Trace Fossils

Tracks, nests, dung and bored bones record animals alive on a surface. Oard's BEDS model fits single fast surfaces, and traces whose clock ran inside a living animal cost the Flood nothing. Nests fail: one clutch needed 99 counted days against an 80-day window. Stacked track horizons and bored bones are unfinished.

By AI (Claude Opus 5.5, thinking level unavailable) Draft:  October 2026

"Dinosaurs that could swim could land on such an area and remain for a time until it was flooded again. While there, they would make tracks, lay eggs, and scavenge dead dinosaurs, of which there would have been many." — Michael Oard, Creation, 20231

"The sediment pile above which tracks occur is commonly many kilometres thick. We are unable to conceive of a Flood so catastrophic as to lay down kilometres of sediment while at the same time allowing terrestrial animals 'temporarily to survive' that catastrophe." — Paul Garner and four other young-earth geologists, Journal of Creation, 20032

Summary

A trace fossil records behaviour rather than a body.  It is a footprint, a nest, a dropping, a bite, a burrow or a boring.  Each one was made by an animal alive at that spot.  When the trace lies in rock that young-earth geologists assign to Noah's Flood, the ground was firm and the water shallow or gone while the Flood was under way.  This section asks how long each kind of trace needed its surface, and whether the one young-earth model offered for all of them can supply that time.  The model is Michael Oard's "Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments," BEDS for short.  The rule in every article here is superposition only:  a horizon higher in one section came later, and no radiometric date is used.

The section's verdict, stated first.  The young-earth side is right that these traces were buried fast, and the excavators agree.  BEDS fits a single surface that needed hours or a day.  It also fits every trace whose clock ran inside a living animal, because a Flood model can spend that time before the Flood began.  It is unfinished for stacks of track horizons and for bones bored where they lie.  It fails for nests, where an embryo's own teeth record more days than Oard's window allows.  The one thing BEDS has never stated in numbers is how long a surface stayed dry, and how often the same ground came up again.

The young-earth position, in Oard's words:  the water level "would fluctuate up and down as it rose in the first half of the Flood," from "tides, uplift and sinking of the earth's crust, and other mechanisms."3  Dinosaurs "swimming or on higher land nearby could move onto the BEDS and thus make tracks, lay eggs, and scavenge dead dinosaurs."3  He puts the eggs and tracks "between Day 40 and about Day 120 of the Flood,"4 and his book gives the animals their "final hours or days" on the exposed sediment.5

The four articles under this heading:

  1. Fossil Tracks and Trackways. Every preserved track surface was buried within a day or two, which suits BEDS and proves nothing about the year. The surfaces themselves record more: microbial mats grown, burrows dug through 20 to 30 cm, mud hardened before burial. Sections stack such surfaces by the dozen. The swimming sauropod that BEDS borrowed is dead at its own type site. A footprint rarely names its maker, Laetoli included.
  2. Fossil Nests and Eggs. Floods buried the clutches, as Oard says. But the daily growth lines in the teeth of a Hypacrosaurus embryo from Devil's Coulee, Alberta, count 99 days, and 171 with the time before its teeth began.6 Oard's window for eggs is about 80 days. Nesting grounds also stack three to nine horizons, with soils between them.
  3. Coprolites, Gut Contents, and Feeding Traces. Gut contents, healed bites and shipworm-bored driftwood cost the Flood year nothing, and gut contents support fast burial. Dung worked by beetles needs about a day on its surface, and a Triassic latrine needs days with a herd of hundreds. Bones bored by beetles or by Osedax worms need one to two months, unless they were bored before the Flood and carried in.
  4. Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments. This article adds up the other three. A tide uncovers ground for under twelve hours and a tsunami trough for minutes. Only an uplift of the crust could give weeks or months, and no young-earth source has modelled one. The excavators' 160 track horizons in Korea need a walked-on low tide every twelve hours for 83 days.78 Six nesting beds at Auca Mahuevo, Argentina, leave 13 days each in an 80-day window.9

Two neighbouring questions are argued elsewhere.  Marine burrows are judged in Bioturbation and Trace Fossils:  the young-earth answer works for lightly burrowed lower Palaeozoic rock and fails for Cretaceous shelf sediments mixed through their whole thickness.  The Coconino trackways are judged in The Coconino Sandstone:  the experimenter's own data allow damp dune sand or water, and the Flood question is settled by a sand budget that falls short by a factor of about 1,600.

Read together, the four articles settle three things none settles alone.  First, a trace's cost depends on where its clock ran:  inside a living animal, in seawater, or on the surface where the trace lies.  Only the last kind is charged to the Flood year.  Second, every young-earth escape in print works by moving a clock off the Flood surface.  Egg retention moves an incubation into the mother.  Bones bored before the Flood move the boring into pre-Flood time.  The move is free where the clock really ran there, as with gut contents.  Where it did not, the escape needs evidence, and for retention no living bird or crocodile supplies it.  Third, single surfaces fit and stacks do not.  The cost lies in how many surfaces one section holds, and no one has yet counted them through a whole column at one place.

Part 1: Fossil tracks and trackways

Fossil Tracks and Trackways finds the track record an unsolved problem for a one-year Flood.  It finds the sharpest statement of that problem in young-earth writing, by Garner and four colleagues, quoted at the top of this page.2  BEDS has the right ingredients:  water falls, a surface is exposed, animals walk, water rises, and the prints are buried.  Sharp prints on a modern lake margin keep their detail "an average of only 1.3 days," so every preserved track surface was buried fast, as Oard says.10  What the model leaves out is what the surfaces record before the prints were made.  At Lark Quarry in Queensland, Oard faults the re-study's authors because they "cannot seem to envision the water level going up and down fast enough during a passage of only a matter of seconds to possibly a few minutes."3  The paper he cites found that the track horizon "ceased deposition, hardened (perhaps subaerially)" before sand buried it.11  At the Wyoming megatracksites where Oard first built BEDS, "Microbial mat growth on the ancient tidal flats apparently initiated the preservation of these prints."12  The main track bed at Glen Rose, Texas, is "thickly riddled with vertical invertebrate burrows (Skolithos)."13

Two of the model's supports have gone.  The swimming sauropod BEDS borrowed from Roland Bird is ruled out at Bird's own site in Bandera, Texas.  Re-excavation found hind-foot prints in four of five steps and water "less than one metre" deep.14  And within one section, tracks found below body fossils prove nothing either way.  Oard himself grants "the typical pattern that formations with tracks do not have body fossils and vice versa."15

A footprint also rarely names its maker.  Martin Lockley counted "almost nine hundred dinosaur species reported from the body fossil record but only a few dozen valid and widely used footprint species."16  Laetoli in Tanzania shows the cost to both sides.  Its hominin prints lie in ten sublevels of a volcanic tuff, in a locality with 18,400 animal tracks.1718  The creationist organisations call the prints human, and none has said whether the tuff is Flood or post-Flood rock.  ICR's own palaeontology paper admits "a bit of difficulty explaining the trackways and footprints found in some layers of the Cenozoic."19  The tracks article stated what BEDS must supply and left the sum to the BEDS article.  Part 4 gives the result, which is milder for single track surfaces than the tracks article's verdict.

Part 2: Fossil nests and eggs

Fossil Nests and Eggs finds that BEDS gets the burial right and the clock wrong.  The excavators agree with Oard that floods buried the clutches.  At Auca Mahuevo, "Flooding of shallow stream channels deposited overbank silt and mud on the eggs, killing the embryos."20  The clock comes from the embryos themselves.  Gregory Erickson and colleagues counted the daily growth lines in embryo teeth and reported "unexpectedly slow incubation (2.8 and 5.8 mo) like those of outgroup reptiles."6  The larger embryo, a Hypacrosaurus from Devil's Coulee, carries 99.45 counted days of tooth growth.  Adding the time before its first tooth, modelled at the lowest value seen in crocodiles, gives 171.47 days.6  Oard's window for egg-laying is about 80 days.4  So one clutch outruns the window on its counted days alone.

The nesting grounds also stack.  At Egg Mountain in Montana, Jack Horner "could see the trampled, muddy soil surface clearly preserved" on the egg horizons.21  The whole section there is calcrete and siltstone with insect cocoons from bottom to top, which its ichnologists read as "well-drained and workable soils with extended periods of subaerial exposure."22  Auca Mahuevo has six egg-beds in 85 metres, one of them in a vertisol, a clay soil of wet-dry climates.9  Pinyes in the Spanish Pyrenees has nine.23

The young-earth camp is split on nests.  Paul Garner surveyed the nest literature in 1996 and found that nests on successive horizons "stretch Oard's Flood chronology beyond breaking point."24  He concluded that "The Flood/post-Flood boundary should therefore be sought in the pre-Triassic record," below every dinosaur nest.24  The only young-earth answer to the incubation clock is CMI's:  "Some pregnant dinosaurs under stress may have retained fertilized eggs longer than usual."25  The nests article answers that keeping shelled eggs through most of development is a habit of some lizards and snakes, unknown in birds, crocodilians and turtles.  Retention also does not shorten the count.  It only moves the days inside the mother.

Part 3: Coprolites, gut contents, and feeding traces

Coprolites, Gut Contents, and Feeding Traces sorts every feeding trace by where its clock ran.  A meal in the gut, a healed bite and a stomach full of hard parts record time inside a living animal.  A Flood model can spend that time before the Flood began.  On gut contents the young-earth writers are right.  The last meal of the armoured dinosaur Borealopelta was "a single brief event, probably of the order of hours,"26 and a stomach still full of food is evidence of fast burial.  A hadrosaur with a Tyrannosaurus tooth healed into its tail "could have lived from several months to perhaps a number of years after the attack."27  That time ran inside the animal, so skeptics should stop citing healed bites against a one-year Flood.  Shipworm borings in drifted wood need weeks to months in seawater.  One living shipworm in a floating panel bored 48 mm in its first month and 797 mm in its ninth.2828  A Flood with floating log mats supplies that time, though no creationist has made the argument.

Traces made on a surface after the dung fell or the animal died cost more.  Coprolites in the Kaiparowits Formation of Utah carry burrows that "resemble the burrowing traces of extant dung beetles."29  Living dung beetles do most of their work "between 24 and 48 hours of dung exposure."30  The Chañares latrines of Argentina reach "maximum densities of 94 coprolites/square metre."31  ICR's Timothy Clarey read them as reptiles "trapped by rising water for several days."32  The coprolites article's arithmetic agrees that a herd of several hundred could do it in days, but finds that Clarey reversed which coprolites the authors found weathered.  Bones bored by carrion beetles need the beetles' development time after the carcass dried, from "89.7 d at 20 degrees C to 36.4 d at 35 degrees C" in the living hide beetle.33  The bone-eating worm Osedax colonises bone on the seafloor "as rapidly as two months" after it lands.34  Both clocks are longer than the "final hours or days" Oard's book allows on a surface,5 unless the bones were bored before the Flood and carried in.  That escape is fair, and nobody has tested it.

Part 4: Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments, the sum

Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments takes the three bills and adds them up, one section at a time.  Surfaces in different places may have been exposed in the same week, so they never add.  Surfaces stacked in one section do add, because each had to be buried before the next could form.  The article prices three windows from Oard's own papers:  80 days (Day 40 to about Day 120), 110 days (Day 40 to Day 150) and 150 days (Day 1 to Day 150).

Oard names four causes of exposure:  "1) tidal oscillations, 2) tsunamis, 3) vertical tectonic uplift, and 4) the dynamics of rapid Flood currents in relatively shallow water."35  They supply very different times.  High tides come "12 hours and 25 minutes apart,"36 so a tide uncovers ground for less than a day.  A tsunami's period runs "from approximately five minutes to two hours."37  Only an uplift of the crust could keep ground dry for weeks or months, and no young-earth paper models one.

The results split three ways.

  1. Single surfaces fit. Kvale's Sundance megatracksite in Wyoming, at over 150,000 tracks per square kilometre,12 needs only about a hundred animals walking ten kilometres each, a figure for scale only. Glen Rose's four tracklayers leave 20 days apiece in 80.138
  2. Stacks of track horizons are unfinished. The Jindong Formation of Korea holds tracks "at as many as 160 distinct horizons throughout the 300 m."7 At one horizon per low tide that takes 83 days, so it fits only if every low tide at that spot laid a bed and was walked on. Garner's group cites a locality with 300 horizons in 110 metres,2 which takes 155 days of tides and fits no window.
  3. Nests fail. Devil's Coulee outruns the 80-day window on one horizon. Stacked nest beds leave 27 days each at Egg Mountain, 13 at Auca Mahuevo and 9 at Pinyes, below every measured archosaur clock.8

ICR's model does not help the nests.  Timothy Clarey keeps the dinosaurs dry on land until "possibly around Day 100."38  But ICR dates the Zuni rocks, which hold the Cretaceous nests, "from about Day 90 of the Flood to Day 150."39  That leaves a nest site 50 to 60 days, less than Oard allows.  The BEDS article's closing judgment is that the model lacks a stated exposure duration, and that this is where it fails.

Part 5: Burrows and the Coconino trackways

The placeholder for this section named two trace questions that are argued under Flood Geology.  This hub reports their verdicts and does not re-argue them.

Burrows.  Bioturbation and Trace Fossils treats a burrowed bed as a clock, and the young-earth literature agrees that it is one.  Andrew Snelling writes that burrowed layers "would represent the passing of at least a few hours."40  The young-earth answer works for the rocks it was built on.  In one 430-metre Devonian succession in Algeria, "86% of strata in this 430-m succession are unbioturbated."41  It fails for Cretaceous shelf sediments, which are mixed through their whole thickness and fall inside the Flood year on most young-earth stratigraphies.  The one fast community-scale rate in the creationist literature is the low end of a range its source gives as "15.5 to 4020 hours (~1 day to 24 weeks)."42  Run through John Woodmorappe's own budget of 4,383 quiet hours,43 that fastest rate buys about 34 metres of heavily reworked rock for the whole Flood, worldwide.  Young-earth authors have said in their own journals that these answers fail.  Carl Froede set the Flood prediction of little burrowing beside the slow-time prediction of burrowed beds and wrote, "neither perspective is consistent with the actual rock record."44  Chad Arment, in Answers in Genesis's research journal, wrote that Nebraska's stacked beaver-burrow horizons "didn't 'briefly' occur during the Flood."45

The Coconino trackways.  The Coconino Sandstone weighs the Grand Canyon's Permian reptile trackways and finds that they were most likely made on wind-blown dunes beside a shallow sea.  Leonard Brand ran the creationist side's trackway experiments, with 230 newt trackways, and his own conclusion is a choice of two:  the tracks "may have been produced in either subaqueous sand or subaerial damp sand."46  In his 2018 textbook he adds, "This research does not show whether the tracks were or were not made in the biblical flood."47  The Coconino article settles the Flood question on other ground, a sand budget.  Timothy Helble gave flood geology ten times its own transport rate and still found the sand delivered "only about 1/1,600 of the required amount."48  So the Coconino tracks raise the same question as the Mesozoic ones, whether the surface was dry, but the Flood verdict on that formation does not rest on them.

Part 6: The trace types side by side

The table gathers each kind of trace, the minimum time it needs, and where that time ran.  "Life" means inside a living animal, which a Flood model can place before the Flood.  "Water" means in seawater.  "Surface" means on the bed where the trace lies, which falls inside the Flood year if the bed is Flood rock.  "Hard" means the number is measured on the trace itself or on the same process today.  "Soft" means it is borrowed from another animal, or rests on an assumption the young-earth side can reject.  The figures come from the four articles above, where each is sourced.

Trace Where the clock runs Minimum time Hard or soft Verdict for a one-year Flood
Gut contents Life Hours from meal to death Hard, not on a surface Holds, and supports fast burial
Healed bite Life Months to years Hard, not on a surface Holds
Shipworm borings in drifted wood Water Weeks to months afloat Soft Holds: the Flood supplies the time
Footprint, made and buried Surface Minutes to make, buried within about a day Hard Fits
Track surface firm, matted, burrowed or hardened Surface Hours; a day or two if mud-cracked Soft Fits on count; the mats and burrows are unpriced
Dung buried at once Surface Near zero Hard Fits
Dung worked by beetles Surface About 1 day Firm at 1 day Fits one exposure
Communal latrine Surface Days, with a herd of several hundred Soft Fits on the arithmetic
Stacked track horizons, Korea Surface, repeated 160 horizons at one low tide each: 83 days Soft Unfinished
Carcass bored by beetles in place Surface About 5 weeks after drying Hard if bored in place; zero if carried in Unfinished
Bone bored by Osedax worms Sea floor About 2 months Hard if bored in place; zero if reworked Unfinished
Nest, counted growth lines Surface, unless eggs were retained 99 days (Hypacrosaurus), 48 (Protoceratops) Hard Fails at Devil's Coulee
Nest, with time before the first tooth Surface 171 and 83 days Soft Fails
Stacked nest horizons Surface, repeated 3 to 9 horizons a site: 27 to 9 days each in 80 Soft Fails on every measured archosaur clock
Marine burrows, Cretaceous shelf Sea floor, repeated 15.5 to 4,020 hours a surface Soft Fails
Beaver-burrow horizons with roots, Nebraska Surface, repeated Not priced in days Soft Fails, in a young-earth critic's judgment

Two patterns stand out.  Every row whose clock runs in life or in water holds, and every surface that needed a day or less fits.  Every row that fails or stays unfinished needed weeks on one surface, or many surfaces in one place.

Part 7: What the four articles add up to

Each article judges one kind of trace.  Read together, they show five things.

  1. Fast burial is agreed, and it does not decide the question. Every article grants it. A sharp track lasts about a day. Floods buried the clutches at Auca Mahuevo and Javkhlant.2049 A full stomach means the animal was buried before it digested its meal. But a flood that buries a nest says nothing about whether it was Noah's Flood or a river in spate, and the excavators read these as local events: rivers overtopping their banks, and sheet floods on a delta. What decides the question is how long each surface lasted before burial, and how many surfaces one place holds.
  2. The cost of a trace depends on where its clock ran. The coprolites article built this frame for feeding traces, and it fits the whole section. A footprint's clock runs on the surface. A meal's runs inside the animal. An egg's runs wherever the egg is, which is on the surface for every living bird and crocodile. Only surface clocks are charged to the Flood year.
  3. Every young-earth escape in print moves a clock or moves the rock. Egg retention moves an incubation from the surface into the mother. Bones bored before the Flood move the boring into pre-Flood time. Garner moves the whole Mesozoic after the Flood.24 Arment moves Nebraska's beaver burrows after it.45 ICR suggests that some Cenozoic track layers "have been misidentified and should be Pleistocene (post-Flood)."19 The bored-bone escape can be tested on the traces themselves: a bored bone either lies in an articulated skeleton or it does not. No test of egg retention has been proposed in print. The last three move the problem to the Flood/post-Flood boundary, where other articles on this site take it up.
  4. Single surfaces fit, and the cost is in stacks and nests. No trace that needed a day or less refutes BEDS. The failures are an incubation longer than the window on one horizon, and nesting horizons stacked three to nine deep. The unfinished cases are track horizons stacked by the hundred and bones bored where they lie.
  5. Young-earth writers stated the problem first. Oard asks it himself: "How could dinosaurs be walking around making tracks and laying eggs during a global deluge?"1 Garner in 1996 and Garner's group in 2003 set out the nest and track problems in a young-earth journal. Arment in 2023 and Froede in 2009 rejected the Flood answers for burrows. ICR's palaeontology paper concedes the Cenozoic trackways. The verdicts in this section build on their work as much as on the mainstream literature.

What would finish the young-earth answer is also the same across the four articles.  It is a water-level curve for one named section, giving the number, timing and length of its exposures, matched to the traces on each horizon.  Nobody has published one.

Part 8: Where the articles differ, and which figure to use

The four articles were written at different times, and the BEDS article was written last, with the other three in hand.  Where they differ, this hub settles the difference from the sources.

  1. The incubation floor. The nests article calls 83 and 171 days "floors." The BEDS article splits each figure in two. Erickson's own Results give both parts for Hypacrosaurus: "a value of 99.45 d" counted from the teeth, then "because the hatchling teeth conservatively began formation at 42% of incubation time (72.02 d), this reveals a minimum incubation period of 171.47 d."6 For Protoceratops the counted part is 48.23 days.6 The authors call the whole a minimum, and every error they list would lengthen it.6 But the 72 days rest on crocodile timing, which the young-earth side can question, so this hub treats only the counted days as hard. The change matters for one case. Devil's Coulee fails on either figure. Protoceratops outruns an 80-day window only with the modelled days.
  2. The verdict on tracks. The tracks article says BEDS has the right ingredients "on the wrong clock" and leaves the sum to the BEDS article. When the BEDS article ran the sum, single track surfaces and short stacks fit on count: Glen Rose's four tracklayers leave 20 days apiece in 80. The stacks of a hundred or more stay unfinished, and so do cracked surfaces such as the main level at Cal Orck'o in Bolivia. This hub follows the computed result. The surface requirements the tracks article set out, mats, burrows and hardening, still stand, and nobody has priced them.
  3. The Korean count. The tracks article cites only Garner's 300 horizons in 110 metres, from a 1994 paper that neither article obtained. The BEDS article found the excavators' own count, 160 horizons through the 300-metre formation.7 This hub gives the excavators' figure first.
  4. The window. The coprolites and tracks articles price against Oard's widest window, 150 days. The nests article prices against his 2016 window of about 80 days. Both are Oard's. The BEDS article prices all three windows. The full Devil's Coulee incubation, and every stack of nesting horizons, fail in all three.
  5. Auca Mahuevo's bill. The nests article prices six Auca Mahuevo incubations at about 500 days. The embryos there died in the eggs, "killing the embryos" as the flood came,20 so each bed needs the eggs laid and the embryos grown to their age at burial, not a full incubation. The nests article also adds Egg Mountain's three horizons to the three nearby Maiasaura horizons, though no source says one stack lies on the other. This hub uses the BEDS article's figure instead: 13 days per bed in 80 days, which no measured archosaur clock meets. The verdict does not change.

Objections and responses

These objections cut across the four articles.  Each article answers the objections specific to its own traces.

"Every one of these traces needed fast burial.  That is a catastrophe, and the Flood is the catastrophe."  Fast burial is agreed, as Part 7 says.  But it shows only that each surface was buried soon after the trace was made.  The excavators name the burying agent at each site, and it is local:  overbank flooding at Auca Mahuevo,20 a thin marker bed blanketing the clutches at Javkhlant,49 sheet floods between the track horizons at Broome in Western Australia.50  A catastrophe that buries a surface in a day fits a river flood as well as a global one.  The question is what happened on the surface before burial, and how many times.

"Conventional geology has the same problem.  Slow deposition cannot preserve a footprint."  Answers in Genesis puts it this way:  "Conventional geologists also face a dilemma.  If geologic change takes place slowly, surely footprints made in mud would be obliterated by wind and rain."51  The mainstream answer is that deposition comes in events with long pauses between.  A surface is exposed, walked on and then buried by the next flood or storm.  That reading needs one burial event per surface, which the record shows, and pauses between surfaces, which the soils, mats and burrows show.  It is not slow, steady deposition, and no mainstream article cited here assumes that.

"Exposures in different places came at different times, so the window applies to each site, not to the whole earth."  Agreed.  The BEDS article prices each section on its own and never adds a track in Texas to a nest in Alberta.  The Devil's Coulee clutch fails in its own section, on one horizon.

"The dinosaurs laid their eggs late, after holding them, so the nest clock ran inside the mother."  This is the strongest answer in print, and Part 7 explains why it has the right shape.  It moves the clock off the surface, as gut contents do.  The difference is that a meal really does run its clock inside the animal, while every living archosaur lays its eggs early.  On Oard's 80 days, a Hypacrosaurus mother must have carried her clutch for more than 90 days of a 171-day incubation.8  The answer is possible.  It has no living bird or crocodile to support it, and it appears in print only as a suggestion in one magazine article.25

"Garner's post-Flood Mesozoic dissolves the problem."  For nests, it does.  Garner's own paper says nests on successive horizons "stretch Oard's Flood chronology beyond breaking point," and he moves the boundary below the Triassic.2424  But it does so by giving up most of the fossil record that other Flood models assign to the Flood, which the Flood boundary articles on this site weigh.  It also leaves the young-earth camp holding two positions that cannot both be right, and its organisations publishing both.

"The growth lines in dinosaur teeth may not be daily."  The nests article answers this in full.  In short, the lines form once a day in living crocodiles and in human teeth, and Erickson's count does not depend on any decay constant or correlation between basins.  It is a count of layers, like a count of tree rings.  If the lines were not daily, the young-earth side would need to show what other period they record.

"Millions of years are assumed throughout."  They are not used.  Every article in this section works by superposition within one section:  a higher surface came after a lower one.  Mainstream ages appear only as the figures under discussion.  The sums in Part 4 use Oard's own windows.

From the skeptic:  "If nests fail, why not call the Flood refuted?"  Because the verdict is on BEDS as Oard states it, and BEDS has room to change.  A longer window, egg retention, or a lower Flood boundary would each change the nest verdict, at a cost the articles name.  Most of what BEDS was built for does fit:  single track surfaces, buried dung, beetle-worked dung, a herd's latrine, a few stacked tracklayers.  And on gut contents and healed bites the young-earth side is right.  An honest verdict says what fails, what fits, and what has not been priced.

Issues and unanswered questions

  1. No model of the exposures. The young-earth answer needs, for one named section, a water-level curve with the number, timing and length of its exposures, matched to the traces on each horizon. Oard's papers name the mechanisms and give no curve. Until one exists, every verdict in this section is a comparison with a window, not with a model.
  2. The whole column at one place. On Oard's scope, every land-surface horizon in a region, from the lowest track rock to the Cenozoic beaver burrows, must fit before Day 150 where it lies. No one has logged a single long section for every track, nest, dung, burrow and soil horizon from bottom to top. The Colorado Plateau, with track-bearing formations from the Permian to the Cretaceous in one region, is the obvious place. That count is the decisive test, and it has not been made.
  3. Do the same surfaces carry several kinds of trace? The coprolites article asks whether its dung and bored-bone horizons coincide with track and nest surfaces. If they do, their clocks overlap and the bill is smaller. If they do not, each kind adds its own surfaces to the stack. No one has checked, formation by formation.
  4. Bored bones in place. Whether the insect-bored bones of the Morrison, Cedar Mountain and Kaiparowits formations were bored where they lie, in articulated skeletons, has not been tested. That test decides between "unfinished" and "fits" for the bored-bone rows.
  5. A titanosaur or Maiasaura growth-line count. The verdicts for Auca Mahuevo, Pinyes and Willow Creek borrow other dinosaurs' clocks. A count in one of their own embryos would make those verdicts hard either way.
  6. The Korean field record. Garner's 300 horizons rest on a 1994 paper, and whether the Jindong horizons show mud cracks or soils is not in any passage read for these articles. Paik and colleagues' 2001 sedimentology of the track beds could settle it.
  7. A primary for egg retention. The nests and BEDS articles both state that no living bird or crocodile keeps shelled eggs through development. A primary review, such as Andrews and Mathies 2000, has not been read.
  8. How long fresh mud takes to take a print. Neither side has measured how long freshly settled mud needs to drain and firm before it holds a dinosaur track. That number would turn the "hours" for a bare track surface from soft to hard.
  9. Oard's book. Oard's 2011 Dinosaur Challenges and Mysteries is read in all four articles through Brian Thomas's reviews and Oard's own shorter papers. It may state an exposure duration that the papers do not.

Verdict

Trace fossils are the one place in the rock where living animals left a record of a particular day on a particular surface.  The young-earth side is right about the burial:  every track, clutch and dung pile in these articles was buried fast, and the excavators say so.  It is right about gut contents, and skeptics should stop citing healed bites against a one-year Flood.  Michael Oard's BEDS model fits every surface that needed a day or less.

It does not fit the nests.  One Hypacrosaurus clutch at Devil's Coulee carries 99 counted days of embryonic growth, longer than Oard's 80-day window, and 171 days with the modelled time before its teeth.  Nesting grounds stacked three to nine deep leave days per horizon where every measured archosaur needs weeks or months.  Stacks of track horizons by the hundred, and bones bored where they lie, are unfinished:  they fit only on a perfect tidal schedule, or on an escape no one has yet tested.  The escapes in print each carry a cost:  egg retention needs a habit no living archosaur shows, and a post-Flood Mesozoic gives up most of the fossil record other Flood models assign to the Flood.  The strongest statements of all this came from young-earth geologists, Garner in 1996 and 2003 and Arment in 2023.  What BEDS lacks is a stated duration for its exposures, and the nests show that whatever that duration is, at least one surface needed more than the window allows.

  1. Human and Dinosaur Tracks Together: the Paluxy "man tracks."
  2. Buried Soils: how long the soils between trace horizons took to form.
  3. Fossil Preservation: what fast burial does and does not show.

Sources

  1. 1.

    Oard, Michael J.  “Dinosaur tracks and eggs:  How could they form during the Flood?”  Creation 45(4):15–19.  Oct 2023.  A popular statement of the BEDS model by its author, a retired meteorologist and the most prolific young-earth writer on Flood geology.  It names scavenged bonebeds alongside tracks and eggs as evidence that BEDS must explain, and puts all of it before Day 150.

    1. 1a.

      Section Faith in the Bible devastated:  “Dinosaurs that could swim could land on such an area and remain for a time until it was flooded again. While there, they would make tracks, lay eggs, and scavenge dead dinosaurs, of which there would have been many.” ↩

    2. 1b.

      Section introduction:  “Above and below each surface on which the tracks and eggs are found (their geological horizon) are sediments that creation geologists maintain were deposited by the Flood. How could dinosaurs be walking around making tracks and laying eggs during a global deluge?” ↩

  2. 2.

    Garner, Paul A. et al.  “Dinosaur footprints, fish traces and the Flood.”  Journal of Creation 17(1):54–59.  Apr 2003.  Five young-earth geologists of the British Biblical Creation Society answering John Woodmorappe.  They hold a minority young-earth position that places most of the Phanerozoic after the Flood.  The Korean figure is their citation of Lim, Lockley and colleagues, Gaia 10:109–117 (1994).

    1. 2a.

      Section numbered list:  “The sediment pile above which tracks occur is commonly many kilometres thick. We are unable to conceive of a Flood so catastrophic as to lay down kilometres of sediment while at the same time allowing terrestrial animals 'temporarily to survive' that catastrophe.” ↩ ↩

    2. 2b.

      Section numbered list:  “In Korea, there is one locality where as many as 300 successive horizons have been counted, through a vertical thickness exceeding 110 m. In the course of a few hours or, at most, days the deposition of 110 m would be catastrophic. Somehow we are to imagine the beasts surviving wave after wave of deluge and returning to the same spot, notwithstanding that it was under shallow water and thus not even visible to them.” ↩

  3. 3.

    Oard, Michael J.  “A stampede of swimming dinosaurs.”  Creation 36(1):38–41.  Jan 2014.  Oard's reading of a 2013 re-study of the Lark Quarry trackways in Queensland as support for BEDS.  It gives the clearest short statement of the model's mechanism, including scavenging on exposed surfaces.

    1. 3a.

      Section Dinosaur tracks explained by BEDS model:  “The BEDS model is based on the fact that the level of the Floodwater would fluctuate up and down as it rose in the first half of the Flood. The fluctuation would be caused by tides, uplift and sinking of the earth's crust, and other mechanisms including effects of the earth's rotation. The dinosaur tracks can be placed early in the Flood before all land animals died by Day 150.” ↩

    2. 3b.

      Section Dinosaur tracks explained by BEDS model:  “In areas with rapid deposition of sediments, a brief drop in the level of the Floodwaters would expose a flat bedding plane (BEDS). Dinosaurs swimming or on higher land nearby could move onto the BEDS and thus make tracks, lay eggs, and scavenge dead dinosaurs.” ↩

    3. 3c.

      Section The new interpretation steeped in uniformitarianism:  “They cannot seem to envision the water level going up and down fast enough during a passage of only a matter of seconds to possibly a few minutes.” ↩

  4. 4.

    Oard, Michael J.  “Argentina egg site supports BEDS model.”  Journal of Creation 30(1):6–8.  2016.  A short paper reading a study of an Argentine nesting site as support for BEDS.  It gives the model's window for dinosaur activity, Day 40 to about Day 120.  Mirror:  Creation.com

    1. 4a.

      Page 8:  “In the Creation model the dinosaur eggs and tracks were most likely made between Day 40 and about Day 120 of the Flood.” ↩ ↩

  5. 5.

    Thomas, Brian.  “The authoritative dinosaur book:  a review of Dinosaur Challenges and Mysteries by Michael Oard.”  Journal of Creation 26(3):38–39.  2012.  A favourable review by an ICR writer that quotes the book's definition of BEDS with its page number.  Mirror:  Creation.com

    1. 5a.

      Page 39:  Quoting Oard's book at its p. 115:  “If there were places that were submerged, covered by sediment, and then re-emerged for a short time, then all the dinosaur data can be explained by their final hours or days being spent on the freshly-laid-and-then-exposed flat Flood sediments”. ↩ ↩

  6. 6.

    Erickson, Gregory M. et al.  “Dinosaur incubation periods directly determined from growth-line counts in embryonic teeth show reptilian-grade development.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(3):540–545.  2017.  Counts daily incremental lines of von Ebner in the teeth of near-hatching embryos of Protoceratops andrewsi and Hypacrosaurus stebingeri and adds a conservative pre-tooth interval to give minimum incubation periods.  The first direct measurement of dinosaur incubation time.  Mirror:  PMC

    1. 6a.

      Section Results:  “However, the time elapsed in forming the oldest functional tooth was determined by summing the age of the younger functional tooth (55.27 d) and the tooth family replacement rate (44.18 d) (Materials and Methods and Fig. S1). This finding equates to a value of 99.45 d. Again, because the hatchling teeth conservatively began formation at 42% of incubation time (72.02 d), this reveals a minimum incubation period of 171.47 d.” ↩ ↩ ↩

    2. 6b.

      Section Abstract:  “Our results show unexpectedly slow incubation (2.8 and 5.8 mo) like those of outgroup reptiles.” ↩

    3. 6c.

      Section Results:  “The time elapsed in forming the oldest tooth in the dentition, determined from the total number of incremental lines represented in the tooth, is 48.23 d. As described below (Materials and Methods), hatchling teeth were conservatively modeled as initiating at 42% of the incubation period (34.93 d). The sum of these values reveals a minimum incubation period of 83.16 d for the P. andrewsi embryo.” ↩

    4. 6d.

      Section Discussion:  “(ii) it is indeterminable how many days away from hatching near-term embryos were, which inherently produces underestimated incubation periods; and (iii) there is a level of uncertainty regarding when in development hatchling teeth initiate [typically 42–52% in extant sister taxon Crocodylia (3) and 51–67% in distant outgroup Squamata (64–69)], with higher percentages leading to longer incubation period estimation.” ↩

  7. 7.

    Lim, Seong-Kyu et al.  “Large dinosaur footprint assemblages from the Cretaceous Jindong Formation of southern Korea.”  Dinosaur Tracks and Traces, 333–336.  Cambridge University Press.  Edited by David D. Gillette and Martin G. Lockley.  1989.  The first English report of the Jindong Formation trackways by the Korean excavators and Martin Lockley:  more than 250 trackways mapped in a lake-deposited shale and siltstone succession with no body fossils, on sea-cliff and wave-cut exposures.

    1. 7a.

      Page 333:  “The Jindong Formation tracks are of particular interest because they occur at as many as 160 distinct horizons throughout the 300 m of gray shales and siltstones that comprise the formation (Lim and Yang 1987).”  The count is credited to an earlier Korean-language report by two of the authors. ↩ ↩ ↩

  8. 8.

    The arithmetic follows the BEDS article.  Its windows are Oard's:  80 days for Day 40 to about Day 120, 110 days for Day 40 to Day 150, and 150 days counted from Day 1.  The time left for each horizon is the window divided by the number of horizons stacked in one section:  80 ÷ 4 = 20 days at Glen Rose, 80 ÷ 3 = 27 at Egg Mountain, 80 ÷ 6 = 13 at Auca Mahuevo, and 80 ÷ 9 = 8.9 at Pinyes.  High tides come 12 hours 25 minutes apart, so 160 low tides take 160 × 12.42 hours, or 83 days, and 300 take 155 days.  If the Hypacrosaurus clutch needed 171.47 days in all and its surface was dry for at most 80, the mother carried the eggs for at least 91.5 days.  The Sundance walker count assumes about one print per metre walked and ten kilometres walked per animal:  150,000 tracks per square kilometre over 7.5 square kilometres is about 1.1 million prints, or about 113 animals.  Both assumptions are round figures for scale and come from no source. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

  9. 9.

    Chiappe, Luis M. et al.  “The Late Cretaceous nesting site of Auca Mahuevo (Patagonia, Argentina):  eggs, nests, and embryos of titanosaurian sauropods.”  Palaeovertebrata 32(2–4):97–108.  2003.  The excavators' own synthesis of the site after five field seasons:  six egg-beds, about four hundred mapped clutches, the vertisol, and the rimmed nest structures with the criteria for recognising them.

    1. 9a.

      Page 100:  “Six different egg-beds, some of which are laterally continuous for several kilometers, are contained within the 85-meter-thick stratigraphic section of Auca Mahuevo (Fig. 1).  These egg-beds occur in uniform mudstones representing overbank deposits on an alluvial plain (Dingus et al., 2000).  Clutches from egg-bed 3 occur in paleovertisols, a type of soil common in areas that experience wet-dry climatic cycles under semi-arid to sub-humid conditions.  A network of slickensides affecting the integrity of the eggs and egg-clutches suggests these were laid prior to the complete formation of the soil.” ↩ ↩

  10. 10.

    Roach, Neil T. et al.  “Pleistocene footprints show intensive use of lake margin habitats by Homo erectus groups.”  Scientific Reports 6:26374.  2016.  481 fossil tracks at Ileret, Kenya, with a field taphonomy experiment:  five barefoot people made 118 prints on Lake Turkana mud, re-measured every 6 to 12 hours for 3 to 7 days.  Mirror:  PMC

    1. 10a.

      Figure 2:  “Taphonomy experiments show human footprints retained high definition features (in red) an average of only 1.3 days (A), with 0.5% of tracks preserving these features longer than 4 days (1 track retained toe ridges for at least 1 month). Notably, tracks formed in deeper muds, like many of the fossil hominin prints, often lost their distinctive toe ridges (B) in minutes to hours. Of the 188 tracks recorded, 53% were completely obliterated within one week (in blue; N = 103).” ↩

  11. 11.

    Romilio, Anthony et al.  “Reevaluation of the Lark Quarry dinosaur tracksite (late Albian–Cenomanian Winton Formation, central-western Queensland, Australia):  No longer a stampede?”  Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 33(1):102–120.  2013.  The University of Queensland re-mapping of the "dinosaur stampede" site, with 3-D track profiles and a re-logging of the section.  The paper Oard and ICR both cite for BEDS.

    1. 11a.

      Page 104:  “This suggests a period when the track horizon ceased deposition, hardened (perhaps subaerially), prior to the high-energy regime when sand was deposited.” ↩

  12. 12.

    Kvale, Erik P. et al.  “Middle Jurassic (Bajocian and Bathonian) dinosaur megatracksites, Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, U.S.A.”  Palaios 16(3):233–254.  2001.  Field mapping of two Middle Jurassic megatracksites in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, on carbonate tidal flats that the authors read as upper intertidal to supratidal, with tracks preserved by microbial mats.  The paper on which Oard built his 2002 note and the BEDS model.

    1. 12a.

      Section abstract:  “These trace fossils occur in carbonate units once thought to be totally marine in origin, and constitute the two most extensive Middle Jurassic dinosaur tracksites currently known in North America.”  “Similarities between the two megatracksites include their formation and preservation in upper intertidal to supratidal sediments deposited under at least seasonally arid conditions. Microbial mat growth on the ancient tidal flats apparently initiated the preservation of these prints.” ↩

    2. 12b.

      Section abstract:  “The Sundance track-bearing surface locally covers 7.5 square kilometers in the vicinity of Shell, Wyoming. Other tracks occur apparently on the same horizon approximately 25 kilometers to the west, north of the town of Greybull.”  “Conservative estimates for the trackway density based on regional mapping in the Sundance tracksite discovery area near Shell suggests that over 150,000 in situ tracks may be preserved per square kilometer in the Sundance Formation in this area.” ↩

  13. 13.

    Farlow, James O. et al.  “Dinosaur tracksites of the Paluxy River Valley (Glen Rose Formation, Lower Cretaceous), Dinosaur Valley State Park, Somervell County, Texas.”  Actas de V Jornadas Internacionales sobre Paleontología de Dinosaurios y su Entorno, Salas de los Infantes, Burgos, 41–69.  2012.  The 2008–2009 GIS and LiDAR survey of the park's tracksites by the leading Paluxy worker, with Glen Kuban, who documented the man-track claims in the 1980s, among the authors.  Page numbers are those of the author manuscript.

    1. 13a.

      Section manuscript page 1:  “Paluxy dinosaur tracksites occur in more than one tracklayer, but the largest and most spectacular footprints occur in the Main Tracklayer, a 20-30 cm thick, homogeneous dolomudstone that is thickly riddled with vertical invertebrate burrows (Skolithos).” ↩

    2. 13b.

      Section manuscript page 10:  “Detailed stratigraphic sections (Fig. 2 and Hawthorne, 1990) indicate that tracklayers occur at four horizons, two of which are described in this paper.” ↩

  14. 14.

    Adams, Thomas L. et al.  “Revisiting Bird's swimming sauropod:  New insights on manus-dominated dinosaur tracks from the Mayan Dude Ranch in Bandera, Texas.”  Historical Biology 38(1):112–126.  2026.  Open-access re-study of the site where Bird found his "swimming brontosaur" trail in 1940, using photogrammetry, petrography and geochemistry after the trail was re-excavated between 2002 and 2024.

    1. 14a.

      Page 112:  “The results of our study indicate that the second manus-dominated sauropod trackway records partial pes impressions with 4 of the 5 steps preserved. Along with the single theropod track, this indicates that the individuals were not buoyed up by deep water and were not kicking off the bottom with their forelimbs. Depositional evidence demonstrates exceedingly shallow-water conditions (less than one metre) and partial marine lithification of the substrate, hence ruling out a swimming sauropod origin of the tracks.” ↩

  15. 15.

    Oard, Michael J.  “Dinosaur and mammal tracks found together.”  creation.com.  Feb 22, 2018.  Oard's reading of the NASA Goddard track slab (Stanford and colleagues 2018) as a BEDS surface.

    1. 15a.

      Section What sort of tracks were found?:  “Body fossils are rare in the Patuxent Formation, which follows the typical pattern that formations with tracks do not have body fossils and vice versa.” ↩

  16. 16.

    Lockley, Martin.  Tracking Dinosaurs:  A New Look at an Ancient World.  Cambridge University Press.  1991.  The standard popular synthesis by the founder of the University of Colorado at Denver Dinosaur Trackers Research Group, who coined the term "megatracksite."

    1. 16a.

      Page 49:  “We know of almost nine hundred dinosaur species reported from the body fossil record but only a few dozen valid and widely used footprint species.” ↩

  17. 17.

    Masao, Fidelis T. et al.  “New footprints from Laetoli (Tanzania) provide evidence for marked body size variation in early hominins.”  eLife 5:e19568.  2016.  The description of the site S trackway found in 2015 during test-pitting for a proposed museum.  Open access.

    1. 17a.

      Section introduction:  “Mammal, bird and insect prints and trails have been identified in 18 sites (labelled from A to R) out of 33 total palaeontological localities in the Laetoli area (Leakey, 1987a; Musiba et al., 2008; Harrison and Kweka, 2011). Footprints occur in 10 sublevels within the so-called Footprint Tuff, corresponding to the lower part of Tuff 7 in the Upper Laetolil Beds stratigraphic sequence (Hay, 1987).” ↩

  18. 18.

    McNutt, Ellison J. et al.  “Footprint evidence of early hominin locomotor diversity at Laetoli, Tanzania.”  Nature 600:468–471.  2021.  The 2019 re-excavation of the five site A prints found in 1976, with 30 authors led by Jeremy DeSilva's group.

    1. 18a.

      Section main:  “In 1976, Peter Jones and Philip Leakey discovered five consecutive bipedal footprints at Laetoli site A within locality 7, a 490 m2 area dated to 3.66 million years ago (Ma) and featuring 18,400 animal tracks”. ↩

  19. 19.

    Tomkins, Jeffrey P., and Timothy L. Clarey.  “Developing a Comprehensive Model of Global Flood Paleontology:  Integrating the Biostratigraphic Record with Global Megasequence Deposition.”  Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9:561–587.  2023.  ICR's palaeontology companion to its megasequence Flood model.  Tomkins and Clarey keep the dinosaurs on a low-lying "Dinosaur Peninsula" in western North America until the Zuni megasequence, and concede trouble with Cenozoic trackways.

    1. 19a.

      Page 577:  “Our interpretation still has a bit of difficulty explaining the trackways and footprints found in some layers of the Cenozoic. It is possible some of these layers have been misidentified and should be Pleistocene (post-Flood), but more research is needed on each site.” ↩ ↩

  20. 20.

    Dingus, Lowell et al.  “Stratigraphy and magnetostratigraphic/faunal constraints for the age of sauropod embryo-bearing rocks in the Neuquén Group (Late Cretaceous, Neuquén Province, Argentina).”  American Museum Novitates 3290:1–11.  2000.  The measured section at Auca Mahuevo, by the American Museum team that found the embryos;  identifies the burial agent as overbank flooding.

    1. 20a.

      Page 1:  “The 5 m thick interval of overbank mudstones containing the fossilized eggs and embryos occurs near the middle of a 35 m sequence of thin, fluvial, concretionary sandstones and thicker units of silty sandstone.  Flooding of shallow stream channels deposited overbank silt and mud on the eggs, killing the embryos and initiating the process of fossilization.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

  21. 21.

    Horner, John R., and James Gorman.  Digging Dinosaurs.  Workman.  1988.  Horner's first-person account of the Willow Creek Anticline and Egg Mountain excavations.

    1. 21a.

      Page 146:  “Even before we'd begun to take Egg Mountain apart, we thought these different horizons might each represent a nesting season.  For one thing, we could see the trampled, muddy soil surface clearly preserved.  And all the eggs were at the same depth in the limestone.” ↩

  22. 22.

    Freimuth, William J.  Paleoecological utility of feeding traces at Egg Mountain, a rich terrestrial vertebrate locality of the upper Cretaceous Two Medicine Formation, Montana, U.S.A.  Montana State University (MSc thesis).  2020.  A master's thesis under David Varricchio;  its geology chapter summarises the Egg Mountain section and the 2019 paper's conclusions in plain language.

    1. 22a.

      Pages 14–15:  “Fossil insect cocoons and dwelling traces are recovered throughout the measured section and suggest incipient, cumulative pedogensis and slow, relatively continuous distal floodplain deposition … The occurrence of invertebrate traces throughout the measured section suggests a lack of large (> 10 cm) depositional events (Freimuth and Varricchio, 2019).  Insect traces also suggest well-drained and workable soils with extended periods of subaerial exposure (Genise, 2016; Freimuth and Varricchio, 2019).  Limestones were interpreted as lacustrine by Horner (1987), but the abundance of insect traces precludes an aquatic origin; limestones instead likely represent calcretes, cemented by infiltrating subsurface waters”.  "pedogensis" is the thesis's spelling. ↩

  23. 23.

    Vila, Bernat et al.  “3-D modelling of megaloolithid clutches:  insights about nest construction and dinosaur behaviour.”  PLoS ONE 5(5):e10362.  2010.  Three-dimensional reconstruction of titanosaur clutches at the Pinyes locality near Coll de Nargó, with the measured section showing nine egg horizons.

    1. 23a.

      Page 1:  “The Pinyes locality in the Upper Cretaceous Tremp Formation in the southern Pyrenees, Catalonia provides new information for addressing these issues. Nine horizons containing Megaloolithus siruguei clutches are exposed near the village of Coll de Nargó.” ↩

  24. 24.

    Garner, Paul.  “Where is the Flood/post-Flood Boundary?  Implications of Dinosaur Nests in the Mesozoic.”  CEN Technical Journal 10(1):101–106.  1996.  A young-earth geologist of the Biblical Creation Society surveys the in situ nest literature to 1995 and concludes the Mesozoic must be post-Flood.  The one creationist paper that states the nest problem in full;  its stratigraphic facts are taken from the excavators' own reports.

    1. 24a.

      Page 105:  “Even more damaging to Oard's thesis are the localities where nests occur on several successive horizons. … How are we to accommodate several successive nest-building periods within 150 days, remembering that we also have to leave sufficient time for the rest of the Mesozoic, the entire Palaeozoic, and possibly a considerable portion of the Proterozoic to be deposited before the dinosaurs can even begin to build the first nest?  Examples such as these stretch Oard's Flood chronology beyond breaking point.” ↩ ↩

    2. 24b.

      Page 105:  “The Flood/post-Flood boundary should therefore be sought in the pre-Triassic record.” ↩ ↩ ↩

  25. 25.

    Creation Ministries International.  “Rethinking Maiasaura.”  Creation 45(2).  2023.  A Creation magazine article applying BEDS to Egg Mountain;  the only creationist source found that addresses incubation time, by suggesting egg retention.

    1. 25a.

      Section BEDS—mounting a challenge:  “Some pregnant dinosaurs under stress may have retained fertilized eggs longer than usual, allowing the embryo to reach the point of hatching shortly after being laid.”  “Infrequently, an uplifted surface could have stayed exposed for long enough to allow the hatchlings to develop for a time.  This would explain the rare finds such as the baby maiasaurs.” ↩ ↩

  26. 26.

    Brown, Caleb M. et al.  “Dietary palaeoecology of an Early Cretaceous armoured dinosaur (Ornithischia; Nodosauridae) based on floral analysis of stomach contents.”  Royal Society Open Science 7(6):200305.  2020.  A study by Royal Tyrrell Museum and university paleobotanists of the abdominal mass in the best-preserved armoured dinosaur known.  They test it against fourteen criteria for a true stomach content, then identify its plant fragments in thin section and its pollen and spores.  The meal was mostly ferns with some charcoal, eaten in the growing season;  the authors stress that it is one animal's last meal.  Mirror:  PMC

    1. 26a.

      Section Discussion, Direct evidence of Ankylosauria diet based on Borealopelta:  “Secondly, the data represent a single brief event, probably of the order of hours, and at the end of one individual animal's life, and may not accurately reflect the typical or average diet of the individual nor the taxon”. ↩

  27. 27.

    DePalma, Robert A. II et al.  “Physical evidence of predatory behavior in Tyrannosaurus rex.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110(31):12560–12564.  2013.  The description of two fused hadrosaur tail vertebrae from the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota with a T. rex tooth crown inside and new bone grown over it, the first direct proof that T. rex attacked living prey.  The authors estimate the survival time from healing rates in living animals.  Mirror:  PMC

    1. 27a.

      Section Discussion:  “The duration of time between the attack and time of death is unknown, however healing rates from modern ectotherms and endotherms suggest that the hadrosaur could have lived from several months to perhaps a number of years after the attack (50–53).” ↩

  28. 28.

    Haderlie, Eugene C., and J. C. Mellor.  “Settlement, growth rates and depth preference of the shipworm Bankia setacea (Tryon) in Monterey Bay.”  The Veliger 15(4):265–285.  1973.  Five years of test panels and timber blocks in Monterey Harbor and Bay, counted and X-rayed monthly to measure how fast shipworms settle, grow and destroy wood.

    1. 28a.

      Page 276:  “Consecutive monthly X-ray photographs (1 May 1971 to 1 January 1972) of a single Bankia specimen in a 5×13×¾ inch douglas fir panel exposed floating just below the sea surface in Monterey Harbor”.  “Figure 6: Bankia specimen in burrow 48 mm long one month after initial detection”.  “Figure 8: Third month burrow; 211 mm in length”.  “Figure 11: Sixth month burrow; 437 mm in length”. ↩

    2. 28b.

      Page 278:  “Figure 14: Ninth month burrow; 797 mm in length”. ↩

  29. 29.

    Chin, Karen et al.  “Consumption of crustaceans by megaherbivorous dinosaurs:  dietary flexibility and dinosaur life history strategies.”  Scientific Reports 7:11163.  2017.  A study of more than fifteen coprolite deposits from the Kaiparowits Formation of Utah, packed with rotted wood and fragments of crustacean shell.  The authors read them as the dung of large plant-eating dinosaurs that ate crustaceans in the breeding season, and describe the dung-beetle burrows and snails in them.

    1. 29a.

      Page 2:  “Open and backfilled burrows are common in the fecal deposits.”  “These fossil burrows resemble the burrowing traces of extant dung beetles which lay eggs in burrows provisioned with dung.” ↩

  30. 30.

    Huerta, Carmen et al.  “Dung beetles (Coleoptera:  Scarabaeidae, Scarabaeinae) and dung removal in Mexican livestock pastures.”  Revista Mexicana de Biodiversidad 89(4):1280–1292.  2018.  A review of Mexican field studies of how fast dung beetles remove cattle dung from pastures, with the authors' own 24-hour trials in Veracruz.  It gives removal by the day, week and month, in wet and dry seasons.

    1. 30a.

      Page 1288:  “the highest dung removal activity of beetles is presented between 24 and 48 hours of dung exposure, although peaks in activity may occur up to 96 hours after deposition”. ↩

  31. 31.

    Fiorelli, Lucas E. et al.  “The oldest known communal latrines provide evidence of gregarism in Triassic megaherbivores.”  Scientific Reports 3:3348.  2013.  A field study of dense fields of dicynodont dung in the Chañares Formation of Argentina, with counts, size statistics and thin sections, read as the oldest known communal latrines.  The supplement describes the coprolites' weathering and the beds' burial.  The paper's page numbers are its own;  the supplement is cited by its printed page.

    1. 31a.

      Page 2:  “The areal density of coprolites is extremely high, averaging 66.6 coprolites/square metre but reaching maximum densities of 94 coprolites/square metre and an estimate of ~30,000 coprolites in the most abundant areas”. ↩

  32. 32.

    Clarey, Timothy.  “Digging Into a Fossil Outhouse.”  Institute for Creation Research.  Dec 16, 2013.  An ICR news commentary on the Chañares latrines of Fiorelli and colleagues, written two weeks after the paper appeared.  It reads the latrines as dicynodonts trapped on temporary high ground by the rising Flood.

    1. 32a.

      “The concentration of coprolites found in the rocks in Argentina suggests the reptiles were surrounded and trapped by rising water for several days.” ↩

  33. 33.

    Richardson, M. L., and M. L. Goff.  “Effects of temperature and intraspecific interaction on the development of Dermestes maculatus (Coleoptera:  Dermestidae).”  Journal of Medical Entomology 38(3):347–351.  2001.  A laboratory study that reared the hide beetle, the dermestid most used in forensic work, at five constant temperatures from 15 to 35 °C and timed its development.

    1. 33a.

      Section Abstract:  “Time required for development varied inversely with temperature from a mean of 89.7 d at 20 degrees C to 36.4 d at 35 degrees C.” ↩

  34. 34.

    Jones, William J. et al.  “Marine worms (genus Osedax) colonize cow bones.”  Proceedings of the Royal Society B 275(1633):387–391.  2008.  An experiment by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute group that discovered Osedax:  cow bones set on the seafloor at four depths and recovered after weeks to months to see how soon the worms settled.  Mirror:  PMC

    1. 34a.

      Page 387:  “Colonization occurred as rapidly as two months following deployment of the cow bones, similar to the time it takes to colonize exposed whalebones.” ↩

  35. 35.

    Oard, Michael J.  “Newly discovered dinosaur megatracksites support Flood model.”  TJ (Journal of Creation) 16(3):5–7.  2002.  The first statement of what became BEDS, built on Kvale and colleagues' 2001 report of two Middle Jurassic megatracksites in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming.

    1. 35a.

      Page 6:  “there are at least four mechanisms that would temporarily expose freshly deposited Flood sediment while the water continued a net global rise. These are: 1) tidal oscillations, 2) tsunamis, 3) vertical tectonic uplift, and 4) the dynamics of rapid Flood currents in relatively shallow water that would cause the sea level to fall in 'troughs'.” ↩

  36. 36.

    NOAA National Ocean Service.  “Frequency of Tides:  The Lunar Day.”  Tides and Water Levels.  n.d.  The US government's teaching page on why most coasts have two high and two low tides a day.

    1. 36a.

      “Because the Earth rotates through two tidal "bulges" every lunar day, coastal areas experience two high and two low tides every 24 hours and 50 minutes. High tides occur 12 hours and 25 minutes apart. It takes six hours and 12.5 minutes for the water at the shore to go from high to low, or from low to high.” ↩

  37. 37.

    U.S. Tsunami Warning Centers.  “Tsunami Frequently Asked Questions.”  tsunami.gov.  n.d.  The National Weather Service tsunami centres' public guide to how tsunamis form and behave.

    1. 37a.

      Section 3.5 How long does a tsunami last?:  “The time between tsunami crests (the tsunami's period) ranges from approximately five minutes to two hours.” ↩

  38. 38.

    Clarey, Timothy L.  “Megasequences during the Flood:  a response to Oard.”  Journal of Creation 39(2):68–74.  2025.  ICR's geologist answers Michael Oard's criticisms of the megasequence model, and says where ICR places the dinosaurs in the Flood year.

    1. 38a.

      Section Where were the dinosaurs in the Flood?:  “Our mapping suggests dinosaurs did not become inundated until well into the Flood year, possibly around Day 100. Dinosaurs and their entire ecosystem were 'high and dry' while the earliest megasequences were being deposited.” ↩

  39. 39.

    Clarey, Timothy L., and Davis J. Werner.  “A Progressive Global Flood Model Confirmed by Rock Data Across Five Continents.”  Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9:412–445.  2023.  ICR's compilation of about 3,000 stratigraphic columns across five continents, divided into six megasequences and assigned to days of the Flood year.  It dates the dinosaur-bearing Absaroka and Zuni megasequences to Days 40 to 150 and calls the boundary between them "subjective."

    1. 39a.

      Page 431:  “We suspect the Zuni was deposited from about Day 90 of the Flood to Day 150 of the Flood. The exact timing of when the Absaroka ended and the Zuni began is rather subjective.” ↩

  40. 40.

    Snelling, Andrew A.  Earth's Catastrophic Past: Geology, Creation & the Flood.  Institute for Creation Research, Dallas.  2009.  A young-earth book on geology, creation and the Flood, in 2 vols.  The bioturbation article cites its chapter 92, pages 739–740, and chapter 114, pages 917–923.  The bioturbation article calls it the fullest young-earth treatment of the subject.

    1. 40a.

      Page 917:  “Because bioturbation requires the passage of time, the degree of bioturbation found preserved in sedimentary strata at numerous levels in the rock record would likewise presumably testify to the passage of perhaps significant amounts of time between the successive deposition of those strata.”  Page 740:  “Those rock layers that have some bioturbation in their rock portions, however, would represent the passing of at least a few hours for the animals to have walked around and left their footprints and trails, or to have burrowed in the sediment surfaces before the next layers were deposited.” ↩

  41. 41.

    Tarhan, Lidya G. et al.  “Tracking bioturbation through time: The evolution of the marine sedimentary mixed and transition layers.”  Science Advances 11(31):eadu7719.  Jul 30, 2025.  A 2025 compilation of published measurements of how deep animals mix seafloor sediment (the mixed layer) and how far their burrows reach below it (the transition layer), across the Phanerozoic.  It grades burrowing with the ichnofabric index (ii), where ii 1 means undisrupted layering and higher numbers mean more burrowing; it finds that lower Cambrian strata rarely exceed ii 3 and that Cretaceous shelf sediments were completely homogenised.  The bioturbation article leads with it because the mainstream literature reports, in parts of the Palaeozoic, the sparse burrowing that the Flood side predicts.

    1. 41a.

      On a Lochkovian to Emsian succession in the Reggane Basin, Algeria:  “86% of strata in this 430-m succession are unbioturbated; 7% are characterized by BI 2, 7% by BI 4, and <1% by BI 5.” ↩

  42. 42.

    Grimm, Kurt A., and Karl B. Föllmi.  “Doomed pioneers: Allochthonous crustacean tracemakers in anaerobic basinal strata, Oligo-Miocene San Gregorio Formation, Baja California Sur, Mexico.”  Palaios 9(4):313–334.  Aug 1994.  A 1994 field study of 41 burrowed layers in the San Gregorio Formation of Baja California Sur, Mexico, which is organic-rich mud laid down without oxygen.  Each burrowed layer is tied to a deposit left by an underwater sediment flow.  The authors found the burrows only in those flow deposits and not in the surrounding mud.  The bioturbation article uses it because the creationist literature takes its burrowing-time calculation from this paper.

    1. 42a.

      Page 328:  “Estimated durations range from 15.5 to 4020 hours (~1 day to 24 weeks).  Of course, these values provide only the loosest constraints upon the duration of the burrowing interval for this bed.  However, it is clear that extensively bioturbated horizons do not necessarily require protracted intervals of time for their development.”  The second and third sentences are the ones Woodmorappe 2006 and Snelling 2009 reproduce.  The first is not reproduced in either. ↩

  43. 43.

    Woodmorappe, John.  “Are soft-sediment trace fossils (ichnofossils) a time problem for the Flood?”  Journal of Creation 20(2):113–122.  2006.  A young-earth paper by John Woodmorappe, who supports the Flood as the source of most sedimentary rock, asking whether burrows made in soft sediment (trace fossils, or ichnofossils) could form during it.  He proposes a hypothetical mechanism in which layers harden soon after they are laid down, protecting burrowing animals below from being immobilized by the weight of the sediment above, so that several layers can be churned at once.  The bioturbation article uses it for the author's own admission that most of 1,151 metres of mostly Cambrian strata in the western USA are heavily burrowed, and for his time budget for the Flood.

    1. 43a.

      Page 122:  Woodmorappe's note 103.  “As an upper limit of episodicity, assume one year (8,766 hours) of overall deposition with active sedimentation occurring half of this time.  Theoretically speaking, there was time available for the construction of 4,383 superimposed 1-hour bioturbating events or 52,596 superimposed 5-minute bioturbating events.  Of course, the foregoing example is extreme; intentionally so for the purpose of illustration.”  The 283-surface and 34-metre figures in the body are the bioturbation article's arithmetic on these inputs and his own cited 15.5 hours per surface.  Woodmorappe does not run the calculation. ↩

  44. 44.

    Froede Jr., Carl R.  “Sediment bioturbation experiments and the actual rock record.”  Journal of Creation 23(3):3–5.  Dec 2009.  A short 2009 article in the young-earth Journal of Creation in which Carl Froede reviews a laboratory study by Gingras and colleagues.  That study put clams, shrimp and crabs, and sea urchins and brittle stars from an estuary in Georgia into aquaria of layered sand, and measured how fast they churned it.  The bioturbation article uses it because Froede admits that neither the uniformitarian nor the diluvial (Flood-based) prediction matches the rock record.

    1. 44a.

      “some diluvialists have predicted that we should expect little sediment bioturbation due to the high-energy conditions associated with the Genesis Flood.  Within this diluvial interpretation it could be postulated that the rapid deposition of sediments, one atop another, would leave little time for trace makers to move in and stir them.  However, neither perspective is consistent with the actual rock record.”  The other perspective he rejects:  “the vertical rock record should exhibit layers of intense bioturbation interrupted by nonbioturbated sedimentary events followed by intense bioturbation.  However, this is not typically found in the actual rock record.” ↩

  45. 45.

    Arment, Chad.  “Palaeocastor Burrows as Post-Flood Biostratigraphic Markers.”  Answers Research Journal 16:183–187.  2023.  A young-earth author in Answers in Genesis's journal rejects Oard's BEDS reading of stacked, vegetated burrow horizons in Nebraska and calls them post-Flood.

    1. 45a.

      Section penultimate section, on the creationist literature:  “Oard disagreed, arguing instead that these represent "animal activity during the Flood," on "briefly exposed diluvial sediments."  Clearly, extensive plant growth, episodic and vertically staggered burrow formation, and a large terrestrial beaver population demonstrate that this phenomenon didn't "briefly" occur during the Flood.”  Of the Palaeocastor burrow horizons of the Arikaree Group, Nebraska. ↩ ↩

  46. 46.

    Brand, Leonard R.  “Variations in salamander trackways resulting from substrate differences.”  Journal of Paleontology 70(6):1004–1010.  1996.  A controlled laboratory experiment in which 230 trackways of the western newt Taricha torosa were made across ten combinations of sediment (mud or fine sand), attitude (level or sloped at 25°) and moisture (dry, damp, wet or submerged).  The Coconino article uses it because Brand's own experiment shows that the distorted toe marks used as evidence for underwater making also come from sloped damp sand, and Brand's own conclusion leaves the underwater origin open.

    1. 46a.

      Section Discussion, page 1010:  “The fossil tracks on sloped cross-beds of the Coconino Sandstone are most similar to the experimental trackways in sloped, subaqueous sand or mud or subaerial, damp sand.”  “The data do suggest that the Coconino Sandstone fossil trackways may have been produced in either subaqueous sand or subaerial damp sand.  The choice between these alternatives depends on further study of criteria that can indicate buoyancy of the trackmakers (Brand, 1992; Brand and Tang, 1991), and continued study of the sedimentological evidence.”  This is the sentence the popular young-earth presentation leaves out.  Brand's own peer-reviewed conclusion is a disjunction, not a demonstration of underwater origin. ↩

  47. 47.

    Brand, Leonard, and Arthur Chadwick.  Faith, Reason, & Earth History: A Paradigm of Earth and Biological Origins by Intelligent Design.  Berrien Springs: Andrews University Press.  3rd edition.  2018.  A book on Earth history and origins by Leonard Brand, who ran the underwater trackway experiments, and Arthur Chadwick, presented as a paradigm of origins by intelligent design.  The Coconino article uses it for Brand's own statement of the problem:  the trackway features seem to need underwater making, while the sedimentology (the study of how sediments such as sand are laid down) points to wind-blown sand.

    1. 47a.

      Page 475:  “It is important not to go beyond our evidence in reaching conclusions.  This research does not show whether the tracks were or were not made in the biblical flood.  It simply points to the underwater origin of these trackways.” ↩

  48. 48.

    Helble, Timothy K.  “Sediment Transport and the Coconino Sandstone: A Reality Check on Flood Geology.”  Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 63(1):25–41.  Mar 2011.  Page 29:  “Any argument for aqueous deposition would have to address all of the evidence for eolian deposition and explain the multiple truncations of irregular cross beds and 'second order' surfaces by long, 'first order' planar surfaces, while remaining consistent with sediment transport rates required to form the Coconino in a matter of days.”  Helble's own figure for the cross-bed dips on this page, 25°, is higher than modern measurements, and the Coconino article does not follow Helble on it.  A mass-balance calculation, which checks whether the amount of material moved fits the process proposed, run on creationist Steven Austin's own inputs.  Helble is a retired National Weather Service hydrologist and a co-editor of the 2016 Kregel volume The Grand Canyon: Monument to an Ancient Earth.  Helble multiplies Austin's own transport rate by ten, works with nine assumptions listed as favourable to the young-earth side, and still gets 26 cubic kilometres of sand against the 42,000 required, which the Coconino article uses as the sediment budget that settles the Flood question.

    1. 48a.

      Page 34:  “To form the Coconino in Austin's Flood scenario, 42,000 km3 of sand would need to be transported across the 1,600 km long northern boundary in twelve days.  However, the volume just calculated—26 km3—is only about 1/1,600 of the required amount.”  The chain as printed:  30 kg/sec/m × 3,600 × 24 = 2.6 × 10⁶ kg/day-m;  × 1.6 × 10⁶ m × 12 days = 5.0 × 10¹³ kg;  ÷ 1,900 kg/m³ = 2.6 × 10¹⁰ m³ = 26 km³.  Austin's own transport rate is 3.0 kg/sec/m, and Helble multiplies it by ten.  At 2.2 km³/day the full 42,000 km³ takes 19,000 days, or 52 years (p. 35). ↩

  49. 49.

    Tanaka, Kohei et al.  “Exceptional preservation of a Late Cretaceous dinosaur nesting site from Mongolia reveals colonial nesting behavior in a non-avian theropod.”  Geology 47(9):843–847.  2019.  A single-season theropod colony of at least fifteen clutches on one surface, buried after most had hatched.

    1. 49a.

      Section Abstract:  “A new nesting site discovered in the Upper Cretaceous Javkhlant Formation of the eastern Gobi Desert, Mongolia, preserves at least 15 egg clutches laid by a probable non-avian theropod, and provides strong evidence for colonial nesting in a non-avian dinosaur.  The occurrence of the clutches at the top of a common paleosurface, the distribution of eggshell fragments within clutches, the presence of a consistent two-layer sediment infill within eggs, and a thin marker lithologic unit blanketing all the clutches indicate the clutches were laid and hatched in a single nesting season.  Despite the absence of sedimentologic evidence indicative of nest structure, statistical analyses of egg characteristics and facies association reveal the clutches were likely incubated in covered or buried nests.  Based on the number of hatched clutches, the hatching success rate of the colony was high (60%), similar to that of extant crocodylian populations and bird species that attend and/or protect their nests during the incubation period”. ↩ ↩

  50. 50.

    Salisbury, Steven W. et al.  “The dinosaurian ichnofauna of the Lower Cretaceous (Valanginian–Barremian) Broome Sandstone of the Walmadany area (James Price Point), Dampier Peninsula, Western Australia.”  Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 36(sup1):1–152.  2017.  Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoir 16;  400+ hours of survey at the request of the Goolarabooloo Traditional Custodians.  Quotations are from the authors' abstract.

    1. 50a.

      Section abstract:  “The main dinosaurian track-bearing horizons seem to have been generated between periodic sheet floods that blanketed the preexisting sand bodies within the braid plain portion of a tidally influenced delta”. ↩

  51. 51.

    Answers in Genesis.  “Dinosaur Footprints.”  answersingenesis.org.  n.d.  Retrieved Oct 5, 2026.  The organisation's topic page for its track articles.

    1. 51a.

      Section introduction:  “Dinosaur footprints create an apparent dilemma for creationists. How could they ever be made and fossilized during the Flood? Conventional geologists also face a dilemma. If geologic change takes place slowly, surely footprints made in mud would be obliterated by wind and rain.” ↩