Makoshika State Park near Glendive, Montana, has a semiarid climate with hot summers and very cold winters, but a long time ago it had the perfect climate for dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs. And then they died.
Makoshika (emphasis on the KO syllable) is known for its badlands style landscape, with various erosional features in alternating layers of sandstone and siltstone. These layers include the dinosaur-rich Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation, and the overlying dinosaur-less Paleocene Fort Union Formation. The iridium-rich clay that marks the end of the Cretaceous separates the two in places, with lots of dinosaur fossils below the iridium layer, and none whatsoever above.
In 2024, the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) published a short article entitled “Makoshika State Park: Dinosaur Myths and Wonders.” The authors are Dr. Brian Thomas of ICR and Tommy Lohman of the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum, a small young-Earth creationist museum just off the interstate in Glendive. The article claims to show that the geological features of Makoshika are best explained by YEC flood geology.
Here’s my analysis of the claims made in the article:
ICR: “Within these same layers are also “living fossils” such as crocodilians, turtles, fish (including gar and sharks), small mammals, and remains of modern plants like fern and sequoia.”
Response: But not the same genera and species as what we see in the modern world. It is not correct to call these “modern.” There is not a single species of mammal at Makoshika that could be called a living fossil.
ICR: “Each of these fossil forms has a living look-alike that shows no evidence of evolution or the millions of years imagined for it to occur.”
Response: Again, these are not the same species as we see in the modern world. The mammal fossil species in the Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation are quite unlike anything in the modern world. They are not only in different genera or families, but in different orders. Mammals found in the Paleocene Fort Union Formation are distinct from those in the Hell Creek, and are still very different from modern species. It is very misleading to suggest that the fossils found at Makoshika are practically the same as what we see in the modern world.
ICR: “This matches the biblical report in Genesis 1 that God made separate, distinct creature kinds.”
Response: Yet the vertebrate fossils observed in the Hell Creek and Fort Union Formations are quite distinct from anything we see in today’s world. YEC “baraminologists,” whose ideas are on display at Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum in Kentucky, generally limit the definitions of biblical kinds to the family level of taxonomy, such as the Tyrannosaur kind, dog kind or elephant kind. There are no “dog kind” or “elephant kind,” or any other modern family of mammals found at Makoshika. The biologists at ICR have somewhat different views about how evolution works in their YEC models, but they don’t allow post-flood evolution at the order level, which is what it would take if the Makoshika fossils are merely somewhat different forms of modern kinds.
I’ll repeat something like this later: The problem is not with the Bible, but with YEC understandings of what is recorded in Genesis.
ICR: “The later runoff phase carved valleys, as would be expected from Genesis 7–8.”
Response: Neither the boundary between the Hell Creek and Fort Union Formations, nor the badlands landscape itself, have landforms or sedimentary structures similar to those found from known catastrophic drainage events such as the Channeled Scablands in eastern Washington.
ICR: “Park signs assert that no dinosaurs were buried above this [iridium-rich] clay line.”
Response: The park signs assert this because no dinosaur fossils are found above the iridium layer. There have been a few reports of re-worked dinosaur fossils in the lowest Lower Paleocene layers elsewhere, but the evidence is ambiguous, and don’t undermine old-Earth geology. What YECs need to explain is how we have a dinosaur-rich layer, an iridium clay layer, and then zero dinosaurs above that line, even though the Hell Creek and Fort Union Formations are otherwise very similar to each other.
ICR: “Many geologists claim a meteorite killed off the dinosaurs, leaving this iridium marker, but evidence suggests the layers was deposited during Noah’s flood.”
Response: The article makes no attempt to explain how Noah’s flood is the best explanation for how this thin iridium-rich layer was formed. It does not present any details for how, during cataclysmic deposition of thousands of feet of sand and silt, something happened that deposited a thin layer of iridium-rich clay right between dinosaur beds and non-dinosaur beds, and did so at a number of locations scattered around the globe.
ICR: “Chicxulub isn’t a crater—just a gravity signature based on rock density differences.”
Response: Chicxulub is a crater-shaped structure under the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, believed to be the source of the iridium-enriched layer. There are multiple lines of evidence pointing to Chicxulub as an impact crater, such as shocked quartz and tektites.
ICR: “Finally, any impact that could have wiped out all or most of the dinosaurs should have erased frogs and other creatures, but there are still frog fossils below and above the clay.”
Response: Frogs are aquatic and would have been more insulated from the intense heat associated with such a large impact. Extinction rates for non-marine aquatic vertebrates was considerably lower than for large terrestrial vertebrates.
ICR: “The region’s rocks have volcanic debris sprinkled throughout.”
Response: The Hell Creek and Fort Union Formations contain numerous distinct tephra (volcanic ash) layers, and these are different than the K-Pg iridium clay. The volcanic glass in these layers has been altered to clay, and the resulting material is known as bentonite. There is no iridium anomaly associated with these bentonites. The problems that pure volcanic ash layers between sedimentary rock layers give for YEC models is a discussion for another time.
ICR: “When ‘all the fountains of the great deep were broken up,’ liquid water and steam mixed within magma made their way up through Earth’s crust—through colossal volcanoes in some places.”
Response: This is typical YEC extrapolation and speculation, not biblical exegesis. The Bible does not tell us what the “fountains of the great deep” (Genesis 7:11) were, and it is a very long way from “fountains” to YEC catastrophic plate tectonics.
ICR: “as the Flood waters progressed during the Flood year, they would have eventually reached dinosaur areas and buried those creatures before moving farther inland and upland to bury large mammals in upper layers.”
Response: YECs have various hypotheses for explaining how Noah’s flood sorted pre-flood plants and animals into what we see in the fossil record. This sentence describes the pre-flood ecological zonation model, with flooding of progressively higher zones. In general, Devonian terrestrial habitats were flooded first, then Mississippian habitats, and so forth until Cretaceous (Hell Creek) then Paleocene (Fort Union) critters were flooded then buried. There are many problems with this suggestion, and for now I will point out that it does not explain why there is such an abrupt paleontological change at the K-Pg boundary, with not a single dinosaur fossil about the iridium layer.
ICR: “Some dinosaur fossils from HCF [Hell Creek Formation] have still-flexible tissues, including blood vessels found inside the bones.”
Response: Dino soft tissues is Brian Thomas’s specialty. “Flexible,” however, does not mean unchanged. No one has found truly original proteins or original tissues, such as intact blood vessels. All of these biomolecules have been altered. Altered is another word for fossilized. In this case, fossilization does not mean to turn to stone, but to turn to something more durable in geological settings and timescales than the raw, original biological substances. The substances may still be stretchy, but they are not the same as they were in living organisms. Laboratory studies took a decade to demonstrate that the biomolecules in the walls of such fossil blood vessels have been altered by extensive crosslinking involving sugars and lipids. We know from experiments that these altered proteins and such are far more resistant to degradation than the original polymers were. How long can these last in geological settings? Scientists, including YEC scientists, do not know the answer. They might even go into an equilibrium state and last indefinitely.
Conclusion
The article concludes with, “Visitors to Makoshika State Park can feel confident that the Flood, not some meteorite impact, killed and buried these creatures in blanketing sediments.”
This is unwarranted confidence:
1. The “living fossils” section did not give examples of animals in the Makoshika rocks that are virtually the same as those alive in the modern world.
2. Neither the layers, erosion between layers, or erosion that created the badlands landscape match what one would expect from cataclysmic flood runoff.
3. The Chicxulub meteor impact theory for the extinction of dinosaurs is based on numerous lines of evidence, and there are reasonable hypotheses for why some terrestrial organisms, such as frogs, mostly survived, and why large land animals, such as dinosaurs, did not.
4. Most of YEC geology is based on speculation, not on any direct teachings of Genesis. This includes conjectures about the fountains of the deep. The Bible does not teach that most of the fossil record and associated rocks were formed during Noah’s flood, so Christians don’t need to feel obliged to fit places like Makoshika into Genesis.
5. YEC fossil sorting models, such as pre-flood ecological zonation, differential mobility, hydrodynamic sorting, and floating vegetation mats, fail to explain why the fossil record is sorted the way it is.
6. Soft tissues in dinosaur fossils are always altered and are not the nail in the coffin to old-Earth geology that YECs often make them out to be.
I’ll conclude with one of those phrases I often repeat: I believe the Bible, but I do not believe young-Earth geology, which is not taught in the Bible.
My testimony of how I came to faith in Christ
God’s Global Plan of Salvation
Notes:
The ICR article was printed in ICR’s Acts & Facts monthly magazine, Vol 53, No 4, pp 12-15.
I typed a previous version of this blog article on my GeoChristian Facebook page.
A bit of terminology: Iridium is a metal that is rare in Earth’s crust but more abundant in meteorites. The existence of this layer around the world is a key piece of evidence for the theory of dinosaur extinction caused by an asteroid impact. Older literature calls this band the K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary, but the preferred term now is the K-Pg (Cretaceous-Paleogene) boundary.
Image credit: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4289165
A PDF of this article is available here.
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