed for a period of time during which the mechanical properties alter, such as when a substrate is drying out."²⁴  Freshly settled mud is too soft.  Draining and firming take time, and nobody on either side has published how much for a dinosaur-bearing bed.  This article therefore treats the bare track surface as needing hours, and calls that soft.

Many track surfaces record more than a footprint.

1. Mud cracks. Oard's own 2023 article shows "Mudcracks and raindrop imprints in an arroyo (steep-sided gully) in Tucson, Arizona, USA, a day or two after rain."⁶ That is a young-earth-sourced figure for a cracked surface: a day or two. On the main track level at Cal Orck'o in Bolivia, Christian Meyer's team found "different generations of mud cracks on its surface, all of which formed after the tracks were left."²⁵ More than one generation of cracks means the surface dried, was wetted and dried again.
2. Microbial mats. At Kvale's Bighorn Basin megatracksites, the ones Oard built BEDS on, "Microbial mat growth on the ancient tidal flats apparently initiated the preservation of these prints."¹⁸ A mat has to grow before it can be walked on.
3. Burrows. The Main Tracklayer at Glen Rose, Texas, is "a 20-30 cm thick, homogeneous dolomudstone that is thickly riddled with vertical invertebrate burrows (Skolithos)."²⁶ James Farlow's team noted that the burrow density "might provide a clue as to how long the muddy deposit that became the Main Tracklayer was exposed before burial."²⁶ Nobody has yet read that clock.
4. Hardening. At Lark Quarry, the re-study found a horizon that "ceased deposition, hardened (perhaps subaerially), prior to the high-energy regime when sand was deposited."²⁷

How long a nest takes

A nest is the slowest trace in the record, because an embryo grows at its own pace whatever the weather.  In 2017 Gregory Erickson and colleagues counted the daily growth lines in the teeth of two dinosaur embryos.  For Hypacrosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur, the embryos came from "a clutch containing four broken eggs" at Devil's Coulee, Alberta.¹³  The count splits into two parts, and the split matters for BEDS:

1. Counted. The oldest tooth took 99.45 days to form, from "summing the age of the younger functional tooth (55.27 d) and the tooth family replacement rate (44.18 d)."¹³ For the small horned dinosaur Protoceratops, the counted figure is 48.23 days.¹³ These are lines that form once a day, counted like tree rings on the animal itself.
2. Modelled. Teeth do not start forming when the egg is laid. The authors added the time before the first tooth, "conservatively modeled as initiating at 42% of the incubation period," the lowest value in living crocodiles. That brings the totals to 171.47 days and 83.16 days.¹³¹³

The counted part is the hard floor on the egg's age.  The modelled part is soft, because it rests on crocodiles.  But the authors list every source of error as making the real figures longer, not shorter.¹³  The sibling article Fossil Nests and Eggs sets out the method and the result in full.

The young-earth side has one answer, egg retention:  the mother held the eggs while the embryos grew.  If she held them past the start of tooth growth, even the counted days could have passed inside her.  No living bird or crocodile does this.  Birds and crocodiles lay early and let the nest do the rest.  Retaining shelled eggs through most of development is a habit of some lizards and snakes.  Retention is the one escape that would save a single nest, and it has no living archosaur to support it.

The full bill

The table gives each trace its minimum time on one surface.  The feeding-trace rows come from Part 7 of Coprolites, Gut Contents, and Feeding Traces, where each number is sourced.  The soil rows point to Buried Soils, the marine burrow row to Bioturbation and Trace Fossils.

Two things stand out.  First, Oard's four mechanisms supply very different exposures, and only one of them can deliver more than a few hours.  Part 3 prices that.  Second, every row above the line of a day fits inside 80 days once.  The trouble starts when one section holds many such surfaces, one on top of another.  Part 4 prices that.

Part 3: What each mechanism can supply

Oard names four causes of exposure but has not modelled any of them.  None of his papers this article could find gives a water-level curve, a frequency, or a duration for a named mechanism at a named site.  Each cause can still be priced from what it does today.

Tides: hours, never a whole day

On a coast with two tides a day, "High tides occur 12 hours and 25 minutes apart. It takes six hours and 12.5 minutes for the water at the shore to go from high to low, or from low to high."¹¹  A patch of tidal flat is uncovered for part of each cycle.  How long depends on its height:  a patch near low-water mark is dry for minutes, and a patch near high-water mark for most of the twelve hours.  No patch that the tide covers stays dry for a whole day, because the next high tide floods it.  So tides can supply the bare track surface and nothing on the slow half of the table.

Tides also cap how many exposures one place can have.  At one low tide per cycle, a single patch gets at most 154 exposures between Day 40 and Day 120, 212 by Day 150, and 289 if the count starts on Day 1.¹⁶  That matters for the Korean section in Part 4.

The size of a Flood tide is unknown.  It matters less than it seems.  On a surface sloping 10 centimetres per kilometre, a one-metre fall in the water uncovers a band 10 kilometres wide.  Oard's 10,000 square kilometres is geometrically possible on freshly laid, flat sediment.  The constraint is time, not area.

Tsunamis and current troughs: minutes

"The time between tsunami crests (the tsunami's period) ranges from approximately five minutes to two hours."¹²  The trough that uncovers the sea floor lasts about half a period, so from two or three minutes to an hour.  Oard's own reading of Lark Quarry is of water going up and down "in seconds."¹  Troughs in fast shallow currents, his fourth cause, would be of the same order, though he gives no figure.  An exposure of minutes can record a footprint on mud that was already firm.  It cannot firm the mud, crack it, grow a mat, or hold a nest.

Uplift and sinking of the crust: the only source of weeks and months

Only a block of crust rising above the water and staying there can keep a surface dry for the days that mud cracks need or the months that a nest needs.  A young-earth model of fast crustal motion could in principle move a block that quickly.  What BEDS would ask of such a block is specific.  At Auca Mahuevo, the same few square kilometres must rise, stay dry while sauropods dig and lay and the embryos grow, sink, take on more than ten metres of mud on average, and rise again, six times.²⁸  It must do so while the Flood as a whole is rising toward its peak.  No young-earth paper has modelled one such cycle, let alone a sequence of them under one site.

The height the ground must move is not the problem.  Each cycle needs the water over the old surface to deepen by at least the thickness of the mud laid on it, so the total motion over the whole stack need only be about the stack's thickness.  At Auca Mahuevo that is about 85 metres.²⁸  A Flood model has no trouble with that.  The problem is the time each surface has to stay up.

The area and the animals

The biggest single track surface on record poses no problem of numbers.  At Shell, Wyoming, Erik Kvale's team estimated that "over 150,000 in situ tracks may be preserved per square kilometer," on a surface that "locally covers 7.5 square kilometers."¹⁸  That is about 1.1 million prints.  At about one print per metre walked, which is an assumption for scale, that is roughly 1,100 kilometres of walking:  a hundred animals walking ten kilometres each.¹⁶  BEDS can supply that in one exposure.

The Entrada megatracksite of Utah is a different scale.  Martin Lockley traced its main track layer "for at least 15 to 20 kilometers along an almost continuously exposed bedding plane," over "an area of at least 300 square kilometers," with mapped densities "from one to ten per square meter."²⁹  Spread over the whole area, which Lockley does not claim, that would be 300 million to 3 billion prints, or 30,000 to 300,000 animals walking ten kilometres each.¹⁶  The figure is for scale only.  Lockley's own reading is that "the track abundance is probably not attributable to exceptionally large dinosaur populations, but to repeated trackmaking activity in the same beds over a long period of time."²⁹  On BEDS, the same surface would need either a very large herd in one exposure or many exposures of the same surface, and each extra exposure is drawn from the same calendar.  The formation "is essentially devoid of dinosaur remains attributable to these or any other trackmakers,"²⁹ so whichever animals made the prints left the surface alive.

Part 4: The sum in single sections

A window applies to one place at a time.  Two sites a thousand kilometres apart could have been exposed in the same week, so their surfaces do not add.  Surfaces stacked in one section do add, because superposition puts each one after the one beneath it, and each had to be buried before the next could form.  So the test is section by section:  count the trace-bearing horizons, give each its minimum surface time from Part 2, and compare the total with 80, 110 and 150 days.  A simpler form of the same test asks how much time each horizon could have had if the stack used the whole window.  That figure is the window divided by the number of horizons, and the calculator beside this article prints it for every case.¹⁶

One clutch at Devil's Coulee

The Hypacrosaurus clutch from Devil's Coulee needs no stacking at all.  Its embryos record 99 counted days of tooth growth, and 171 days with the time before the teeth.¹³  Horner and Currie found the nests "in greenish-grey mudstones, some of which contained abundant caliche," near the top of the formation.³⁰

1. Against Oard's 80 days, the counted days alone overrun by about three weeks.
2. Against 110 days, the counted days fit only if the eggs were laid on Day 40, nothing else happened on that ground before or after, and the clutch was buried by Day 140. The full 171 days do not fit.
3. Against 150 days, counted from Day 1, the full figure still overruns by three weeks. Oard rules out Day 1 anyway, because the rain would have washed the eggs away.⁴
4. On ICR's timing, with the Zuni megasequence from about Day 90 or 100 to Day 150, the window for a Cretaceous nest is 50 to 60 days. The nests sit on Zuni sediment, so they were laid after it was deposited, even if the dinosaurs had lived on dry land until then. The counted days alone overrun the window.

The only escape is egg retention.  On Oard's 80 days, the mother must have carried her eggs for at least 92 of the 171 days, past the point where the teeth began.  On ICR's 50 to 60 days, she must have carried them for 111 to 121 days.  This is a fail for BEDS unless dinosaurs retained eggs in a way no living archosaur does.

Egg Mountain and the Willow Creek Anticline, Montana

At Egg Mountain, Jack Horner's crews "had found each kind of egg on each of three different fossil horizons," and "could see the trampled, muddy soil surface clearly preserved."³¹  Next to it, "Three Maiasaura peeblesorum nesting horizons have been discovered," with babies in the nests and bones from embryos up to juveniles with 19-centimetre femora strewn over the lower horizon.³²  A modern study of the Egg Mountain section found insect cocoons throughout, "a lack of large (> 10 cm) depositional events," and "extended periods of subaerial exposure."³³

These are two stacks of three, and the sources do not say whether one lies above the other, so they are priced separately.  Three horizons leave 27 days each in an 80-day window and 50 days in 150 days.  A Maiasaura nest with growing babies in it needs a full incubation and then weeks more.  No growth-line count exists for Maiasaura or for the Egg Mountain eggs.  But even the shortest dinosaur count, Protoceratops at 48 counted days, makes three horizons about 145 days, and the hadrosaur count makes them about 300.¹⁶  The figure is soft, because it borrows another dinosaur's clock.  Every measured dinosaur clock makes it a fail.

Auca Mahuevo, Argentina

"Six different egg-beds, some of which are laterally continuous for several kilometers, are contained within the 85-meter-thick stratigraphic section of Auca Mahuevo."  The clutches of egg-bed 3 lie in a vertisol, a cracking clay soil, whose slickensides cut through the eggs.²⁸  The eggs held embryos, killed when "Flooding of shallow stream channels deposited overbank silt and mud on the eggs."³⁴  Oard counts "four levels of eggs" in one 40-metre interval.⁴

Six beds leave 13 days each in 80 days, 18 in 110, 25 in 150.  On Oard's own count of four, 20 days each in 80 days.  These embryos did not hatch, so the clock is their age at burial, not a full incubation.  No one has counted growth lines in a titanosaur embryo.  For scale only, living birds incubate for "11–85 d" on average, by Erickson's comparison.¹³  A sauropod clutch would have to be laid, and its embryos grow skeletons, inside two to three weeks, six times over, with tens of metres of mud laid between, and one bed long enough for a clay soil to crack.  This is soft, because it rests on no titanosaur clock.  It is a fail on any clock measured in an archosaur.

Pinyes, Spanish Pyrenees

In the southern Pyrenees, "Nine horizons containing Megaloolithus siruguei clutches are exposed near the village of Coll de Nargó," in "pedogenically modified massive, calcareous silty mudstones."³⁵³⁵  Nine horizons leave 8.9 days each in 80 days and 16.7 days in 150.¹⁶  The same arithmetic as Auca Mahuevo, made tighter:  a fail on any measured archosaur clock.

The Korean section

The excavators' own count, in English, is from Seong-Kyu Lim, Seong Young Yang and Martin Lockley in 1989:  the tracks "occur at as many as 160 distinct horizons throughout the 300 m of gray shales and siltstones that comprise the formation."¹⁵  The figure the young-earth critics give is higher and tighter:  "In Korea, there is one locality where as many as 300 successive horizons have been counted, through a vertical thickness exceeding 110 m."²  They cite a 1994 paper this article could not obtain.  Woodmorappe and Oard doubted the count in reply, asking whether it is "a composite of much fewer events occurring laterally in area and simultaneously in time."²  Their question is fair, and Part 6 lists it as open.  Taken at face value, 300 horizons leave 6.4 hours each in 80 days, 8.8 in 110 and 12 in 150.  In that time each cycle has to lay about 37 centimetres of sediment, uncover it, firm it enough to print, bring the animals onto it and bury it.  The 160 horizons of the 1989 count leave 12 hours each in 80 days and 22.5 hours in 150, with about 1.9 metres of sediment per cycle.¹⁶

1. On tides. At one horizon per low tide, 300 horizons take 155 days, more than every window. The 160 horizons of the 1989 count take 83 days, which fits 110 or 150 days only if every single low tide at that spot laid a new bed and was walked on, with none missed. That is the tightest schedule any section in this article demands.
2. On tsunamis or current troughs. Exposures of minutes give enough cycles, but they cannot firm fresh mud. They require every one of the 300 surfaces to have been firm already when the water drew back.
3. On Woodmorappe and Oard's stepping-up picture. If the dinosaurs "simply keep stepping upward as the water kept flowing while progressively more sediment accumulated around their toes,"² then 110 metres accumulated around animals standing in shallow water within the window. That is at least 73 centimetres a day for 150 days, or 1.4 metres a day for 80, without pause, under herds that stayed put. Animals standing in water print on submerged mud, and the picture predicts tracks scattered through the beds rather than on discrete surfaces. It also leaves nothing to explain any horizon that shows drying.
4. If the horizons dried. Any horizon with mud cracks needs a day or two by Oard's own photograph. If all 160 did, the section needs about 160 days; if all 300 did, about 300. The passages of the 1989 chapter read for this article report no drying features for the Jindong beds, so this is the test still to be made.

The Korean case is unfinished.  BEDS fits only on the lower count and a perfect tidal schedule, or if each horizon was walked on during minutes of exposure on mud that was already firm and shows no drying.  Both are questions the field record can answer.

Oard's own example, the Bighorn Basin

Kvale's Wyoming megatracksites were the basis of Oard's 2002 paper.  The lower tracks "occur at multiple horizons within a 1 m interval in the middle part of the Gypsum Spring Formation."¹⁸  The upper surface, in the Sundance Formation, lies "many meters" higher.³  Both formed "in upper intertidal to supratidal sediments deposited under at least seasonally arid conditions," with microbial mats that "apparently initiated the preservation of these prints."¹⁸  A handful of surfaces fits easily on the count.  Whether each mat could grow in the hours a tide allows is the open question.  Fits on the count;  unfinished on the mats.

Glen Rose and Cal Orck'o

At Glen Rose, "tracklayers occur at four horizons," and the main one is riddled with Skolithos.²⁶²⁶  Four horizons leave 20 days each in 80 days.  That fits, unless the burrow clock Farlow pointed to turns out long.  Fits on the count;  unfinished on the burrows.

At Cal Orck'o, "Altogether nine levels with dinosaur tracks have been recorded," with mud cracks, paleosols and root horizons in the formation.²⁵²⁵  Nine levels leave 8.9 days each in 80 days.  The main level, with several generations of cracks formed after the tracks, needs more than one drying.  Fits on the count if each level used under nine days;  unfinished.

Nebraska: Oard's Cenozoic burrows

Oard placed the Palaeocastor burrows before Day 150 as BEDS.⁷  Arment, quoting Robert Hunt, gives their "staggered vertical distribution . . . through nearly 45m [150ft] of the Arikaree Group."⁸  Each level needed a colony of beavers to dig spiral burrows, roots to grow into them, and silica to cement them.  Nobody has priced that in days, so the arithmetic cannot be run.  Arment, a young-earth writer, judged it impossible as BEDS.  Fails, on the young-earth critic's own judgment;  unpriced in days.

A cross-check from the burrow record

The sibling article Bioturbation and Trace Fossils ran the same kind of sum on John Woodmorappe's own figures for burrowed marine beds.  He allowed "one year (8,766 hours) of overall deposition with active sedimentation occurring half of this time."³⁶  The fastest published time to burrow one 12-centimetre bed is 15.5 hours.³⁷  That buys about 283 surfaces in a whole Flood year.  It is a different clock, under water, but it lands on the same order:  a few hundred surfaces per section per Flood year.  It also draws on the same calendar at sites where burrowed marine beds and land surfaces alternate, since one place cannot be under quiet water and dry at once.

The cases together

Objections and responses

"A footprint takes seconds.  BEDS needs no time at all."  True for the print, and Part 2 grants it.  The cost lies in what the surface records before and after the print:  mud firm enough to take it, mats grown over it, cracks dried into it, burrows dug through it.  Where a horizon shows none of those, BEDS fits it.  Where it shows them, the surface needs hours to days, and a stack multiplies that.

"The mothers held their eggs until they were nearly ready to hatch."  This is the only answer in print to the incubation clock, and it is CMI's.¹⁴  It does not shorten the count.  It moves the days inside the mother.  For the Devil's Coulee clutch to fit Oard's 80 days, a hadrosaur must have carried a clutch of eggs 20 centimetres across for at least 92 days, past the start of tooth growth, while swimming or sheltering from the Flood.¹⁶  No living bird or crocodile does anything like it.  The answer is possible in words and has no animal to support it.

"Different places were exposed at different times."  Agreed, and this article prices each section separately for that reason.  It never adds a track in Texas to a nest in Alberta.  The stacks in Part 4 are each in one place, one above the other.

"The 300 Korean horizons may be fewer events, correlated wrongly."  Woodmorappe and Oard raised this, and it is a fair question about field correlation.²  The excavators' own figure is 160, and it is still the tightest case:  a walked-on low tide every twelve hours, without a miss, for 83 days.

"Mud cracks can form under water."  Some cracks do form by shrinkage of clay under water, which is why this article treats a cracked horizon as soft.  The Cal Orck'o surface is harder to explain that way, because its cracks came in several generations after the tracks were made, in a formation with root horizons and soils.²⁵²⁵

"The bored bones were bored before the Flood and carried in."  This escape is real, and it costs nothing if true.  It can be tested by counting articulated skeletons with beetle borings in place.  The coprolites article lists it as unfinished for that reason.

"The dinosaurs laid in haste and built no nests."  Oard argues that most eggs lie on flat bedding planes with no nest, because the animals "had little time."⁶  Haste shortens laying.  It does not shorten incubation, and the embryos at Devil's Coulee and Auca Mahuevo had grown skeletons inside the eggs.  Where a nest was dug, as in the rimmed bowls of Auca Mahuevo's egg-bed 4,²⁸ even the haste argument does not apply.

"ICR's Dinosaur Peninsula removes the need for BEDS."  It removes the need before about Day 90 to 100, when ICR has the dinosaurs on unflooded land.  But the Cretaceous nests lie in Zuni rocks, which ICR dates from about Day 90 or 100 to Day 150.²²¹⁰  That gives each nest site 50 to 60 days, which is less than Oard allows.  And Clarey still needs brief exposures between waves for tracks in marine rock.²³

"Mainstream geology has its own puzzles here, such as the same kind of dinosaur on surfaces said to be three million years apart."⁶  The same trackmakers in the same kind of setting is what a long history of recurring tidal flats predicts, so it is no puzzle for the mainstream.  But this article does not need the mainstream to be right.  It asks only whether BEDS fits its own calendar.

From the skeptic:  "If nests fail, why not call BEDS refuted?"  Because most of what BEDS was built to explain does fit.  Single track surfaces, fast-buried dung, beetle-worked dung, and a few stacked tracklayers all fit inside Oard's window, with time to spare.  The failure is specific:  nests, and stacks of surfaces that each needed days.  The young-earth side is also right that fast burial preserved these traces, and the excavators say floods buried the nests at Auca Mahuevo, Egg Mountain and Devil's Coulee.  The dispute is how long the surfaces lasted before the floods came.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. The Korean count. Garner's 300 horizons in 110 metres cite Lim and colleagues in 1994, which this article could not obtain, and the 1989 count of 160 covers the whole 300-metre formation. Whether the Jindong horizons show mud cracks, raindrop prints or soils is not stated in the passages read. Paik and colleagues' 2001 sedimentology of the track beds would settle it, and could not be obtained.
2. No growth-line count for a sauropod or Maiasaura embryo. The Auca Mahuevo, Pinyes and Willow Creek verdicts rest on other dinosaurs' clocks. Counting the teeth of an Auca Mahuevo embryo would turn a soft fail into a hard verdict either way.
3. Egg retention needs a primary. This article and the nests article state that no living bird or crocodile retains shelled eggs through development. A primary source for that statement, such as Andrews and Mathies' 2000 review, has not been read.
4. How long fresh mud takes to take a print. Neither side has measured how long a freshly settled mud needs to drain and firm before it holds a dinosaur track. Falkingham's strength bands give the target, and a settling-column experiment could give the time. That number would turn the "hours" in Part 2 from soft to hard.
5. The mats and the burrows. Microbial mat growth on the Bighorn surfaces and Skolithos density on the Glen Rose Main Tracklayer are clocks nobody has read.
6. The whole column at one place. On Oard's scope, every land-surface horizon from the lowest track rock to the Cenozoic beaver burrows must fit before Day 150 where it lies. No one has compiled a single long section, logged for every track, nest, burrow and soil horizon from bottom to top. The Colorado Plateau, with track-bearing formations from the Permian to the Cretaceous stacked in one region, is the obvious place to do it. That count is the decisive test of BEDS, and it has not been made.
7. No model of the exposures. A working BEDS model would give, for one named section, a water-level curve with the number, timing and length of exposures, and show that it matches the traces on each horizon. Oard's papers name mechanisms and give no curve.
8. Sources not read. Oard's 2011 book Dinosaur Challenges and Mysteries and his 2009 chapter in Rock Solid Answers are not on archive.org or any open route tried. The book is quoted here through Brian Thomas's review.

Verdict

Oard's BEDS model is the only young-earth answer offered for land-surface traces inside Flood rock, and it gets one thing right:  these traces were buried fast, and the excavators agree.  It fits single surfaces that needed hours or a day:  a trackway, a pile of dung, a herd's prints on one tidal flat.  It is unfinished for stacks of track horizons, where the excavators' count of 160 in Korea needs a walked-on low tide every twelve hours without a miss, and for bones bored in place.  It fails for nests.  One Hypacrosaurus clutch at Devil's Coulee holds 99 counted days of embryonic growth, longer than Oard's 80-day window, and 171 days in all, longer than the whole time land animals lived during the Flood.  Stacked nesting horizons at Auca Mahuevo, Pinyes and Egg Mountain multiply that failure.  The only escape in print, egg retention, has no living archosaur to support it.  Young-earth geologists have said much of this first:  Garner in 1996 and 2003, and Arment in 2023.  What BEDS lacks is a stated duration for its exposures, and that is where it fails.

Sources