There it was, right before our eyes, a beautiful specimen of the tip of a Tyrannosaurus tooth. It was unearthed, with great excitement, by our Creation Studies Institute’s (CSI) group, just a few feet from where I was digging. It was a hot, mid-summer July day in the heart of the Badlands of Glendive, Montana. We had been taking our groups to private land owned by fellow creationist, Otis Kline, an expert hunter of dinosaur fossils. The exact site where we were digging is called the Hell Creek Formation, a place that is well known for its abundance of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops fossils. Over the years, we have taken part in excavating numerous Triceratops fossils and, on more than one occasion, we have seen several tips of Tyrannosaurus teeth in this area, but this tooth far exceeded any others that CSI had found in the past. We were completely surprised that, in less then an hour from starting our dig, Dr. Scott Mc Owen, a retired veterinarian and one of our CSI Board of Directors, made this amazing discovery. As we looked on, his brush carefully removed the dirt and uncovered a perfectly formed tip of the T. Rex tooth with the obvious serrations that, morphologically, are very similar to those found on a shark’s tooth.

After we got over the excitement of our discovery, a few minutes later, in the very same layer of earth, we found a piece of a turtle shell. This specimen resembled a modern turtle’s shell. It was almost an exact replica of the types of fossils we found in the Peace River in Florida, all of which are considered fairly modern. Every time we have discovered a Triceratops or Tyrannosaurus fossil, we have witnessed, almost without exception, modern-day animal fossils close by. Of course, this exposes a gigantic challenge for evolutionists to explain. Why are there fairly recent fossils found with supposedly 65 million year old dinosaur fossils? This is not just an isolated incident; there is case after case of fossil discoveries with the same old-fossil-next-to-modern-fossil pattern.

Dr. Carl Werner – a physician who, with his wife, has traveled 160,000 miles over 14 years visiting 60 museums and a 10 dinosaur dig sites – has compiled a massive file of documents on the fossil record including videotaped interviews and numerous photographs. Werner came to a conclusion stating, “We found fossil examples of every major animal phyla living today, and the fossils looked nearly identical to the modern forms.” To his total amazement, Dr. Werner listed numerous examples of modern creatures mixed in with ancient fossils all over the world. As he states, “If lots of modern animals and fossils are found alongside dinosaurs, it implies they lived together and [that] supports one-time creation.”

There are other serious problems with the fossil record that need to be addressed, since it is one of the most important evidences for evolution. Fossils are preserved remnants of plants and animals and the way they are laid down gives us a true picture of the past. Since evolution cannot be observed in the present, because of the underlying proposed principle of slow change over long periods of time, it is of paramount importance that the fossil record be complete. Of course, this will have to include transitional fossils where one can actually see those small changes taking place. For evolution to be a scientific fact, the fossil record should give a clear historical record of common ancestry. What we actually are modern organisms buried alongside 65 million-year-old dinosaur remains.

Writing about the same fossil formation we were excavating, American Museum of Natural History curators, Mark Norell, Eugene Gaffney and Lowell Dingus, ask and answer the question, “How many different kinds of dinosaurs are there?” [Discovering Dinosaurs. University of California Press, 1995] Their answer is based on “a literal reading of the fossil record” during the “heyday of diversity” during the last time dinosaurs would appear according to the evolutionary timeline –the Late Cretaceous (65 millions years ago). These evolutionists were forced to give the total number of dinosaurs as being no more than forty different species. Why so few? “Because the fossil record is incomplete, we can view the record only as a minimum estimate of the number of kinds of dinosaurs that existed in the past.” These devoted evolutionists were forced to acknowledge, “We do not know how bad the fossil record is, but we suspect it may be very bad.” This is a direct admission from evolutionists themselves that the area where CSI dig teams have been excavating for several years reveals no record of dinosaur evolution. None! In addition to this amazing truth, there is a serious void of any transitional fossils that would affirm evolution in Hell Creek Formation or anywhere else on the planet.

There are numerous testimonies that demonstrate the frailty and the incompleteness of fossil record:
“As is now well known, most fossil species appear instantaneously in the record, persist for some millions of years virtually unchanged, only to disappear abruptly.” [Tom Kemp, “Fresh Look at the Fossil Record.” New Scientist vol. 108: (1985): 67.]

“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The Evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.” [Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History 86, (1977): 14.]

What does the fossil record really reveal? It actually supports the creation model. Without transitional forms, the fossil record supports animals and plants suddenly appearing just as Genesis chapter 1 states. In the Genesis account, reproduction is described as, “…kind after its kind.” It further suggests that what we are really observing is consistent with the aftermath of a worldwide, cataclysmic flood. There were numerous marine fossils found at our dig site mixed-up with dinosaurs remains that would certainly make a case for a catastrophic flood as described in Genesis chapters 6-9. All of this evidence supports the Genesis flood. Isn’t it ironic that the fossil record, supposedly one of the most important proofs for evolution, really contradicts Darwin’s theory, but affirms the Genesis account.

Tom DeRosa is the Executive Director and Founder of Creation Studies Institute, He is an author, teacher, and sought out speaker with a passion to equip other believers with the tools needed to refute the lies of evolution. Tom can be reached at [email protected].