Fossil Preservation

"Thus, ironically, the best preservation of delicate remains required rapid burial, associated with mass mortality, and very low rates of background sedimentation following the event." — Carlton Brett and colleagues on the trilobite beds of the Ordovician to Devonian, 2012¹

"This time-averaging of local but noncontemporaneous remains is pervasive in the fossil record: It explains why fossilized individuals are rarely found in their original life orientations, but instead are rotated and disarticulated" — Susan Kidwell and Steven Holland, 2002²

"Is it possible to fit many episodes of several months of disarticulation into a one-year Cambrian to Cretaceous process?" — Leonard Brand, young-earth palaeontologist, 2018³

Summary

A fossil is a corpse that escaped.  Almost every animal that dies is eaten, rotted, broken and dissolved within days to years, and the few that enter the rock are the ones something stopped that process.  Young-earth writers build an argument on this:  if fossils need rapid burial, and the rocks are full of fossils, then the rocks record a catastrophe.  This article states that argument from its own sources, sets it against what taphonomy, the study of what happens between death and discovery, actually measures, and then asks what preservation does to every argument built on fossil order and fossil gaps.

The conclusions, stated first:

1. The weak claim is right, and it is mainstream. An articulated skeleton, a soft-bodied animal, a crinoid with its arms on, a fish with its scales on, was taken out of circulation fast. The clocks are measured: killed embryos rot in hours, crinoid arms fall apart in days, fish scales loosen in days and flesh is gone in weeks, buried carcasses are destroyed in six months even without oxygen, bones on the ground are gone in ten to fifteen years.⁴ Every one of those is a mainstream measurement, and the young-earth primaries cite them correctly.
2. The strong claim fails on the fossils that make up most of the record. Snelling himself grants that "the vast majority of them by number are the remains of shallow-water marine invertebrates."⁵ Shells are the one kind of remain that does not need rapid burial. On one modern tidal flat the shells lying on the surface span 3,569 years;⁶ on a Bahamian sand flat clam valves span 4,000 years while the sand dollars beside them span two;⁷ and the standard review calls this mixing "pervasive in the fossil record" and the reason most fossils are "rotated and disarticulated."² No young-earth source engages these numbers.
3. Anoxia does not preserve; chemistry does, and each Lagerstätte has its own. Decay in airtight jars "had virtually destroyed the carcasses within 25 weeks."⁸ What saves soft tissue is early mineralisation or sealing: phosphate from the carcass itself in a closed system, pyrite grown by bacteria on the body, siderite from decay bicarbonate, clay chemistry in sulphate-poor seas, brine, or a microbial mat. The young-earth primaries agree about anoxia and say so.³
4. Each great Lagerstätte is a stack of small burials inside one ordinary environment, not one catastrophe. The Burgess Shale's Walcott Quarry is 26 separate mud-flow burials in seven metres, with most decay done before burial.⁹ Mazon Creek is river-flood mud on a delta laminated by twice-daily tides.¹⁰ Messel is a maar lake whose turtles died in mating pairs as they sank into poisoned water.¹¹ Jehol is volcanic ash flows into lakes.¹² Green River fish show every stage of decay on the lake floor, by a creationist's own specimens.¹³ A Solnhofen horseshoe crab walked 9.7 metres across the lagoon floor before it died.¹⁴
5. The best preservation needs rapid burial and then nothing happening. That is the mainstream finding on the obrution beds, and it is stated as an irony: rapid burial, mass mortality, "and very low rates of background sedimentation following the event."¹ Young-earth writers keep the first half and drop the second.
6. The young-earth primaries disagree with each other, and the best of them concede the problem. Snelling and ICR read Green River as catastrophic burial "in days";¹⁵ Whitmore and Brand read it as a post-Flood lake that "took some years."³ Brand asks in print whether months of disarticulation can fit into a one-year Flood,³ and Brand's own Pisco whales "were not buried as an event."¹⁶
7. Reefs and amber are argued elsewhere. Fossil reefs are summarised in Part 5: the young-earth claim that they are transported debris is contradicted by its own authors' measurements. Atoll thickness is argued under Chalk, Limestone, and the Flood, and amber under Amber and the Flood.
8. Preservation bias cuts both ways, and both sides have to live with it. Bias can suppress a record but cannot invert a sequence, so it does not touch the order result. It makes the absence of a particular intermediate weak evidence, because soft-bodied animals are 30 to 100% of species in marine muds and have "negligible preservation potential,"¹⁷ which is the mainstream's defence and also the young-earth side's best reason not to argue from gaps. And it has a direction: decay strips the characters that place a fossil high in a tree first, so fossils look more primitive than they were.¹⁸

Verdict.  The young-earth side is right that the spectacular fossils needed fast entombment, and right that mainstream taphonomy says so.  It is wrong that this makes the fossil record a record of catastrophe.  The record by number is time-averaged shell beds;  the Lagerstätten are, by the mainstream's own count and the young-earth side's own word, the exceptions;  and each exception carries evidence of the quiet environment it formed in.  Rapid burial is a fact about individual fossils.  It is not a fact about the rocks.

Part 1: The claim, in its own words

The argument is older than any of the ministries, and its fullest modern statement is Andrew Snelling's two-volume Earth's Catastrophic Past (2009), which opens its chapter on fossilisation by conceding the ground it will then build on:  "Although it cannot be categorically said that no fossils are now being formed in currently accumulating sediments, it is nevertheless emphatically true that there are no modern parallels for the formation of the fossil assemblages found in great numbers in various parts of the geologic record. Actually, the formation and preservation of fossils is rare, and requires special conditions".⁵  He then quotes two mainstream textbooks for the requirement that hard parts be "protected from these destructive processes by being covered rapidly with sediment," and on the next page he says of the frozen mammoths, tar pits and amber:  "These examples are all exceptionally rare, and are not representative of normal conditions of preservation."⁵

The premise is set earlier, under the heading "Ideal Conditions for the Formation of Fossils During the Flood":  "an incredible number of living creatures, as well as plants, were likely swept away by the Flood waters, and then trapped and eventually buried in the huge, moving masses of sediments under conditions that were eminently conducive to fossilization. Indeed, never before or since could there have been such favorable conditions for the formation of fossiliferous strata."⁵  The conclusion is drawn in his summary chapter:  "The presence of so many fossils, often preserved in exquisite detail, throughout the geologic record on every continent, are testimony to the rapid burial of countless animals and plants during the catastrophic sedimentation of these strata."⁵  In between, forty pages of "fossil graveyards" walk through the great Lagerstätten and read each as one event:  Mazon Creek's animals "were evidently buried rapidly";⁵  the Santana Formation "required a catastrophic mass-mortality event to virtually instantaneously kill and bury all these organisms together";⁵  at Tepexi the organisms "were killed, squashed together, and rapidly buried";⁵  the conodont shale records "catastrophic burial of countless thousands of these organisms over thousands of square kilometers."⁵

The ministries say it shorter.  ICR's standing statement is that "Fossils provide universal evidence of rapid burial, and even agonizing death," and that "The abundant marine invertebrate fossils throughout the entire fossil strata demonstrate extraordinary burial conditions."¹⁹  John Morris:  "The animals represented in the fossil record typically died in catastrophic conditions of rapid water movement, not in uniform conditions. Fossilization occurred through rapid burial."²⁰  Morris again, in Answers in Genesis's New Answers Book 3:  "Only by undergoing rapid burial, away from scavengers, bacteria, and oxygen, can an organism be fossilized. Yet we find fossils in almost every rock type. Surely catastrophic processes are displayed in the fossils."²¹  Snelling, in Answers magazine:  "Countless billions of plant and animal fossils are found in extensive 'graveyards' where they had to be buried rapidly on a massive scale. Often the fine details of the creatures are exquisitely preserved."²²  Jonathan Sarfati, for children:  "The only chance to form a fossil is to bury an animal before scavengers can get to it. And the mud that buries it must contain dissolved minerals ready to turn the remains into rock. Deep burial, with lots of mud, is needed",²³  and "The fossils all around the world are a stony record of swift watery burial."²³

Two things need separating before any of this is tested, because the primaries run them together.

The weak claim is that a well-preserved fossil was taken out of the biological recycling system fast:  before scavengers, before decay, before currents.  Snelling takes this from mainstream textbooks and it is correct.  Leonard Brand, the Loma Linda palaeontologist who has published taphonomy in Geology and Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, states it in exactly the form a mainstream colleague would:  "The basic processes are agreed upon by everyone, no matter what their philosophy. The better preserved a fossil, the more quickly it was taken out of the biotic environment by burial and/or rapid mineralization."³

The strong claim is that because fossils are everywhere, catastrophe was everywhere:  "universal," "typically," "on every continent."  It is an extrapolation from the Lagerstätten to the whole record, and it has to survive two facts the primaries themselves supply.  The first is Snelling's:  "Even a cursory examination of the fossils preserved in the strata of the geologic record reveals that the vast majority of them by number are the remains of shallow-water marine invertebrates (brachiopods, bivalves, gastropods, corals, graptolites, echinoderms, crustaceans, ammonites, etc.)."⁵  The second is Brand's, and it is the most honest sentence in the young-earth literature on this subject:

"The other side of taphonomic data also needs to be considered. If at least the Paleozoic and Mesozoic were deposited within a year, with systematic ecological processes killing and burying organisms, then most animals must have been buried very soon after death—within hours or days. The problem with such consistently rapid burial is that it should have preserved mostly intact, articulated specimens. However, the vertebrate fossil record includes many examples of disarticulated, scattered bones and teeth. Most of these disarticulated remains probably required several weeks or months of decay and disarticulation before burial. Is it possible to fit many episodes of several months of disarticulation into a one-year Cambrian to Cretaceous process?"³

The rest of this article is an attempt to answer Brand's question with numbers.

Part 2: What taphonomy measures

Taphonomy is the experimental study of what happens to a body after death.  Its results are clocks, and the clocks are short.

The table⁴ says three things at once.  First, the young-earth side is right about everything above the last row.  A fish with its fins on, a crinoid with its arms on, a jellyfish with its bell intact, a dinosaur with its tendons attached:  each of these was sealed off within days, and every mainstream taphonomist says so.  Snelling cites Meyer and Meyer for the crinoids and Briggs and Kear for the shrimp, and both reports are accurate.⁵⁵  Second, the last row is different in kind.  Shells do not need to be buried to survive.  They lie on the bottom for centuries, get buried and dug up again, and accumulate.  Third, the clocks measure how long a body lasted before burial, which is not the same as how fast the sediment came.  A fish that lay on a lake bed for three weeks and was then covered by a millimetre of mud a year is an articulated skeleton with no flesh;  Whitmore's own experiments found the bones stay articulated after the flesh is gone.²⁶

Anoxia does not do the work

The popular mainstream story used to be that stagnant, oxygen-free bottom water explained the Lagerstätten.  Peter Allison tested it in 1988 by sealing worms and crustaceans in airtight jars of sediment and water from the sea, an estuary and a lake:  "Decay processes were active in the experimental conditions despite anoxia and had virtually destroyed the carcasses within 25 weeks."⁸  His review the same year concluded that "anoxia does not significantly inhibit decay" and that "Early diagenesis is the principal factor amongst the complex processes leading to soft-part preservation. The development of a particular preservational mineral is controlled by rate of burial, amount of organic detritus, and salinity."³⁰  Brand reports the same result and draws the same conclusion:  "experiments have not supported the hypothesis that anoxic water slows or eliminates decay. Published research shows that decay is not slower in anoxic conditions. It just involves anaerobic bacteria."³  On this both sides agree, and it sharpens the problem for both:  something has to stop decay within weeks, and the something is not the water.

What does the work: three routes, each with a chemistry

Adolf Seilacher's 1985 classification, which Snelling cites, sorts the Lagerstätten by three "chief causative effects (stagnation, obrution and bacterial sealing)" that "define a conceptual continuum into which individual occurrences may be mapped."³¹  Obrution is rapid burial;  it is one of three.  Derek Briggs's 2003 review puts the mechanism underneath:  labile tissue such as muscle "normally requires the replication of their morphology by rapid in situ growth of minerals," and "This process relies on the steep geochemical gradients generated by decay microbes."³²  Soft tissue is preserved by its own rot.  Briggs and Kear showed it in a jar:  shrimp muscle turned to calcium phosphate within two weeks, "The source for the formation of calcium phosphate was the shrimp itself," and "Similar closed conditions would prevail where organisms are rapidly overgrown by microbial mats."²⁷  Raff and colleagues found that sea-urchin embryos, which rot in hours in seawater, hold their shape under strongly reducing conditions long enough to mineralise, but only inside their fertilisation envelope:  "primary larvae have negligible preservation potential."²⁴

Each famous deposit runs on its own chemistry.  Chengjiang's animals are pyrite, grown because "the clay-rich host sediment was deficient in organic carbon but replete in available Fe, and this composition ensured that a decaying carcass acted as a local substrate for Fe- and S-reducing bacteria."³³  Mazon Creek's are moulds inside siderite nodules that grew from the bicarbonate of the carcass's own decay, as Snelling correctly says.⁵³⁴  The Burgess Shale's are carbon films, and the sulphate-poor, low-oxygen, high-alkalinity Cambrian sea is part of the recipe.³⁵  Solnhofen's lay under hypersaline brine.³⁶  In every case the burial is necessary and the chemistry is what is rare, which is why these deposits are rare, and why the same mud a hundred kilometres away holds nothing but shells.

How deep

Sarfati's point about depth is a real one and deserves its due.  He reports experiments in which small crocodile carcasses buried under water produced decay gases, bloated, broke through the mud, "Then the body fell apart and was eaten. Only the weight of lots of mud prevented bloat-and-float."²³  The mainstream literature says the same for whales:  in the shallow North Sea, "gas-filled, buoyant carcasses disarticulated during flotation," while a whale on the floor of the Santa Catalina Basin at 1,240 metres stayed articulated because hydrostatic pressure kept it down.³⁷  So an articulated large vertebrate needs either deep burial or deep water.  Which of the two it had is a question about the bed it lies in, and that question has to be asked bed by bed.  It cannot be answered from the fossil alone, and the next part is about asking it.

Part 3: Where rapid burial is real, and where the claim overreaches

Obrution deposits: rapid, catastrophic, local, repeated

Mainstream palaeontology has a word for a bed of animals smothered alive:  an obrution deposit.  Behrensmeyer, Kidwell and Gastaldo's 2000 review lists what exceptional preservation needs, "postmortem isolation of the carcass from scavengers and physical disruption" and "decomposition retarded until mineralization is accomplished," and says these "can be accomplished via catastrophic burial (obrution), for example from ash falls and sediment avalanches on land and from various sedimentary processes in water."¹⁷  Nobody on the mainstream side disputes that such beds are catastrophic.  The dispute is over scale and frequency, and the best-studied cases answer it.

Brett and colleagues' 2012 survey of the Ordovician-to-Devonian trilobite beds found two burial styles.  Their Type I beds "suggest rapid (hours to days), but not instantaneous burial, without bottom disruption, enabling preservation of in situ behavior, including mass aggregations and molt ensembles. Most occurrences contain bedding planes in which trilobites exhibit incipient disarticulation."¹  Then the sentence this article opened with:  "Thus, ironically, the best preservation of delicate remains required rapid burial, associated with mass mortality, and very low rates of background sedimentation following the event."¹  The reason is chemistry:  if nothing is deposited after the burial, the sulphate-reduction zone sits still in the sediment long enough to cement it, and cement is what keeps a delicate fossil from being crushed.  A record of rapid burial is also a record of the stillness that followed.

How long the stillness must last is not stated in Brett's abstract, and the best measurements make it shorter than "very low rates" may suggest.  Hidekazu Yoshida and colleagues studied fossil tusk shells in Neogene mudrock in Japan, each wrapped in a ball of carbonate cement 14 to 37 mm across that grew from the animal's own decay.  From the width of the cement's growth front and the rate carbonate diffuses through mud, they estimate that the balls "were formed within weeks or months following death of the organism."³⁸  A 2018 follow-up on concretions from several Japanese sites found them formed "at least three to four orders of magnitude faster than previously estimated timescales."³⁹  Both are model estimates from the rock, not concretions watched growing, but they are mainstream and they cut the young-earth way:  the cement around one carcass can set in weeks to months, and one pause of that length fits inside a Flood year.  Brett's abstract supplies the reply.  During the starved interval "the sediments were bioturbated," and "Development of the concretionary layers required more prolonged periods of stability of the sulfate reduction zone."¹  Animals moved back in and burrowed the new bed before the cement set, and a cemented layer across a whole bed takes longer than one ball around one carcass.  The number a Flood model has to fit is how many such pauses lie stacked in one section.

Hunda, Hughes and Flessa measured one such bed.  The Mt Orab "butter shale" of Ohio, 0.46 metres thick and famous for its enrolled trilobites, "is composed of a series of stacked event beds, each representing rapid deposition from a flow bearing fine-grained sediment, most likely associated with distal storm processes below storm-wave base," with "at least seven, and possibly many more, alternating silt and clay couplets."  The trilobites in each clay layer "represent census assemblages of animals alive at the same time," and the whole half-metre took "a period from 10¹ to 10³ years."⁴⁰  Seven or more smotherings, ten to a thousand years, half a metre.  That is what the rapid-burial beds look like when someone counts.

The same shape appears wherever the counting has been done.  Standing fossil forests buried "in a geological instant" are real, and DiMichele and Falcon-Lang tie them to "ashfalls proximal to volcanic centres, coastal plains drowned by relative sea-level rise, and fluvial environments such as channel bars, crevasse splays, and distributary lobes," with long-term survival needing "high rates of subsidence."⁴¹  The Paskapoo fish layer that Snelling cites was read by its describer as a mass death "probably occurring during spring or early summer high water while the fish were attempting to spawn in shallow water," in a flood that "trapped the fish in an overbank, backswamp, or abandoned-channel pond or shallow lake," with "Rapid burial … probably the reason for the lack of scavenging and disarticulation."⁴²  Snelling quotes the taphonomy and leaves out the river.  And the most careful young-earth field study of all, Brand and colleagues' survey of the Pisco Formation whales in Geology, reports that "The well-preserved whales indicate rapid burial" and in the same abstract that "The 346 whales within ∼1.5 km2 of surveyed surface were not buried as an event, but were distributed uninterrupted through an 80-m-thick sedimentary section."¹⁶  Rapid burial, many times, through eighty metres.  The whales are argued under Fossil Graveyards;  the method is what matters here.

Tracks are the same argument in another medium.  A footprint on a tidal flat lasts about a day, so a preserved trackway was covered fast;  the measured survival and what it does and does not prove are set out in Fossil Tracks and Trackways.

Overreach 1: the shells

ICR's statement that "The abundant marine invertebrate fossils throughout the entire fossil strata demonstrate extraordinary burial conditions"¹⁹ is the strong claim applied to the one group it cannot hold for.  Shells are durable.  They lie on the sea floor, get buried a few centimetres, get dug out by a storm, and lie there again, for a long time.  How long is measured by dating individual dead shells picked off modern sea floors, and the results are consistent across settings.

On the tidal flats of Bahía la Choya in Mexico, thirty shells of one bivalve "yielded radiocarbon dates from modern (A.D. 1950 or younger) to 3569 years before present. The median calendar age of inner flat shells is 483 years".⁶  Across five settings in the Gulf of California, shell half-lives ran "90 to 165 years" where sediment arrives fast and "285 to 550 years" where it is starved, and "highly altered shells range in age from young to several thousand years old."²⁹  On a Bahamian sand flat, thirty sand-dollar tests and thirty clam valves from the same patch of surface:  "All echinoid tests yielded post-bomb … ages, and the estimated time-averaging (interquartile age range) is at most 2 yr. In contrast, sympatric mollusk valves spanned 4000 yr with an estimated time-averaging of 1830 yr."⁷  The standard review summarises:  "in many nearshore marine environments, presently accumulating sediments include mollusk and foraminiferan shells up to several hundreds or a few thousands of years old … Shell ages range up to 20,000 or 30,000 years in the thin shelly sands that cover continental shelves".²

These dates are used here as what they are, a relative clock between shells lying on one surface today, and nothing in this article dates a rock with them.  What they show is that a shell bed is not a burial;  it is an accumulation.  Kidwell and Holland draw the consequence that answers the strong claim directly:  "net rates of stratigraphic accumulation are commonly slow relative to the life span of individual organisms. Consequently, the skeletal remains of multiple generations typically become mixed within a single bed. This time-averaging of local but noncontemporaneous remains is pervasive in the fossil record: It explains why fossilized individuals are rarely found in their original life orientations, but instead are rotated and disarticulated".²

That inference needs care, because two parts of it are weaker than they look.  First, rotation and disarticulation show that a shell was moved after death, and a flood moves shells too.  On their own they do not tell time.  Second, the durations come from today's sea floors, not from the fossils.  Kidwell and Holland say so:  "The absolute duration of time-averaging in fossil assemblages can be inferred from Recent sediments in which the organic remains of several different groups have been dated".²  A young-earth reader is entitled to both points.  What does tell time in an ancient shell bed is damage a dead shell gets only while it lies exposed:  borings by worms and sponges, encrusting bryozoans grown on the inside of a valve, and fresh and corroded shells of one species mixed in one bed.  Those are the tests set out under The Redwall Nautiloid Bed, and they decide the question bed by bed.  A Flood model has one move left for a bed that fails them, and it is the move Morris makes for reefs in Part 5:  the shells piled up and were bored on the sea floor before the Flood, which then swept them up.⁴³  That works for a bed of loose shells, which could have been bored anywhere and carried in.  It does not work where the borers and encrusters are rooted on the bed's own cemented top, as on a hardground, because then the exposure happened where the bed lies now, in the middle of the section.  Hardgrounds and how fast they cement are argued under Chalk, Limestone, and the Flood.

The one young-earth primary that addresses shells is Morris's chapter.  He argues from clams:  "The dead clam opens up, and scavengers eat the insides. But often the fossils retain both shell halves, tightly closed … Usually when we find clam fossils they are jammed together in great numbers, not at all how they live in their life zones today. Thus, we discern the clams felt themselves in danger as they were transported and deposited".²¹  Closed, articulated valves are real and they are the rarer, better-resolved case;  a bed of them in life position is exactly what Hunda's census layers and Brett's Type I beds are, and it is read the same way by everyone.  But "jammed together in great numbers," disarticulated and worn, is the time-averaged case, and Meyer and Meyer's crinoid study, the very paper Snelling cites for rapid burial, describes the ordinary outcome in the same abstract:  "The result is a time-averaged accumulation that contains abraded and broken ossicles as well as fresh material."²⁵  Crinoidal limestone is that accumulation.  Whether a particular dense shell bed is one bad afternoon or ten thousand quiet years is decidable, by tests for boring, encrustation, abrasion and size-sorting;  what those tests are and why nobody has run them on the most famous young-earth shell bed is the subject of The Redwall Nautiloid Bed.

The bones: fresh in the bonebeds, weathered on the floodplains

Bones carry their own clock, and it is legible on fossils.  Anna Behrensmeyer followed carcasses of known age in Amboseli, Kenya, and sorted their bones into six weathering stages:  "The time necessary to achieve each successive weathering stage has been calibrated using known-age carcasses. Most bones decompose beyond recognition in 10 to 15 yr."²⁸  Bones reach stages 2 and 3, flaking and fibrous, after about three years.  A fossil bone at stage 3 lay on the ground for years before it was buried;  a bone bed whose bones carry a spread of stages accumulated, and did not fall in a day.

On the famous dinosaur bonebeds this clock favours the young-earth side.  The largest count is by a young-earth team.  Keith Snyder, Arthur Chadwick and colleagues dug the Hanson Ranch Edmontosaurus bonebed in Wyoming for twenty years and published in PLoS ONE:  "Of the 7,619 elements examined for weathering, the vast majority (98.5%) fall within stage 0."  Their reading is that exposure lasted long enough "(weeks to months)" for the skeletons to rot apart, "but was not long enough (months to years) for weathering to affect the bones."⁴⁴  Mainstream teams report the same on other beds.  The Centrosaurus bonebeds of Alberta show an "absence of flaking and cracking on the bone surfaces due to weathering."⁴⁵  The Ghost Ranch Coelophysis quarry shows "little evidence of predator or scavenger disturbance or surface weathering."⁴⁶  The Cleveland-Lloyd quarry's bones "show minimal carnivore modification and surface weathering."⁴⁷  By Behrensmeyer's calibration, stage 0 means a year or less on the surface.²⁸  On these beds, then, the bones were buried within months of death, and the young-earth reading is right.

The weathered bones are elsewhere, and they are what the young-earth side has not answered.  Roger Smith logged 940 vertebrate fossils through the Permian floodplain rocks of the Karoo in South Africa and found more weathered bone near the old channels, enough to suggest "that skeletal elements spent between 2 and 20 years on the floodplain surface before becoming completely buried."⁴⁸  That figure leans on the same Kenyan calibration and is an analogy, not a measurement on Karoo bone.  Brand states the general problem without the tool, in the passage quoted in Part 1:  disarticulated and scattered bones "probably required several weeks or months of decay and disarticulation before burial."³  Snyder and Chadwick's own "weeks to months" is one such episode.  A single bonebed of that kind fits inside a Flood year.  The open question is how many separate exposures lie stacked in one formation, and that count is taken bed by bed under Fossil Graveyards.

Overreach 3: the Lagerstätten are sparse

The word Lagerstätte means a deposit with unusually good preservation, and the primaries on both sides agree they are unusual.  Franzen, whom Snelling quotes on Messel, begins:  "Less than 2% of Lagerstätten with fossil vertebrate remains have yielded anything more than fragments of jaw material and other bones."⁴⁹  Inside them, the specimens are thinly scattered.  Behrensmeyer and colleagues:  "it turns out that mass death is not a prerequisite for superb preservation of multiple individuals in one sedimentary layer, as evidenced by the wide spacing of metazoan specimens within classic konservat-lagerstätten (Seilacher et al. 1985). Even in overall aerobic environments, single carcasses can be highly effective in depleting oxygen from the immediate environment within sediment or under microbial mats, creating their own locally anaerobic conditions favorable to diagenetic mineralization".¹⁷  Hoesch's closing question, "Are lagerstätten anomalies of the fossil record, or are they telling us something that is basic to its very character?",¹⁵ has an answer:  they are anomalies, by definition, by count, and by what sits between them.

The count can be put in numbers, roughly.  The largest global compilation, by A. D. Muscente and fourteen colleagues in 2017, gathered "a dataset of 694 globally distributed exceptional fossil assemblages."⁵⁰  The Paleobiology Database holds 277,490 fossil collections of every kind.⁵¹  The two are not the same unit, since one Lagerstätte can hold many database collections, so the ratio, about one in four hundred, is a scale and not a measurement.  Exceptional preservation of whole bodies is rare by any count.

Preservation of molecules may not be.  Brian Thomas of the Institute for Creation Research and Stephen Taylor of the University of Liverpool reviewed fifty years of reports in the mainstream journal Expert Review of Proteomics and concluded that "original biochemistry is geologically extensive, geographically global, and taxonomically wide-ranging."⁵²  Thomas later put the number of reports their review cited at 85.⁵³  A mainstream team led by Sergio Bertazzo at Imperial College examined eight dinosaur bones that "are not exceptionally preserved and show no external indication of soft tissue," found collagen-like banding in one and blood-cell-like structures, and wrote that such preservation "is more common than previously thought."⁵⁴  Whether those traces are original protein, altered residue or later microbes, and what their survival says about age, is argued under Dinosaur Soft Tissue.  For burial speed they say little either way.  Jasmina Wiemann's team found the bone "soft tissues" in Mesozoic bone "preserved in oxidative settings," while "Hard tissues in reducing environments, in contrast, lack soft tissue preservation."⁵⁵  That is close to the opposite of the reducing, mineralising chemistry of the Lagerstätten, so these finds are a different route, not more evidence of rapid entombment.

Part 4: The great Lagerstätten, one by one

Each of these is cited by at least one young-earth primary as a catastrophe.  Each has a primary literature that measured how it formed.  The question for each is the same two questions:  how fast was burial, and what environment does the deposit record.

Burgess Shale (Cambrian, British Columbia).  Conway Morris's classic summary:  "Some 80% of the fauna is soft-bodied",⁵⁶ and the fauna "was rapidly buried in fine sediment" under anoxic water, "so decay was greatly retarded."⁵⁶  That much the young-earth side has right.  Caron and Jackson then counted:  "variation in fossil preservation was analyzed through a vertical succession of 26 bed assemblages, each representing a single obrution event, within the 7-m-thick Greater Phyllopod Bed of the Walcott Quarry. More than 50,000 specimens belonging to 158 genera".⁹  And:  "most organisms studied were preserved within their habitat and only slightly disturbed during burial; (2) most decay processes took place prior to burial and resulted in disarticulation of organisms at the time of burial",⁹ with "transport … trivial."  Twenty-six mudflows onto a living sea floor, each catching animals in every state from alive to rotted, with sheets of cyanobacteria on the bottom between them.  The preservation itself needed the Cambrian ocean:  "Low sulfate concentrations in the global ocean and low-oxygen bottom water conditions," then "rapid entombment of fossils in fine-grained sediments and early sealing of sediments by pervasive carbonate cements at bed tops," a chain "promoted by unique aspects of early Paleozoic seawater chemistry."³⁵  Butterfield adds the clay, with the animals "buried with all cavities and spaces permeated with fine grained clays,"⁵⁷ and Wilson and Butterfield's burial experiments tie the whole Cambrian-to-Ordovician window to "glauconite-prone seas."⁵⁸  What the window means for the Cambrian explosion is argued under The Cambrian Explosion.

Chengjiang (Cambrian, Yunnan).  Zhao and colleagues logged 11,974 specimens through one section and found the shale "characterized by superimposed couplets of laminated background and thin event mudstone layers representing two distinct taphofacies."  In the background mud, "disarticulated arthropods account for 84.3% of specimens (mostly isolated valves of Kunmingella douvillei)" and the fossils "have undergone significant pre- or syn-burial decay and represent limited time-averaged assemblages."  The event layers represent "mostly smothered organisms by distal tempestites," storm mud, and both "represent a single local community subjected to two different taphonomic processes".⁵⁹  Rapid burial, storm by storm, on a shelf that was quiet in between.

Mazon Creek (Carboniferous, Illinois).  Snelling reads it as a rapidly buried "mixture of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine organisms."⁵  Baird and colleagues, the standard taphonomy, read the burial the same way and the setting differently:  "Marine animals were killed by episodic pulses of turbid fresh water associated with flooding from distributaries, and terrestrial organisms were introduced into coastal waters from upstream sources. Rapid burial entombed remains, commonly before significant decomposition had occurred".  And the host mud keeps time:  "Numerous, distinctive, cyclic repetitions of siltstone-claystone laminae, each recording a single tidal (flood-ebb) event, are observed in areas yielding marine organisms; these indicate that rapid but extremely regular deposition was also important."⁶⁰  Clements, Purnell and Gabbott's 2019 review corrects the old three-fauna picture:  "there is a lack of evidence to support a distinct freshwater fauna";¹⁰ the "'pinstripe' laminations record daily and twice a month neap–spring tidal cycles … indicating that the entire Mazon Creek area was tidally influenced";¹⁰ and the animals "inhabited an area around a river delta system that discharged large amounts of sediment and freshwater into a shallow, non-turbulent, brackish marine basin."  Preservation falls off with distance from the river mouth:  "Increased geographical distance from the river mouth correlates with an increase in the percentage of 'dud' or barren concretions".¹⁰  A delta, flooding from its river, with tides laminating the mud twice a day between floods.

Solnhofen (Jurassic, Bavaria).  The standard monograph says in its preface that the organisms "are thought to have been washed into hypersaline lagoonal basins and buried rapidly by fine micritic mud,"³⁶ so burial speed is not in dispute.  The killer was the water:  "The most convincing explanation for the poisonous properties of the stagnant waters, that so favoured the exceptional preservation of the fossils, appears to be an excessive concentration of salt."³⁶  The lagoon was stratified and still:  "Weak water currents failed to remove the stagnant bottom waters and only the occasional, major storm could flush the waters from these hollows".³⁶  Animals that fell in died within hours and left their last tracks, and one of those tracks is 9.7 metres long:  a juvenile horseshoe crab that "fell victim into a hypersaline lagoonal environment … was washed into this environment where it was rapidly asphyxiated," walked, and died at the end of its own trail.¹⁴  A trail that long survives only on a floor nothing disturbed.  And the famous specimens are the minority:  "whilst the exceptionally preserved fossils were delivered straight to the hypersaline pools to be covered rapidly by sediment, the less well-preserved specimens (which are relatively quite common) drifted around in the surface waters before becoming entombed in the sediment."³⁶

Messel (Eocene, Germany).  Snelling quotes Franzen on the black silhouettes and gut contents.⁵  Franzen's next sentences:  "Apart from the fish that formerly lived in the lake, the most frequent fossils found are flying creatures such as birds, bats and insects. Clearly, the lake acted as some kind of trap for these animals."⁴⁹  The lake is a volcanic maar, and its oil shale is a laminated core whose pollen record Lenz, Wilde and Riegel read as "a time interval of approximately 640 kyr" with orbital cycles in it.⁶¹  Whether such laminae are annual is argued under Lake Varves;  what is not arguable is that the deposit is a continuous lake floor, not an event bed.  Joyce and colleagues found how the animals died.  Of 51 specimens of one turtle, twelve are in mating pairs, and "two or more individuals of the same taxon within the same layer are not otherwise to be found among tens of thousands of documented finds."  Their reading:  "it is unlikely that the turtles would mate in poisonous surface waters. Instead, the turtles initiated copulation in habitable surface waters, but perished when their skin absorbed poisons while sinking into toxic layers."¹¹  A lake fit to live and mate in at the top and deadly at the bottom, taking animals one and two at a time, for a very long time.

Jehol (Cretaceous, Liaoning).  The feathered dinosaurs' deposit is the one place the catastrophe reading is closest to right, and the catastrophe is volcanic.  Jiang and colleagues:  the fossils "usually occur together within some horizons and have been interpreted as deposits of mass mortality events," and "Pyroclastic density currents were probably responsible for the major causalities and for transporting the bulk of the terrestrial vertebrates from different habitats, such as lizards, birds, non-avian dinosaurs and mammals, into lacustrine environments for burial."¹²  Between the ash flows, "The lacustrine deposits are characterized by thin-laminated tuffaceous mudstones and tuffs".¹²  Repeated Pompeiis into lakes, with laminated lake mud between them.

Green River (Eocene, Wyoming).  Here the young-earth literature splits, and the split is instructive.  Hoesch, for ICR:  Green River fish "rot in a period of days or weeks. Yet somehow they got pickled by the billions … Either they were rapidly buried in mud or else they got exposed to some unusual oxygen-deprived and/or saline environment soon after death … Not months, nor years, nor millennia, but days!"¹⁵  Whitmore, whose dissertation Hoesch cites, for Answers in Genesis:  "An interesting feature about many of the fish in the GRF is that they show various stages of decay, which have been duplicated in laboratory experiments (Figure 4). Some of the fish appear to have exploded, scattering their remains on the lake bottom before they were buried,"¹³ and "It is likely that the GRF represents a large post-Flood lake system".¹³  His GSA abstract reports that "fish tend to disarticulate faster in shallow water than in deep water," that "oxygen concentration in the water is not a significant factor in the decay process," and that "In Fossil Lake the percentage of articulated fish increases towards the basin center."²⁶  A gradient of decay from shore to centre is a lake, not a smothering.  Brand, who supervised the work, concludes that the formation "took some years to be deposited, but where in the sediments could millions of years fit?"³  That is a fair question and it belongs to the lamination argument under Lake Varves, where the young-earth objection to Green River is given its full weight.  It is not a rapid-burial question.  Whitmore's exploded fish settle that:  the fish lay on the bottom long enough to burst.

The phosphatised faunas.  Snelling's chapter on the rate of fossilisation leans on Briggs and Kear's shrimp, and his report is right:  "Mineralization commenced within two weeks, and increased in extent for at least four to eight weeks."⁵  The Santana fish of Brazil, whose muscle and gills are phosphate, are the field case, and Hoesch's report of Martill's "within only a few (probably less than 5) hours"¹⁵ is of a piece with it.  What the experiments add is the condition:  the system has to be closed, by a mat or a carcass's own envelope, in reducing pore water, and only some stages of some organisms qualify.  Raff's embryos keep their shape only "within the fertilization envelope" while larvae "have negligible preservation potential," so "the paleo-embryological record may have strong biases on developmental stages preserved."²⁴  Fast, yes.  Catastrophic, no:  a sealed, rotting carcass in quiet mud.

The jellyfish.  Three ministries cite the Wisconsin jellyfish beds.  Sherwin:  "Ronald Pickerill of the University of New Brunswick states, 'They must have been buried extremely quickly.' Creation scientists agree--by a catastrophic event 4,000+ years ago."⁶²  An older Creation note:  "Unless the jellyfish were buried quickly, and the rock hardened rapidly, their delicate features would disappear within a few days at most."⁶³  Catchpoole engages the primary paper's figures and concludes that "The evidence indicating that the jellyfish did not dry out fits better with their being buried while continuously under water."⁶⁴  The primary, Hagadorn, Dott and Damrow, describes "at least seven horizons characterized by hundreds of decimeter-sized impressions of medusae; these represent one of only two fossilized mass-stranding deposits. Medusae exhibit features nearly identical to those observed in modern scyphozoan strandings".⁶⁵  The later sedimentology of the same beds by Hagadorn's group settles the drying question against Catchpoole:  "Indicators of variably shallow water (washout structures and stranded cnidarian medusae) and subaerial exposure (adhesion marks, rain-drop impressions and desiccation cracks, including cracked medusae) are abundant."⁶⁶  Some of these jellyfish dried in the air until they cracked, on shores where rain left its prints.  Sappenfield, Tarhan and Droser, on the still older Death Valley strandings, explain why the window exists at all:  "several of the requirements for preservation of these fossils were holdovers from the Ediacaran Period, including the presence of microbial mats and a lack of carcass disturbance by scavenging and/or bioturbating taxa."⁶⁷  A jellyfish on a mat-bound Cambrian beach, with nothing yet evolved to eat it, is buried by the next layer of sand.  At least seven horizons of them is at least seven strandings.

The action shots.  The fish caught swallowing a fish,⁶⁸ the ichthyosaur giving birth,²³ the Mongolian fighting dinosaurs, the Messel turtles, the Solnhofen death march:  Morris's "true 'action shots'" argument is that "How long does it take for a fish to swallow his lunch? It might take a few seconds, but in that brief interval it was trapped and buried".²¹  But a predator that chokes on its prey dies in seconds in any lake on earth, and then it sinks and lies there.  The question is never how fast it died;  it is how long it lay.  Joyce and colleagues make the point from the other side:  "One reason why these fossils are so rare is because organisms typically do not perish while undertaking daily routines,"¹¹ and the Messel pairs show what a death trap that works slowly, one couple at a time, looks like.  Whitmore's Green River fish, from the same beds as the famous meal, show what the lying-there looks like.

Part 5: Reefs and amber

Reefs

A reef is the one kind of fossil deposit that cannot have been buried fast, because it was never buried at all while it formed:  it is a framework built in place by organisms growing on what their predecessors built.  The young-earth answer is that the fossil "reefs" are not reefs.  Morris, for ICR:  "Fossil reefs differ greatly from modern reefs. They are typically much smaller, less organized, are often buried in limestone strata, and lack fossil organisms that would have secreted stabilizing glues,"⁴³ and the cross-sections "often largely consist of chips of broken reef-like material loosely embedded in a limey matrix."  His conclusion:  "Reefs could have grown to maturity in the calm, nutrient-rich pre-Flood waters. During its initial violence, the Flood would have broken the reefs apart and mixed those coral bits with carbonate silt and sand that later solidified."⁴³  His source is Ariel Roth's 1995 paper, which makes the case most fully against the Permian Capitan reef of Texas:  "One of the main problems with the traditional reef interpretation of the Capitan Reef complex is the lack of reef frame builders. The massive reef core consists mainly of fine, calcium-carbonate mud … There are some sponges but sponges are not known to produce great reefs; and there is insufficient algae to bind the sediments. A number of the sponges are bottom side up, interpreted as growing downward from the top surface of cavities in the reef core (Wood et al. 1994)."⁶⁹

Two of Roth's own sources answer him.  The paper he cites for the upside-down sponges is Wood, Dickson and Kirkland's "Turning the Capitan Reef upside down," and its finding is a frame:  "most calcareous sponges … did not grow upright in thickets to form a reef framework or bafflestone. Rather they were pendant cryptobionts inhabiting cavities, often in considerable abundance. In addition to this distinctive cryptic community, the framework of the reef was constructed in part by microbially-bound sediment, with the walls and ceilings of the cavities frequently supported by fenestellid and ramose bryozoans".⁷⁰  A cavity with a roof, a ceiling fauna hanging from it and bryozoans holding it up is a structure that grew where it stands;  a debris flow has no ceilings.  And Roth's own measurements, with Lance Hodges in the Journal of Paleontology, found at eight Pleistocene, Devonian and Silurian sites that "Fossils in Pleistocene and Silurian reef core facies have pronounced upward orientation, suggesting that most fossils are in growth location, or that the reefs were moved to their present location without appreciable tilting,"⁷¹ with random orientations only in the flank beds, where everybody expects debris.

Roth knows this, and says so more candidly than the ministry pages built on him:  "One single fossil reef that would normally have taken many years to grow could negate the biblical account of beginnings with its requirement that most of the fossiliferous layers be deposited during the year of the flood … Earlier in this paper reference was made to reports of fossil reefs with frame builders in apparent position of growth. These appear as true autochthonous reefs. However, another alternative that would fit with the creation concept is that some of these reefs grew that might have grown between the time of creation and the flood."⁶⁹  His conclusion keeps both doors open:  "Some fossil reefs appear to be real autochthonous reefs, and may represent reefs that grew between creation and the Genesis flood. Autochthonous reefs may or may not have been moved during some of the catastrophic changes of that complex flood event."⁶⁹  That is a retreat from not-reefs to reefs that grew before the Flood and were perhaps moved whole, and it concedes the taphonomic point:  a reef records growth time, in place.  How much time, in metres per year, is the atoll arithmetic argued under Chalk, Limestone, and the Flood, where the young-earth growth-rate figure is traced to its source.

Amber

Amber is the one preservation route that has nothing to do with burial speed:  the resin traps the animal, dehydrates it within hours to days, and seals it;  the famous experiment on flies found that sealing them from oxygen without drying them made them rot faster, not slower.  Everything else the young-earth literature claims from amber, the "intact mid-Flood ecosystems," the sea creatures in tree resin, the DNA, the living fossils, the ancient-oxygen bubbles, is worked through on its primary sources in Amber and the Flood, which also finds that amber's chemistry carries no clock and that the deposits are dated by what they lie in.  Nothing in it bears on the rapid-burial argument except as confirmation that it is the sealing, not the sediment, that keeps tissue.

Dinosaur soft tissue is a separate question, about whether molecules can survive deep time once a fossil is made, and is argued under Dinosaur Soft Tissue.

Part 6: Preservation bias in both directions

Everything above is also a statement about what the fossil record leaves out.  Soft-bodied animals are gone unless a Lagerstätte catches them;  mobile animals are under-represented against sessile ones;  land animals against marine;  small and juvenile bones against large and adult.  That bias is the mainstream's problem and the young-earth side's opportunity, and it is worth being exact about what it can and cannot do.

What it does to arguments from fossil order

The order argument, worked in full under Fossil Order and the Flood, runs on first and last appearances in superposed rock, and bias of the kind described here can move a first appearance later or a last appearance earlier.  It cannot put a bird below a Triassic floor or a mammal into the Cambrian.  Suppression is not inversion.  The series' own test of two million database occurrences against twenty-four boundary rules found essentially no violations, and the geographic lopsidedness of the record is stated there before any number depends on it:  one country holds 22.4% of catalogued collections, the top ten hold 56.9%, and apparent diversity tracks collecting effort tightly.⁵¹  So preservation bias is a real limit on diversity curves and on the shape of radiations, and no limit at all on the sequence.  The young-earth side can claim, correctly, that the record is thin and lopsided.  It cannot claim that the thinness explains the order.

Nor can taphonomy explain the absence that most needs explaining.  The order article makes the point that every rapid-burial and bloat-and-float mechanism in this article is non-selective, which means it would have destroyed dinosaur bones as readily as human ones, and that the hard half of the problem is not bones but artefacts:  worked stone does not float, rot or get eaten, and there is none below the Neogene.  This article adds only that the decay clocks of Part 2 run on tissue and bone, and have nothing to say about flint.

What it does to arguments from missing transitions

Here the bias cuts the other way, and the young-earth side should notice before using the gaps.  Soft-bodied taxa "have negligible preservation potential under ordinary environmental conditions, such as oxygenated seafloors and lake beds, and land surfaces characterized by moist and/or warm conditions … In marine sands and muds, for example, such taxa constitute 30–100% of species".¹⁷  Eighty percent of the Burgess fauna would be invisible in an ordinary shale.⁵⁶  Even among the durable, "the probability of incorporation into a time-averaged death assemblage declines with tissue durability—from ∼95% for shelled mollusks to ∼75% for echinoids and land mammals and ∼50% for marine decapods".¹⁷  Schopf's census of one intertidal fauna found that about 40% of it would fossilise, but "67% of the genera which essentially rest in one place are known as fossils. In contrast, only 16 to 27% of the burrowing detritus eaters (e.g., polychaetes) and roving carnivores (e.g., sea stars and crabs) are known as fossils."⁷²  Kidwell and Holland draw the conclusion for evolutionary series:  exceptional preservation "provides valuable windows into the anatomy and habitats of these groups," but "stratigraphic horizons with comparable preservation are generally so widely spaced or environment specific that evolutionary time series for these groups are highly incomplete."²

The worked examples are under Missing Transitions.  Romer's Gap stood for eighty years and was closed in four years of digging in one Scottish valley by people who then wrote:  "We conclude that the gap in the fossil record has been an artifact of collection failure."⁷³  The oldest turtles are thin-shelled and terrestrial, and their describers say the fact "hint[s] at taphonomic filters that basal turtles had to overcome before entering the fossil record."⁷⁴  And the series' own measurement is that three quarters of well-sampled fossil genera have a demonstrated hole in their own range, with a median length of millions of years.⁵¹  That is the mainstream's defence against "no transitional forms," and it is a good one.  But it is symmetric.  If demonstrated non-preservation on this scale is normal, then the absence of an intermediate is weak evidence, and so is the absence of a stem lineage below a Cambrian phylum, and so is the absence of pre-Flood humans in Flood rock.  Neither side gets to use the gaps selectively.

Bias also has a direction, and the direction matters for how any single fossil is read.  Sansom, Gabbott and Purnell rotted amphioxus and lamprey larvae and found that "loss of chordate characters during decay is non-random: the more phylogenetically informative are the most labile, whereas plesiomorphic characters are decay resistant."⁷⁵  Sansom and Wills then simulated fossilisation across 78 published data sets:  "61% of 491 taxa shift significantly down phylogenies, from their original position toward the root, vs 39% which shift significantly up,"¹⁸ and they call the effect, "Stem-ward slippage, whereby fundamental taphonomic biases cause fossils to be interpreted as erroneously primitive," a "ubiquitous problem".¹⁸  Fossils look more primitive than they were.  The full treatment is under Trends in the Fossil Record;  the lesson for this article is that a Lagerstätte's "intermediate" is partly a rotting artefact, and a creationist who argues that a given stem-group fossil is really a crown member has a measured bias on his side, while one who argues that fossils appear "fully formed" is arguing against the same bias.

What the young-earth side can and cannot claim

It can claim, with the mainstream, that the spectacular fossils were entombed within hours to weeks of death, that anoxia did not do it, and that each such deposit records a local event.  It can claim that the record is heavily biased toward durable, sessile, marine, adult and large, and that arguments from diversity curves and from collector's curves inherit that bias.  It can claim that the absence of a particular fossil is weak evidence, provided it accepts that this also disarms the gap arguments.

It cannot claim that rapid burial is universal:  shells, the majority by number, do not need it, modern shell floors are measured mixtures of centuries, and an ancient shell bed whose shells are bored and encrusted lay exposed before it was buried.  It cannot claim that a Lagerstätte is one event, because every one that has been counted is many.  It cannot claim that the quiet intervals the fossils themselves record, the death walks, the decay gradients, the mating pairs, the tidal laminae, the weathered bones, the burrowed pauses between burials, the cemented bed tops, were absent.  And it cannot claim, as its own best scientist has noticed, that months of disarticulation fit inside a year.

Objections and responses

"The mainstream admits anoxia fails. So what preserved the Burgess Shale, if not instant burial?"  Rapid entombment is part of it and nobody denies it.  The rest is a chemistry that the Cambrian sea supplied and later seas did not:  low sulphate, low oxygen, fine clay, and carbonate cement at the top of each bed that shut oxidants out.³⁵  Twenty-six such beds in seven metres is twenty-six entombments, not one.⁹

"Shell ages come from radiocarbon, and this series does not use radiometric dates."  The series excludes radiometric dating as evidence for the age of rock.  The shell studies date dead shells lying on a modern sea floor relative to each other, and the result that matters is the spread, not the absolute scale:  on one surface, sand dollars that all post-date the nuclear tests and clam valves that span forty times the oldest sand dollar.⁷  No calibration of the carbon-14 scale makes a two-year spread and a four-thousand-year spread the same.

"Time-averaging is a uniformitarian assumption."  It is a measurement on modern sea floors.  Meldahl and colleagues found the shortest shell half-lives exactly where sediment comes fastest, "90 to 165 years" on fan deltas against "285 to 550 years" on starved flats.²⁹  Fast sediment shortens the mixing;  it does not remove it.  A Flood model has to show either that modern shells do not accumulate this way or that fossil shell beds are, bed by bed, the articulated life-position kind.  They mostly are not.²

"The laminae inside the Lagerstätten could have formed in hours during the Flood, so the 'quiet intervals' are an interpretation."  The lamination argument is had under Lake Varves, and this article does not rest on laminae being annual.  It rests on what the fossils themselves record between burials:  a 9.7-metre death walk on an undisturbed lagoon floor,¹⁴ fish in every stage of decay including burst bellies,¹³ turtles dying two at a time across "tens of thousands of documented finds,"¹¹ carcasses buried "at the time of burial" already disarticulated,⁹ and trilobites showing "incipient disarticulation" on most bedding planes.¹  Those are clocks on bodies, not on mud.

"Brand's Pisco whales show rapid burial in sediment the mainstream says took millions of years. Is that not the argument winning?"  It is the argument being made properly, and the right answer to it is argued under Fossil Graveyards.  Brand's team counted the whales, measured the section, published in Geology, and reported that the whales "were not buried as an event."¹⁶  The conclusion they drew is a higher diatom accumulation rate, which is a claim about one basin's sedimentation, not about the Flood.  Their own book lists "We proved the biblical flood—NO" as the first thing the research did not do.³

From the mainstream side:  "This article concedes too much. Stagnation and sealing preserve without rapid burial at all."  Granted, and said in Part 2:  obrution is one of Seilacher's three routes.³¹  Solnhofen's horseshoe crab was not smothered;  it suffocated in brine and was covered later.  The article's concession to the young-earth side is narrower than it looks:  the spectacular fossils were sealed off fast, by burial or by water chemistry, and in neither case does the speed say anything about the age of the rock.

"Whole formations full of fossils over thousands of square kilometres are still catastrophes, whatever happened inside one quarry."  The continental sheets are argued under the flood-geology articles, and the one young-earth shell bed that is claimed as a single continental event is tested under The Redwall Nautiloid Bed.  This article's scope is what a fossil's state of preservation can tell about the sediment around it, and the answer is:  how long the body lasted before it was sealed, and nothing beyond that.

Issues and unanswered questions

• Nobody on either side has published a partition of the fossil record into obrution beds and attritional beds, by count or by volume. Snelling's "universal" and this article's "most fossils are time-averaged shells" are both arguments from the kinds of deposit, not from a census of them. The census could be done from the Paleobiology Database's lithology and preservation fields and has not been.
• Weathered bone is engaged on one side only. The famous dinosaur bonebeds are stage 0, and a young-earth team has measured it (Snyder, Chadwick and colleagues, 98.5% of 7,619 bones). No young-earth work read here engages the weathered floodplain bone of the Karoo, where Smith's 2 to 20 years per bone rests on a calibration made in a dry Kenyan basin; no calibration for wet floodplains was found by this article or by Fossil Graveyards. A humid-climate weathering calibration would sharpen the numbers on both sides; a young-earth answer would also need to show how stage 3 and 4 bones fit inside a year.
• Whether Brett's "very low rates of background sedimentation following the event" can be compressed into a Flood-year timescale has not been attempted by anyone on the young-earth side. The mainstream concretion work of Yoshida and colleagues estimates weeks to months for the cement around one carcass to set, which helps the young-earth side. What no one has done is count, through one Lagerstätte, the burrowed and cemented pauses between burials and multiply.
• Whitmore's 2003 dissertation, the fullest fish-decay study on either side, is available only through ProQuest and was not read; its GSA abstract and his 2006 article are used instead. Syme and Salisbury's crocodile experiments, which Sarfati summarises, were not read.
• The Green River lamination count remains the one place the young-earth objection may bite, and it is left open under Lake Varves; nothing here depends on it.
• The full texts of the Palaios and Geology papers on Burgess, Chengjiang, Mt Orab, Mazon Creek, the Capitan reef and the Wisconsin jellyfish were read at abstract level only; every quotation from them is from the abstract and is marked so in the footnotes.

Verdict

The young-earth claim that fossils need rapid burial is right about the fossils it is usually made from and wrong as a statement about the rocks.  An articulated skeleton, a soft-bodied animal, a phosphatised muscle, was sealed off within hours to weeks of death, and mainstream taphonomy measured those clocks and says so.  But burial is not the only seal, anoxia is not a seal at all, and the fossils that make up most of the record by number, the shells, needed no seal:  on modern sea floors shells lie for centuries and mix across millennia, and the standard reading of fossil shell beds, by analogy with those floors, is that most formed the same way.  Every great Lagerstätte that has been counted is a stack of small burials inside one quiet environment, a lagoon, a lake, a delta, a shelf, and the bodies in them record the quiet as plainly as the burial:  the horseshoe crab's walk, the burst fish, the mating turtles, the trilobites half fallen apart, the bed tops cemented in stillness.  The mainstream's own irony holds:  the best preservation required rapid burial and then nothing.  Preservation bias is real, large and directional, and it disarms arguments from absence on both sides at once.  Rapid burial is a fact about individual fossils.  It is not a fact about the age of the earth.

Sources