The Redwall Nautiloid Bed

"This is the first documentation in the geological literature of a regionally extensive hyperconcentrated sediment gravity flow upon a marine carbonate platform." — Steven A. Austin, 2003¹

"While it may be true that this ten-foot-thick layer of the Whitmore Wash Member containing Rayonnoceras fossils represents some kind of debris-flow-type deposit, this in no way implies a worldwide cataclysmic flood affecting the entire 5,000-foot-thick suite of sedimentary rocks exposed in the Grand Canyon!" — Carol Hill and Stephen Moshier, 2009²

"The taphonomic features visible on the cephalopod conchs indicate that the Glisstjärn Formation does not represent an event bed, but rather a concentration of beached conchs." — Björn Kröger and colleagues on a Swedish orthocone bed, 2011³

Summary

Near the bottom of the Redwall Limestone, high in the Grand Canyon's wall, there is a bed about two metres thick full of big straight-shelled squid relatives.  They are orthocone nautiloids of the genus Rayonnoceras, up to two metres long in life.  In one side canyon, now called Nautiloid Canyon, they lie so thick on a single surface that rafting parties stop to look.

Steven Austin surveyed this bed at more than sixty localities and published the survey in 2003.  He named the unit the Whitmore Nautiloid Bed.  He argued that a fast, sediment-choked underwater flow killed and buried the animals across the whole region in a matter of hours.¹  Answers in Genesis lists the result among the best evidences for Noah's Flood.⁴

The technical paper and the ministry version are different claims, and the gap between them can be measured.  Six conclusions, stated first.

1. The bed is real and so is the fieldwork. Austin worked more than sixty numbered localities, observed over a thousand nautiloid fossils, measured maximum shell diameter on 403 of them, and recorded 337 shell orientations.¹ The nautiloid-bearing facies is 2.0 ± 0.1 metres thick and holds that thickness over more than 1.5 × 10⁴ square kilometres.¹ Nobody disputes that the bed exists.
2. It is probably a single depositional event. Austin reports inverse grading in the lower half, coral heads over 20 centimetres across held up in the middle of the bed, fluid-escape pipe structures, and shells standing vertically with the pointed end down and none point-up.¹ That is a coherent rapid-burial signature. Carol Hill and Stephen Moshier, his sharpest published critics, concede it may be "some kind of debris-flow-type deposit."² The weakest leg is the vertical shells, which Austin says need a "rapid freeze" to hold them upright. The one precedent he cites, James Quinn on Rayonnoceras, explains the same posture by buoyancy and rules out turbulent transport by name. Austin's summary of Quinn on his page 70 says the opposite of what Quinn wrote.¹⁵
3. "Billions" is one multiplication, and the density it multiplies comes from the best patches. Austin takes 1.5 × 10¹⁰ square metres of bed and a density "approaching 1 fossil per m^2" and gets billions.¹ The only raw count in the paper with a measured area is eighty shells on 320 square metres at Nautiloid Canyon, or 0.25 per square metre. The higher figure comes from where "the exposure is optimum."¹ Spreading a best-patch density across 15,000 square kilometres is a projection.
4. The popular retellings inflate the paper. Andrew Snelling calls the fossil graveyard "10,500 square miles (30,000 km2)."⁴ In Austin, 3 × 10⁴ square kilometres is the platform facies plus the slope facies, and he says twice that nautiloids are rare or absent in the slope facies.¹ The nautiloid-bearing area is about half that. Gary Parker's page gives "perhaps four billion nautiloids," a figure that is not in the 2003 paper at all. He cites a 2001 research proposal for it.⁶
5. The technical paper never mentions Noah or Noah's Flood. All forty-five pages were searched. "Noah" does not occur. "Genesis" occurs once, lower-case, in the title of a cited paper on turbidity currents. All five occurrences of "flood" are hydrological, such as "flood-scoured ledges" and "the 1998 Eel River flood event." Austin's own claim of novelty is narrow, and he places the bed alongside mainstream event beds he accepts as real.¹ The Flood conclusion is added downstream.
6. The test that would separate slow from fast has never been run by anyone. A dense bed of aligned orthocones can be one burial event or a condensed shell lag built up over a long interval of almost no sedimentation. The discriminators are standard: hardgrounds, borings, encrustation, corrosion, geopetal fills, intraclasts, bioturbation and mixed preservation states. Austin reports none of them, in either direction. No mainstream sedimentologist has published a re-examination of the outcrop. A search for the formal name returns three works, all creationist conference papers. This article does not say the nautiloid claim has been refuted. It has been ignored.

Where Austin is right

He did the work.  He states his model's inputs, cites the published equations behind them, gives his sample sizes, and hedges his weakest number.  Few popular geological claims on either side can say as much.  His paper also filled a real gap.  On his own account, the standard mainstream monograph on the Redwall described no nautiloid fossils from this member anywhere in or south of the Grand Canyon.¹

The objection most often raised against him also misdescribes the fossils.  Hill and Moshier write that the shells are "in excellent condition, not showing evidence of breakage or abrasion," and treat that as a problem for a violent flow.²  Austin's own paper says the body chamber "is usually collapsed or exploded" and that fossils "sometimes occur as broken segments."¹  Austin blames post-burial compaction and decay for the damage, so this answers the description without settling the question of transport wear.

Where the argument breaks

It breaks at the join between the bed and the conclusion.  A hyperconcentrated flow crossing a carbonate platform in several hours is a large event.  It is also the same kind of event as the Alamo Breccia and the Crow Creek Member, which geologists file under ordinary earth history.  Three members higher in the same limestone, forested river valleys are cut up to 91 metres deep into its top surface.⁷⁸

Part 1: What is in the rock

The Redwall Limestone is the sheer cliff in the middle of the Grand Canyon's wall.  It is about 150 metres of grey limestone, stained red by iron washing down from above.  Edwin McKee divided it into four members: Whitmore Wash, Thunder Springs, Mooney Falls and Horseshoe Mesa.  His reading of them is the mainstream position the nautiloid argument runs against:

"These well-defined units are based on distinctive lithologic features and are believed to represent two periods of marine transgression, each followed by a period of regression.  They apparently are independent of time units as shown by faunal zones, especially those of foraminifers, that are abundant in these rocks."⁹

Conventional geology puts the Redwall in the Early to Middle Mississippian, about 340 million years ago.  That age comes from fossil biozones matched to dated sections elsewhere.  There is no radiometric date on the rock itself; the Park Service's summary of Grand Canyon dating prints none for any Paleozoic unit in the canyon.  Its two dated ash beds are both in the Precambrian rocks far below.¹⁰

Austin's bed is the top bed of the lowest member, the Whitmore Wash.  He names it the Whitmore Nautiloid Bed and maps it as three facies:¹

Every dispute about this bed's size turns on the right-hand column.  The nautiloids live in the platform facies: 1.5 × 10⁴ square kilometres, or roughly 5,800 square miles.  In Austin's model the other two facies belong to the same event.  They are why his abstract says the bed area "exceeds 3 x 10^4 km^2" and its volume "exceeds 100 km^3."  Those totals describe the whole bed.  The nautiloids occupy only the platform part.

The animals are orthocones: cephalopods with a straight, chambered, cone-shaped shell in place of the coil of a modern nautilus.  The 403 shells Austin measured have a mean maximum diameter of 9.6 centimetres.  That implies a mean original length near 0.8 metres.  The largest, over 25 centimetres across, "probably approach a length of 2 m."¹

The famous exposure, now called Nautiloid Canyon, was found by a river party in May 1966 and written up by Carol Breed in 1969.  Austin showed that the same horizon can be walked out from Marble Canyon in Arizona to the South Virgin Mountains in Nevada.  Two distances appear in his paper, and they mean different things.  The present-day map distance is 290 kilometres.  Undo the stretching that Basin and Range faulting has done to Nevada since the Mississippian and it is 200 kilometres.¹  His flow model runs on the 200.

What Austin says happened

A submarine sediment flow, thick with lime mud and sand, swept across a shallow carbonate platform from the northeast.  It killed the nautiloids living there, carried the shells a short distance, and dumped everything at once.

The five metres per second in the popular retellings is not read off the shells.  It comes from a two-dimensional sediment gravity flow model with stated inputs:

"If we assume that the hyperconcentrated density flow that deposited the platform facies of WNB in Arizona had a thickness of 8 meters and a sediment concentration of 35% by volume, Figure 15 indicates a flow velocity over the carbonate platform of more than 5 m/s."¹

Water depth 30 metres, flow thickness 8 metres, 35 per cent solids by volume, flow density about 1.6 grams per cubic centimetre.  The equations are Benjamin's and Kranenburg's, and the hydroplaning criterion is Mohrig's.  All are mainstream.  Every one of those inputs is an assumption.  Austin does not derive the flow thickness or the solids fraction from anything in the rock.  He picks plausible values and reads the velocity off a stability diagram.

The duration follows from the distance and the speed:

"In order for the hyperconcentrated flow to traverse the distance of at least 200 km (Marble Canyon to South Virgin Mountains), the sediment slurry had to exist in a fast-moving, strongly fluidized condition upon a marine platform, resting on a hydroplane, for a period of several hours."¹

Two hundred kilometres at five metres per second is about eleven hours.  Austin says "several hours."  He does not say minutes.  He does not say how long the sediment took to settle at any one point.

The evidence for rapid burial

Five observations carry the weight.  They are why this article does not treat the bed as slowly accumulated.¹

Inverse grading in the lower half of the bed.  Coarse material concentrated upward is a grain-flow signature.  Quiet settling does the opposite.

Outsized coral heads suspended in mid-bed.  Syringoporoid and lithostrontionoid colonies more than 20 centimetres across sit in the middle of the bed rather than at its base.  To hold a coral head off the floor, the transporting mixture has to be denser than the coral head.  Ordinary sedimentation does not do that.

Fluid-escape pipe structures in the upper half, matched to laboratory experiments at 25 to 45 per cent solids by volume.  Water forced up through a rapidly dumped, loose sediment pile makes these.  A slowly accumulated lag does not.

Vertical shells, apex down, none apex up.  About 15 per cent of the 337 measured orientations plunge more than ten degrees, and more than three-quarters of those plunge steeper than eighty degrees.  Where the internal chamber walls were visible, "each showed apical end downward within the bed.  None was observed with apical end upward."¹  Austin does not say how many shells could be read that way.

Internal layering compared to ignimbrite.  Austin divides the bed into layers 1, 2a, 2b and 3.  He reads the stack the way a volcanologist reads an ash flow: one aggrading pulse rather than four separate events.

Taken together, the Whitmore Nautiloid Bed looks like an event bed.  Hill and Moshier concede as much.  The open questions are what the event was, how many nautiloids it killed, and what follows from it.

Part 2: Where "billions" comes from

The number everyone repeats is one multiplication, and Austin prints it:

"The areal distribution of the platform facies of WNB, therefore, appears to exceed 1.5 x 10^4 km^2 (1.5 x 10^10 m^2).  With a density of nautiloids approaching 1 fossil per m^2, billions of nautiloid fossils are likely to occur within WNB throughout the Grand Canyon region."¹

Area times density.  1.5 × 10¹⁰ square metres at about one shell per square metre gives 1.5 × 10¹⁰ shells, or fifteen billion.  There is nothing else in it.

So the claim rests on the density.  Here is every count in the paper, in Austin's words:¹

Only one row has both a count and a measured area, and it gives 0.25 per square metre.  Austin says why he does not use it: "the exposure of nautiloids is not optimum across a significant portion of the 320-m^2."[face.  Where the exposure is optimum, the average density within the bed is greater than 2 nautiloids per m^2."[austin-2003:density]  That is a fair field judgement.  A weathered ledge does not show every shell in it.  But it turns the density from a count into an estimate taken from the best-looking parts of the outcrop.

What survives the correction

Run the multiplication again with the low number.  0.25 per square metre across 1.5 × 10¹⁰ square metres is 3.75 × 10⁹, still billions.  The word "billions" survives a fourfold cut in density.  Anyone attacking Austin on the density alone is attacking the wrong assumption.

The assumption that carries the claim is areal uniformity.  Austin counted nautiloids at a handful of places along the Colorado River corridor and in the South Virgin Mountains of Nevada.  The 1.5 × 10⁴ square kilometres is the mapped extent of the platform facies.  Most of it is eroded away or buried and has never been looked at.  The multiplication assumes that a shell horizon seen in canyon walls fills the whole buried sheet at the same density.  That cannot be tested over most of its range.

Austin hedges it three times in one sentence: "appears to exceed," "approaching 1 fossil per m^2," "are likely to occur."  Every hedge is gone by the time the number reaches a tract.

The defensible version runs like this.  A nautiloid-rich horizon can be traced along about 200 kilometres of the Redwall outcrop belt.  Where it is well weathered, shells occur at roughly one to two per square metre.  Where a full surface has been counted, they occur at a quarter of that.  If the horizon keeps those densities across the mapped platform facies, the total runs to several billion.  That last clause is a conditional, and nobody has tested it.  That is less impressive, and it is what the data support.

Part 3: Where the popular version departs from the paper

Answers in Genesis lists the nautiloid bed among its best evidences for the Flood.  Here is the whole paragraph:

"For example, billions of straight-shelled, chambered nautiloids (figure 1) are found fossilized with other marine creatures in a 7 feet (2 m) thick layer within the Redwall Limestone of Grand Canyon.  This fossil graveyard stretches for 180 miles (290 km) across northern Arizona and into southern Nevada, covering an area of at least 10,500 square miles (30,000 km2).  These squid-like fossils are all different sizes, from small, young nautiloids to their bigger, older relatives.  To form such a vast fossil graveyard required 24 cubic miles (100 km3) of lime sand and silt, flowing in a thick-soup-like slurry at more than 16 feet (5 m) per second (more than 11 miles or 18 km per hour) to catastrophically overwhelm and bury this huge, living population of nautiloids."⁴

The citation is correct.  It points at Austin's 2003 paper, with the right page range and the right editor.  Four things in the paragraph do not match the paper.

The graveyard area is doubled.  30,000 square kilometres is Austin's platform facies plus his slope facies.  Austin states twice, in his abstract and in his conclusion, that nautiloids are rare or not characteristic of the slope facies.¹  Count only the rock that holds the nautiloids and the area is about 15,000 square kilometres, or 5,800 square miles.

The volume is doubled the same way.  100 cubic kilometres is 30 from the platform plus 75 from the slope, rounded.  Only the 30 carries nautiloids.

The 290 kilometres is the wrong distance for a flow argument.  It is the present-day map separation of the end localities.  Austin's flow model uses the palinspastic distance of 200 kilometres, because the crust between them has been pulled apart since.¹  Quoting 290 kilometres beside a five-metres-per-second flow silently lengthens the event by 45 per cent.

"This huge, living population" states as fact what Austin offers as an inference.  Austin's wording is that the shells "could be thought of as indicative of a mass-kill event."¹

Gary Parker's Answers in Genesis page goes further:

"Dr. Steve Austin documented the rapid, catastrophic death of perhaps four billion nautiloids and other sea creatures preserved in a six-foot (2 m) bed near the base of the Redwall Limestone…"⁶

Four billion is not a number in the 2003 paper.  The paper's own arithmetic gives about fifteen billion.  Parker's footnote points instead at Sedimentary Model for Canyon-Length Mass Kill of Large Orthocone Nautiloids: A Proposal for Research, an Institute for Creation Research document from 2001, two years before the data existed.  That proposal could not be found anywhere, so where four billion comes from is unknown.

The looseness runs both ways.  Hill and Moshier put the nautiloids "in the top ten feet or so of the Whitmore Wash Member."²  Austin measures the bed at 2.0 ± 0.1 metres, or 6.6 feet, with the shells on a single coplanar surface inside it.  Ten feet is a loose rounding.  But it is not the published number, and it is the number their critique argues against.

Part 4: What the paper does not say, and who has answered it

Search the extracted text of Austin's forty-five pages for "Noah," "Genesis" and "Flood" and here is the result.  "Noah" does not occur.  "Genesis" occurs once, lower-case, in the title of a cited paper on turbidity currents.  The word "flood" occurs five times, all hydrological, in phrases like "flood-scoured ledges," "river floods" and "the 1998 Eel River flood event."

The paper does not claim the bed requires a global flood, says nothing about the rest of the canyon column, and gives no young-earth chronology.  Instead it lists mainstream comparisons Austin accepts as real events in ordinary earth history: Cretaceous-Paleogene gravity flows in the Gulf of Mexico, the Alamo Breccia, the Crow Creek Member of the Pierre Shale, Lower Muschelkalk event beds, Lockne crater resurge gullies.  His argument is that his bed beats those in extent, sediment concentration and fluidised state.  He does not argue that geology has no beds like it.¹

A critic who treats the 2003 paper as an argument for Noah's Flood is attacking the tract.  A believer who cites it as proof of Noah's Flood is citing a document that does not contain the claim.

Nobody in the mainstream has re-examined the outcrop

A search of the OpenAlex bibliographic index for the exact string "Whitmore Nautiloid Bed" returns three works.  All three are creationist conference papers: Austin's own, and two by Darry Stansbury on related problems in the same rocks, one from 2003 on a subaqueous dune in the Anchor Limestone and one from 2013 on how an underwater debris flow ends.¹¹  A search for Rayonnoceras together with the Redwall Limestone returns two works: Austin 2003 and a 1949 cephalopod taxonomy paper by Miller, Downs and Youngquist.

No sedimentologist has published a re-examination of the bed, a rebuttal of the flow model, or a competing interpretation.  There is no field study, no petrographic study, and no attempt to reproduce the density counts.  This article therefore does not say the nautiloid claim has been refuted.  It has not been examined.

Silence is neither agreement nor refutation.  The likeliest explanation is mundane.  The paper sits in the proceedings of a creationist conference, which no working carbonate sedimentologist reads, and its unit name never entered the stratigraphic literature.  A geologist looking for Mississippian shell concentrations would not find it.

What the one published critique says

Carol Hill and Stephen Moshier give the nautiloids one paragraph in their 2009 critique of Flood geology in the Grand Canyon.²  Their conclusion is the passage quoted at the top of this article: the bed may well be a debris-flow deposit, and that "in no way implies a worldwide cataclysmic flood affecting the entire 5,000-foot-thick suite of sedimentary rocks exposed in the Grand Canyon!"²

Three things follow.

They concede the bed.  Their objection is about scope.  On that narrow question this article agrees with them.

They are not arguing with the technical paper.  Their sources for the section are the Institute for Creation Research's video Geologic Evidences for Very Rapid Strata Deposition in the Grand Canyon, Austin's chapter in the coffee-table book Grand Canyon: A Different View, and Breed's 1969 discovery note.  The 2003 ICC paper is not among them.

Their one empirical objection misdescribes the fossils.  They write that the skeletons are "in excellent condition, not showing evidence of breakage or abrasion," and their Figure 9 caption says the nautiloids "are not broken up but look perfectly preserved."²  Austin describes the opposite in the paper they did not read.  The body chamber "is usually collapsed or exploded," it "is usually not preserved, usually being ruptured during compaction in the sediment," and fossils "sometimes occur as broken segments."¹  Two qualifications are owed.  Austin blames post-burial compaction and decay for that damage, so it says nothing about abrasion in transport, which neither writer addresses.  And Hill and Moshier were looking at a photograph of one polished bedding surface, on which whole shells do look intact.

Part 5: Dense beds of aligned orthocones that took a very long time

The intuitive force of the nautiloid argument is a photograph: big shells, all lying the same way, packed on one surface.  It looks like a disaster.  But the same photograph can be taken in rocks whose whole scientific reputation is that they accumulated very slowly.

Kinnekulle, Sweden

The Middle Ordovician "orthoceratite limestone" of Baltoscandia is the classic condensed carbonate of northern Europe.  Anders Lindskog and Mats Eriksson give its sedimentation rate:

"net sedimentation rates in the paleobasin typically reached only a few millimeters per millennium."¹²

A few millimetres per thousand years.  In that same rock:

"Dense accumulations of cephalopod conchs occur in several horizons."

"Cephalopod conchs show preferential alignment towards the south and siphuncular orientations vary."¹²

Density, alignment and large shells on bedding planes, in the most famously slow carbonate in Europe.  The feature that makes the Redwall photograph striking is no evidence of speed on its own.

The Kinnekulle rock has what Austin's bed is not reported to have: the toolkit that tells a slow shell bed from a fast one.  Hardgrounds with vertical pits, borings into lithified rock, undisturbed three-dimensional burrows, centimetre-sized intraclasts, reworked fossils, ferruginous crusts on shells.¹²  Lindskog and Eriksson also draw the distinction that matters here:  "an overall slow but stable sedimentation over longer time scales, but individual beds may have been deposited rapidly."¹²  Finding one fast bed does not make the formation fast.

Siljan, Sweden: the same object with the opposite verdict

The sharper comparison is Björn Kröger and three colleagues on a Hirnantian shell concentration in the Siljan district.  Their bed is:

"a conspicuous, up to several decimeter thick bed densely packed with bipolarly oriented, orthoconic cephalopod conchs that can reach lengths of more than 120 cm."³

That is the same kind of object as the Whitmore Nautiloid Bed, at comparable shell sizes.  Austin's mean reconstructed length is 0.8 metres and his largest approach 2 metres.  These reach 1.2 metres and more.

Kröger and colleagues reached the opposite conclusion, and they show their work:

"The taphonomic features visible on the cephalopod conchs indicate that the Glisstjärn Formation does not represent an event bed, but rather a concentration of beached conchs.  Many cephalopod conchs show signs of reworking, bioerosion, as well as fragmentation.  Telescoping is rare, and preserved apices are also very rare.  However, with the exception of small pits in one specimen … epizoans are not found on the cephalopod conchs.  Long drifting times and a distant origin of the orthoconic conchs can be excluded by the sheer number of conchs and by the poor sorting of conch size classes.  The wide spectrum of conch sizes also speaks against the concentrations deriving from a spawning place.  Thus, the given evidence is indicative for time averaging in a relatively high energetic environment, probably representing a time when conchs from cephalopods were beached that lived more offshore."³

Seven discriminators, all on printed page 39: reworking, bioerosion, fragmentation, telescoping, apex preservation, epizoans and size-class sorting.³  Austin reports data bearing on three of the seven, and they do not point the same way.

Fragmentation he reports, and it cuts against him: body chambers "usually collapsed or exploded," fossils "sometimes occur as broken segments."¹  In Siljan that is a mark of a worked-over shell bed.

Apex preservation cuts for him.  Kröger and colleagues found preserved apices "very rare," a sign of long exposure and reworking.  Austin's apices are routinely there.  He reads apical direction off the septa in his vertical shells, describes partly filled camerae at the apical end, and reports mineralized connecting rings preserved in apical ends under 10 centimetres.¹¹

Size-class sorting is a wash.  It is treated below, because the two papers read the same data in opposite directions.

On reworking, bioerosion and epizoans Austin says nothing.  Telescoping he does not name.

Two qualifications go with this comparison.

It does not show that the Redwall bed is slow.  The Siljan description has nothing like inverse grading, outsized corals held in mid-bed, fluid-escape pipes, or a population of vertical apex-down shells.  Those features are real and they point at one emplacement.  The fair statement is that the Redwall bed looks more like an event bed than the Siljan bed does, and that nobody has applied the Siljan tests to it.

It shows the field is open to catastrophic readings.  Kröger and colleagues name "event bed" as the alternative they tested.  They reject it for this outcrop on evidence.  That is the standard Austin's bed should be held to.

The size histogram is not evidence, in either direction

Austin fits a lognormal curve to his 403 shell diameters and reads it this way:

"A lognormal probability density function seems to describe the maximum diameters in Figure 10 and suggests an entire 'life assemblage' of nautiloids."¹

Kröger and colleagues, looking at a wide size spectrum in their bed, read it as evidence against a single population and for time averaging.³

Both readings cannot be reliable.  A broad size distribution is what ordinary growth produces in any population, living or piled up over centuries.  Neither paper tests its reading against the alternative.  This article does not lean on the size histogram.

One argument that helps Austin

The slow reading has an obvious escape hatch: the shells could have floated in from elsewhere over a long period, the way a beach collects driftwood.  Margaret Yacobucci tested that:

"only those shells with relatively high inflation are likely to float for a significant interval after death and therefore potentially experience postmortem transport.  Most ammonoid cephalopods have shell forms making postmortem transport unlikely. … georeferenced locality data for living nautilid specimens and dead drift shells indicate that most species have relatively small geographic ranges and experience limited drift."¹³

Orthocones are the low-inflation extreme, so the animals almost certainly lived near where they are found.  That is a point for Austin and against a drifted-in lag.  It does not distinguish one burial event from many at the same place.

Vertical shells are the strongest observation, and still not decisive

Shells standing on end at random would prove nothing, and Austin's finding is stronger than that.  Of the steeply plunging shells whose internal chamber walls could be read, every one had the pointed apex down and none had it up.¹  He concludes that "rapid freeze of the dispersion is required in order to capture vertical orientations."¹

One weakness first.  Austin never says how many shells that was.  He measured 337 orientations, and 49 of them plunge more than ten degrees.  Only some of those showed enough septal structure to tell which end was which, and that number is not printed.  "None was observed with apical end upward" out of five shells and out of forty-five are very different results.

"Required" is also stronger than the literature supports.  The source Austin cites for the comparison says so directly.

James Quinn published the Rayonnoceras burial study in the Fayetteville Shale of Arkansas in 1977, and it was obtained for this article.⁵  Austin summarises it on his page 70 like this: Quinn "attributed upright orientation of Rayonnoceras to an abrupt thixotropic transition during a rapid, clay-rich, high-concentration sedimentation event."¹

That is not what Quinn wrote.  Quinn attributes the orientation to buoyancy, and rules out the violent option by name:

"A dead animal might float to the surface with the apex of the shell down, due to the ballast.  As body gasses were lost it should sink gently to the sea floor resting initially on the apex of the shell.  As decay proceeded, the shell would occupy a more and more horizontal position until it came to rest horizontally on the sea floor."⁵

The animal makes its own ballast in life.  Rayonnoceras fills the underside of its rear chambers with calcite, so a dead shell hangs apex-down in the water and lands apex-first.⁵  No flow is needed to stand one on end.

Quinn then says plainly that his shells were not swept up by anything:

"The Rayonnoceras conchs were not involved in undersea landslides or other turbulent movement because they nearly always are oriented in buoyant relationship to the sea floor."⁵

His burial agent is a mud flow, but a slow and gentle one.  It "would tend to move more and more slowly," it "would eventually cease," and it could "flow around a dead Rayonnoceras resting on the sea floor without disturbing its orientation."⁵  The shell was already dead, already on the bottom, and already oriented before the sediment arrived.  That is the opposite of a mass kill.  The gas explosion Austin's readers usually hear about is a post-burial event in Quinn.  The animal is "deeply buried in the clay" first.  Then the decay gas blows the living chamber apart.  That is how the pyritic halo of goniatite shells around the conch is made.⁵

So Austin's page 70 misstates its own citation.  The error cuts against him.  Quinn is the closest published analogue to the Redwall shells, and he read the same posture as evidence of quiet water.

Three things keep this from being fatal to Austin.  The first is the strongest point in Quinn's paper for rapid burial.

Quinn's own burial still has to be fast.  A shell standing at eighty degrees with a 1.3-metre conch needs about two metres of mud on top of it.  Quinn says the mud has to arrive before the body rots:

"In order to bury the animal completely, a layer of clay as much as 2,000 mm deep would have been required.  Burial must have taken place before decay of the body."⁵

So Quinn and Austin do not disagree about slow against fast.  They disagree about what was fast and when.  Quinn has a dead shell settle quietly into its own posture and then get buried quickly by a mud cloud.  Austin has a living population killed and buried by the same event.  Both need rapid sedimentation.  Only Austin needs a mass kill.

Second, Quinn's inclined shells are mostly "at an angle of 30 to 65° more or less," while more than three-quarters of Austin's plunging shells are steeper than 80°.⁵  Steeper is harder to get by gentle settling.  Third, Quinn was working in clay shale with thixotropic behaviour.  Austin's bed is carbonate sand with, on his own account, "virtually no clay content," so the quick-clay mechanism does not transfer directly.¹

Richard Reyment wrote two papers on vertically embedded cephalopod shells, in 1970 and 1973.  Neither could be obtained, so neither is used here.¹⁴

None of this makes Austin wrong about his own outcrop.  The vertical shells fit his flow, and they also fit something much less dramatic.  The way to tell the two apart is to look at the sediment around and inside the shells.

Part 6: The tests nobody has run

A shell concentration is either an obrution deposit, where the animals were smothered where they lived, or a condensed shell lag, where shells piled up on a surface that got almost no sediment for a long time.  Paleontologists separate the two routinely with standard methods.  None has been applied to the Whitmore Nautiloid Bed, in either direction.

Each test is cheap and needs no drilling.  A graduate student with a hammer, a compass and a thin-section lab could do them in a season.

Orientation statistics, past the rose diagram.  Austin has 337 orientations and a chi-squared result showing the pattern is not random.  He does not have polarity or spatial consistency.  For each horizontal shell, which end points which way?  Does that direction hold from Marble Canyon to Nevada?  A single flow should leave polarity that rotates smoothly with the flow path.  A shoreline worked over centuries should leave alignment that tracks the palaeoshoreline, and the classic shoreline signature is bipolar.  That is what Wendt found in the Moroccan orthocone beds, and what Austin himself attributes to "a bi-directional current as could occur on a beach."  Austin knows those beds and says his pattern "contrasts strongly" with them.¹  If polarity is consistent and flow-parallel across 200 kilometres, that is very strong for one flow.  If it swings with the facies belt, something local and repeated is working the bed.

Shell condition, scored the way Kröger and colleagues scored theirs.  Grade a few hundred shells for fragmentation, abrasion, telescoping and apex preservation.  A single kill gives one taphonomic mode, because everything had the same history.  A lag gives several modes side by side, because some shells sat on the seafloor for a century and others arrived last week.  A unimodal distribution supports Austin.  A mixed distribution is close to fatal for a one-event reading.  Austin's note that body chambers rupture during compaction points at damage done after burial.  That is a point for him, though it is an aside and no survey.¹

Encrustation, boring and corrosion.  A shell lying exposed on the seafloor gets colonised.  Bryozoans and crinoid holdfasts grow on it, worms and bivalves bore into it, seawater etches it.  A shell buried within days gets none of that.  The words "encrust," "boring," "hardground" and "geopetal" do not appear anywhere in Austin's paper.  Hundreds of clean, unbored, unencrusted shells would count strongly for rapid burial.  One caution: Kröger and colleagues found no epizoans on their Siljan conchs either, and still concluded time averaging on the other six criteria.  Absence of encrusters is necessary for a fast reading.  It is not sufficient.

Sediment fabric inside and around the shells.  This is the most diagnostic of the four and the easiest to do.  Cut the shells open.  A geopetal fill is sediment that half-filled a chamber and settled flat.  It is a spirit-level record of which way was up at the time.  If every geopetal surface in the bed is horizontal and parallel, the shells were filled after they came to rest and never moved again.  If they point in different directions, shells were filled, rotated and reburied, which takes time.  Then compare the sediment inside the chambers with the matrix outside.  Same sediment means one event.  Different sediment, or several generations of internal fill, means the shell sat open through more than one episode.  Add a check for burrows and for hardground surfaces at the base and top of the bed.  Matching internal and external sediment, uniform geopetals and no burrowed omission surface would settle this in Austin's favour more decisively than anything now in print.

Two further tests attack the parts of the claim that are not about speed.

Count the shells honestly.  Lay out ten randomly chosen full bedding-plane exposures, not the ten best.  Measure each one and count every shell on it.  That turns the density from an impression into a number with an error bar.  It either rescues "billions" or retires it.  It would take a week.

Test whether the horizon is the same age everywhere.  Austin correlates his bed across 200 kilometres by lithology and facies.  A single flow predicts one instant.  A condensed horizon predicts a surface slightly younger in one place than another.  The Redwall carries abundant foraminifers and conodonts, and McKee built his member scheme knowing the faunal zones cut across it.⁹  Conodont biostratigraphy at a dozen of Austin's localities would test the correlation directly.

A note on the exposures themselves

Austin records that at Boundary Point and at Garden Wash the nautiloid horizon is exposed on a stylolite surface.¹  A stylolite is a pressure-solution seam: rock dissolved under load, and the insoluble residue gathered along a parting.  Stylolites often nucleate on shell layers, so this is unsurprising and no argument against Austin.  But it means some of the best exposures are diagenetic partings, and a density count made there counts what the seam chose to expose.  That belongs in the error bar.

Objections and responses

"One bed cannot prove a global Flood."  Correct, and Austin's technical paper does not claim it does.  This article agrees with Hill and Moshier's scope objection.²  Getting from one hyperconcentrated flow to a year-long global flood requires the whole column to behave the same way, and it does not.  Three members above this bed, the top of the same limestone is cut by river valleys up to 91 metres deep and 425 metres wide.  They are filled with Lepidodendron logs, twenty-two species of spores, mud cracks, burrows and stromatolites, with an erosion surface inside the fill and another above it.⁷⁸  That is dry land with trees on it, in the middle of the supposed Flood deposits.

"It was published at a creationist conference, so it is not real peer review."  True, and it is a real handicap: the paper is invisible to the people best qualified to check it.  But venue is not an argument against data.  The paper names its localities, prints its sample sizes, states its model inputs and cites the mainstream equations it uses.  Anyone willing to walk the outcrop can check all of it.  The right response to an unreviewed claim is to review it, and nobody has.

"Dense beds of aligned orthocones are common and form slowly.  Nothing special."  Half right.  Density and alignment are not diagnostic, as Kinnekulle shows at a few millimetres per millennium.¹²  But Austin reports four features that the slow beds do not have: inverse grading, outsized corals suspended in mid-bed, fluid-escape pipes, and a uniformly apex-down vertical population.¹  The Swedish literature does not dispose of those.  It shows only that the photograph is not the argument.

"The shells are pristine, so there was no violent flow."  This is Hill and Moshier's objection, written from a video, and the description is wrong.  Austin reports body chambers "usually collapsed or exploded" and shells preserved as broken segments.¹  But he blames burial and compaction for the breakage, so nobody has yet reported whether the shells show the abrasion a long transport would leave.

"Mainstream geologists simply will not engage with creationist work."  Here, that is accurate.  Twenty-three years on there is no re-examination, no rebuttal, and no competing reading of the outcrop in the indexed literature.  But the complaint leaves out two things.  The paper was placed where geologists do not look; nobody searching for Mississippian shell concentrations will ever see the phrase "Whitmore Nautiloid Bed."  And the route through the wall is known.  John Whitmore and Raymond Strom published original Coconino fieldwork, done under a Park Service permit, in Sedimentary Geology, an ordinary Elsevier journal, where it now has to be answered.¹⁵  The taphonomic study proposed above would be publishable on its own merits, whatever it found.

"Snelling and Parker got their numbers from Austin, so complaining is nitpicking."  The differences are not rounding.  The area is doubled by folding in a facies Austin twice says has few nautiloids in it.  The flow distance is quoted at 290 kilometres when the model runs on 200.  Four billion has no source in the data paper.  A reader who checks finds that the ministry version does not match its own citation, and that costs more credibility than the argument gains.

"The vertical, apex-down shells settle it."  They are the strongest single observation in the paper, but they do not settle it, because a chambered cone with ballast at the point lands apex-first on its own.  Quinn, the one published precedent Austin cites for upright Rayonnoceras, proposes exactly that and rules out turbulent transport for his own shells.⁵⁵  What would settle it is the sediment inside the shells, and nobody has looked.

"You concede it is an event bed.  That is catastrophism."  Catastrophic beds are not in dispute and have not been since the 1960s.  The Alamo Breccia, the Crow Creek Member and the Cretaceous-Paleogene gravity flows are all mainstream, all catastrophic, and all separated from each other by millions of years of ordinary time.  Austin cites them himself.¹  A rock record full of catastrophes spread through deep time is the conventional view.

Issues and unanswered questions

• The petrography does not exist. No published thin sections, geopetal orientations, encrustation counts, boring surveys, hardground descriptions or taphonomic grading for this bed. Everything in Part 6 is a proposal.
• The density has never been measured over a representative area. One count with a stated area, 0.25 shells per square metre, against an estimate of one to two from optimum exposures.
• The flow model's inputs are assumptions. Flow thickness of 8 metres and 35 per cent solids are assumed values. The five metres per second inherits their uncertainty, and no error bar is published.
• The shells sit on a single coplanar horizon inside a two-metre bed. If one fluidised flow emplaced the whole bed in hours, why are the nautiloids on one plane 0.2 to 1.2 metres below its top? Grain-flow sorting could do it. So could a shell pavement the flow buried. Austin does not address the question.
• Whether the horizon is one instant across 200 kilometres is untested. The correlation is by lithology and facies. Conodont biostratigraphy could check it.
• Where "four billion" came from is unknown. Austin's 2001 research proposal, the source Parker cites, could not be found on the Institute for Creation Research's site or elsewhere.
• The mainstream description of the Whitmore Wash Member reaches this article at second hand. McKee and Gutschick's 1969 monograph, GSA Memoir 114, is not online and was not obtained. What it says is quoted here through Austin, who has an interest in the question, and no page number from it is printed.
• The Baltoscandian comparison is qualitative. The papers that would give an orthocone density per square metre for the condensed Swedish limestone, the number that could be set beside Austin's one to two, are paywalled with no open copy. Three were chased for this article and all three are closed: Kröger & Rasmussen 2014, Lethaia 47:275–295; Kröger 2012 on "The 'Vaginaten'," GFF 134(2); and Kröger 2015, "Mollusk maxima and marine events," Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 436. OpenAlex, Unpaywall and Semantic Scholar all return closed for each, and the repository records OpenAlex lists hold metadata only. Kröger and colleagues' 2011 Siljan paper is open and supplies the taphonomic reasoning, but gives no conchs-per-square-metre figure either.
• Austin misreports the one published precedent he cites for upright shells. His p. 70 says Quinn 1977 "attributed upright orientation of Rayonnoceras to an abrupt thixotropic transition during a rapid, clay-rich, high-concentration sedimentation event." Quinn attributes it to buoyancy and writes that his shells "were not involved in undersea landslides or other turbulent movement."¹⁵ Nobody on either side appears to have noticed in twenty-three years.
• Nobody has looked for abrasion. Austin reports breakage and blames post-burial compaction for it. Hill and Moshier assert there is no abrasion but cite a photograph. A hyperconcentrated flow carrying metre-long shells for 200 kilometres should leave surface wear, and no one has scored a single shell for it.

Verdict

The Whitmore Nautiloid Bed is real, mappable over hundreds of kilometres, and very likely a single depositional event.  Steven Austin established that with several years of fieldwork, and his sharpest published critics concede it.  He never claimed it proved Noah's Flood.  His paper does not contain the words.

The claim that fails is the one printed on the tracts.  "Billions" is a projection from best-exposed patches across 15,000 square kilometres of mostly buried rock.  The area attached to the nautiloids in ministry literature is double what Austin assigns them.  The four-billion figure has no traceable source.  And the question that would decide whether this bed records one bad afternoon or ten thousand quiet years has never been asked.  The discipline that owns the methods has never heard of the outcrop.  The people who care about the outcrop have never run the methods.

One field season would settle most of it.  Until somebody spends it, the honest verdict is that the Redwall nautiloids record a large, fast, local event in a Mississippian sea, and nothing more.

Every source this article rests on is catalogued, with what it measured and which way it cuts, on a companion page: the literature.

Sources