Investigating Ichnofossils

After a brief break for Easter, we are back to investigating the very important clues in the case of World-Wide Flood vs. Evolution & Billions-of-Years, a case in which you are the judge. We briefly discussed ichnofossils over the past few weeks, but I’d like to dive further into this deep sea of clues. Although most ichnofossils, such as dinosaur footprints, are exposed after water erodes away the layers above, some are found with the layers still together. In such cases, you can actually have two copies of the same ichnofossil on both layers of rock. The one preserved on the upper layer is said to have epichinial preservation, while the one on the lower layer is said to have hypichinial preservation.

In our last clue about ichnofossils, I mentioned that ichnofossils are mostly about a creature’s behavior, and that it is often difficult to distinguish what animal made the trace fossils. However, mortichinina traces are exceptions, because by definition, it is both about the creature’s death and it always has a body fossil at the end of the trail, making their sources always identifiable. In a way, just about all trace fossils are mortichinia or fugichinia (escape) traces under the creationist interpretation, because they are all traces of creatures that were trying to escape God’s judgment during the flood, but failed.

Most iconologists study invertebrate paleontology, and are more interested in studying things like fossilized sea-cucumber burrows rather than dinosaur footprints. This is because invertebrate body fossils are not as common as vertebrate body fossils, for invertebrates are soft-bodied creatures that don’t fossilize easily. They use trace fossils to fill in a few gaps in their understanding of invertebrates, because they believe that understanding fossil invertebrates is important to understanding evolution. They are assuming that all life formed from lifeless chemicals and that the universe is billions of years old before they even look at the ichnofossils. However, don’t be fooled by this. The presence of any invertebrate fossils in the fossil record, like jellyfish fossils, is not something evolutionists like Charles Darwin expected. Jellyfish fossils don’t make sense according to evolution/billions of years, but they make perfect sense in light of the Biblical flood, being buried rapidly in underwater mudslides. Next week we will discuss dinosaur footprints.