Rejecting a quotation from publication and erasing it from the record are two different decisions. This page is the record.
What this page is
Four quotations were held back when the article was drafted because none could be checked against the source it names. One has since been cleared and is now in the article: Newell 1967, entry 3 below. Three remain held back. None has been deleted.
A standing rule applies to every entry. Nothing here was established with Claude's WebFetch tool, which converts a page to markdown and answers through a small summarising model. Every text below was read off downloaded bytes: curl for PDFs and web pages, bin/iapdsearch.py and archive.org's fulltext/inside.php for books.
Three status words are used.
- UNVERIFIABLE: no route to the named source has been found yet. That is a statement about this project's reach, not about the quotation.
- UNSTABLE: the quoting author has printed the wording more than one way, so there is no settled text to quote.
- SECOND-HAND: the words are probably right, but they reach this project only through a source that is quoting them, and the primary has not been opened.
- RESOLVED: the primary was later obtained and the quotation is now in the article, pinned to its page.
1. T. H. Van Andel on the Venezuelan coal seams
Status: UNSTABLE and UNVERIFIABLE.
Wording as Roth printed it in 1988 (Origins 15(2):84):
"I was much influenced early in my career by the recognition that two thin coal seams in Venezuela, separated by a foot of grey clay and deposited in a coastal swamp, were respectively of Lower Palaeocene and Upper Eocene age. The outcrops were excellent but even the closest inspection failed to turn up the precise position of that 15 Myr gap."
Wording as Roth printed it in 2009 (Journal of Creation 23(2):79):
"I was much influenced early in my career by the recognition that two thin coal seams in Venezuela, separated by a foot of gray clay, and deposited in a costal swamp were respectively of Lower Paleocene and upper Eocene age. The outcrops were excellent, but even the closest inspection failed to turn up the precise position of that 15 Myr gap."
Claimed source. Van Andel, T. H., "Consider the incompleteness of the geological record," Nature 294:397-398, 3 December 1981.
The two printings differ in five places. "grey" against "gray"; "Palaeocene" against "Paleocene"; "coastal" against "costal"; "Upper Eocene" against "upper Eocene"; and the 1988 version has "were respectively of" where the 2009 version moves the comma. Nature in 1981 used British spelling, which favours the 1988 version, but that is an inference and not a reading.
Routes tried. The nature.com article page loads and confirms the metadata, and the body sits behind a $39.95 wall that a free registered Nature reader account does not open. No repository copy exists in OpenAlex. The piece is a two-page comment, so there is no preprint anywhere.
One further problem worth recording. A Lower Palaeocene to Upper Eocene gap is about 25 million years on current numbers, not the 15 million years the sentence states. Whether that is Van Andel's figure on the 1981 time scale or a transcription error cannot be settled without the page.
What would clear it. Two pages of Nature 294, read as bytes. An interlibrary scan or a bin/cdp-fetch.py session against nature.com with an institutional login would do it.
2. Stanley Beus on the Temple Butte unconformity
Status: UNVERIFIABLE.
Wording as Roth printed it (Journal of Creation 23(2):78):
"Here the unconformity [i.e. the gap or paraconformity], even though representing more than 100 million years may be difficult to locate."
Claimed source. Beus, S. S., "Temple Butte Formation," in Beus and Morales (eds.), Grand Canyon Geology, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 107-117. Roth gives no page.
Routes tried. Archive.org has no scan of either edition of Grand Canyon Geology; creator:beus AND title:grand canyon returns zero items, and Open Library lists both editions with no scan attached. The book is in print and was not borrowed.
Why it is not needed. McKee's Stratified Rocks of the Grand Canyon, U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 669, says the same thing about the same interval on its p. 44, it is public domain, it is on disk, and its page number is anchored. The article quotes McKee instead. Nothing in the argument turns on Beus's wording.
What would clear it. Pages 107-117 of the 1990 or 2003 edition, with the folio visible.
3. Norman Newell on the absence of leaching under paraconformities
Status: RESOLVED 2026-09-05. The primary was obtained and the quotation is now printed in the article from the page.
Wording as Roth printed it (Origins 15(2):83):
"A remarkable aspect of paraconformities in limestone sequences is general lack of evidence of leaching of the undersurface. Residual sods and karst surfaces that might be expected to result from long subaerial exposure are lacking or unrecognized."
And, two sentences later:
"The origin of paraconformities is uncertain, and I certainly do not have a simple solution to this problem."
Claimed source. Newell, N. D., "Paraconformities," in Teichert and Yochelson (eds.), Essays in Paleontology and Stratigraphy: R. C. Moore Commemorative Volume, University of Kansas Department of Geology Special Publication 2:349-367, 1967.
Why this matters more than the other two. This is the most-quoted sentence in the whole creationist literature on flat gaps, and it is the strongest single mainstream concession in it. A paraconformity article that prints it without having read the page is doing what this project criticises others for doing. Note also that "Residual sods" is very likely a scanning error for "Residual soils," which is another reason to want the printed page.
Routes tried, and the one that worked. A title search on archive.org for the exact phrase "Essays in paleontology and stratigraphy" returns zero hits, which is what closed this entry the first time. KU ScholarWorks holds the whole volume as a 262 MB PDF at handle 1808/3895 and returns 403 to curl on every path. The volume is on archive.org under a mangled title. A keyword search for Moore commemorative volume paleontology stratigraphy returns essaysinpaleonto0000unse, catalogued as "Essays in paleontology stratigraphy; R.C. Moore commemorative volume", with the ampersand and the second "in" dropped. It is inlibrary and printdisabled, so bin/iapdsearch.py reads it. Leaf = folio + 12 from the item's _scandata.xml, anchored at leaf 361 = p. 349 (the paper's first page, matching the 349-367 citation), leaf 376 = p. 364 and leaf 382 = p. 370.
What was found. Roth's wording is accurate except for one scanning error. The printed text reads: "A remarkable aspect of paraconformities in limestone sequences is general lack of evidence of leaching of the undersurface. Residual soils and karst surfaces that might be expected to result from long subaerial exposure are lacking or unrecognized." The sentence straddles the page break, beginning on p. 356 and ending on p. 357. "Residual sods" was indeed a scanning error, as suspected. The second quotation is verbatim at p. 364.
What the article does with it now. Both sentences are printed, and so is what Newell says next, which the creationist literature never quotes: on the same p. 364 he names the answer he favours, "a concept of long protracted stillstand of relative sea level adjacent to very low land surfaces," and on p. 365 he writes that "The fact that paraconformities are difficult or impossible to recognize by casual inspection is not proof that they do not exist."
A companion quotation that did survive a cross-check, and still is not printed. Newell's 1984 restatement, in Catastrophes and Earth History p. 125, appears independently in Roth 1988 p. 83 and Austin 1994 p. 44, and the two wordings agree except that Roth has "many other major biostratigraphic boundaries" where Austin has "other major stratigraphic boundaries," and Roth has "even where the underlying rocks are cherty limestones" where Austin has "even where." Two creationist authors quoting the same page and differing is a reason to open the book, not a reason to average them.
Still open: the 1984 companion. Catastrophes and Earth History is on archive.org as catastropheseart00berg and was not opened for this pass. Roth and Austin disagree on its p. 125 wording, and the article does not use it.
4. Michael Oard's Teton sentence
Status: SECOND-HAND.
Wording as Oard printed it (Journal of Creation 30(3):5-6, his reference 7):
"The regularity and parallelism of the layers in well-exposed sections suggest that all these rocks were deposited in a single uninterrupted sequence."
Why it is held back. Oard gives it as a description of the Teton section, and the sentence is doing a lot of work in his argument. A sentence in a stratigraphy paper that begins "suggest that" is very often the setup for a "but," and the primary was not opened to find out whether this one is. The article makes no use of it.
What would clear it. Oard's reference 7, read in the original, with the sentence that follows.
Verifier log 2026-09-05
Every quotation and locator in index.md was re-checked against bytes on disk or fetched with curl. Nothing was established with WebFetch. What changed:
Locators corrected (4). Roth 1988's definition of a paraconformity is on p. 79, not p. 78. His "entire globe" sentence is on p. 85, not p. 89. Miall 2014's "less than 10%" is on p. 7 of the extended abstract, not p. 6. The footnote on Roth 1988 said "printed folio = PDF page"; the offset is PDF page + 74, and the note now says so and gives three anchors. The Roth 2009 footnote described a two-up scan; the file is six pages carrying one folio each.
Unsourced numbers replaced (2). The article said "about 147 million years" for the Muav-Redwall gap; no source on disk gives that figure, so it is now "more than 100 million years," which is the U.S. Geological Survey map's own number for the sub-Devonian unconformity alone. The Redwall karst arithmetic used "about 90 metres of relief," which is also unsourced; Billingsley and Beus give valleys averaging 75 metres deep and reaching 122 metres, so the arithmetic now runs on 75 metres and yields 750,000 years at the fastest measured dissolution rate rather than 900,000. A caveat was added: Billingsley and Beus credit the valleys to stream erosion, so the dissolution rate prices the caves and the plateau, not the valley floors.
Overstated geometry corrected (1). The Chattanooga section said a 1° bevel across 150 kilometres of the Nashville Dome removes 2.6 kilometres of section. Conant and Swanson give 1° as the maximum, seen "at a few places," so applying it across the whole dome overstates. The passage now says a 1° bevel removes a kilometre of section in 60 kilometres of travel and notes that the real figure is smaller.
Unsupported claim deleted (1). "tens of metres at the rates measured on the Australian cratonic outcrops he is pointing at" had no Australian figure behind it and is gone.
Three claims of young-earth silence were false and are fixed.
- The Chattanooga bevel. The article said no young-earth author mentions the Chattanooga Shale. John Morris did, in Acts & Facts 41(11):15 (2012), and he engages the basal contact directly: "underlain by an amazingly flat, featureless erosional surface … Such flat erosion usually speaks of rapid sheet erosion." He is now quoted. He does not mention the twenty-three formations or the subcrop map, and that narrower claim is what the article now makes.
- The Redwall karst. The article said no creationist has answered it. Emil Silvestru published a mechanism in 2001 (Journal of Creation 15(3):109): emergent Flood sediments degassing and dewatering produce "a wide range of negative relief in a matter of days." John Reed and Michael Oard apply it to the Redwall in 2018 and answer the Surprise Canyon plant fossils too. Both are now quoted and answered.
- Hardground petrography. The article asserted that a boring truncates grains while a squeeze mould cannot, and that "thin sections decide it." John Woodmorappe published the counter in 2006 (Journal of Creation 20(3):106): a clean cut through a hard grain may show only "that the hardness of the object itself is a sufficient explanation." The claim has been softened, his objection is printed, and the surviving test is narrowed to a boring wall cutting cement that bridges two grains. No such petrography was checked.
Newell 1967 obtained. See entry 3 above. The quarantined quotation is now printed from the page, along with Newell's own answer, which the creationist literature does not quote.
Quotation truncations marked (2). Walker 2006's borings quotation dropped a parenthetical citation without an ellipsis; it now carries one. Walker 2003's pseudokarst line was dropped altogether, because Walker credits it to Silvestru and Silvestru is now cited directly.
Everything else held. Conant & Swanson p. 13 and p. 14, Portenga & Bierman pp. 6-7 (1,599 rates, outcrop mean 12 ± 1.3, median 5.4, maximum 140), Banks & Jones Table 7 (all ten rows, 0.003 to 0.100 mm/a), López-Quirós p. 6 and fig. 7 p. 8, Clarey & Werner p. 414, Miall 2014 p. 6, Hessler p. 1, Miall 2024, Whitmore p. 294, McKee pp. 44 and 46, White pp. 8-9, Winograd table 1 p. C11, Billingsley 2000, Billingsley & Beus, Snelling 1992, Oard 2016, Walker 2006, and all fifteen Dunbar & Rodgers and Austin 1994 passages read by bin/iapdsearch.py against the _scandata.xml leaf maps. All fifteen external links return 200. Footnotes are symmetric at 71 used and 71 defined. Body length 7,012 words against 6,997 before the pass.
Metered accounts: none used. No JSTOR read, no hoopla borrow, no controlled-digital-lending loan. The three archive.org books were read with the search-inside route on printdisabled items, which costs nothing.