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Truth & Trials in Togo
Throughout my journey through medical education, my goal was to use the career God gave me to serve vulnerable international...
One of my guilty pleasures in life is watching murder mysteries. I love the process of examining the evidence and seeing if my conclusions line up with the detective’s before the show ends.
On that note, let me share a case with you, a palaeontology case, and we’ll see if you can figure it out before the end. Here it goes…
How did over 300 whales, seals, porpoises, turtles, fish, ground sloths, penguins and other land animals end up getting buried together in Peru?1
Sounds crazy, right? The craziest part of this story is that they were not buried by sand or rocks, but by diatomite which are fossilised remains of an aquatic algae. In this case the fossilised whales and company were buried under 80 metres of this diatomite!
However, the data trail doesn’t end there. It turns out the fossilised remains of the whales were left beautifully intact (or articulated if you’re a palaeontologist,) with some of the whales having even their fragile baleen teeth left intact. The whale skeletons had no signs of normal decay – such as wormholes, barnacle encrustation or general degradation.
Secular geologists have measured the accumulation rate of diatoms and clay in the British Columbian fjords to be 2.5 to 5.0 mm per year.2 At that rate the fastest that burial could take place is 16,000 years – more than enough time for sharks, starfish, and other scavengers to consume all the whale carcasses, bones and all.
So how did it happen? Did you solve the mystery?
This all points towards one thing – rapid burial of the whales to protect them from predators and scavengers. But how did all the land animals get mixed in there? There must have been a catastrophic event that not only affected the sea but the land as well. A uniformitarian, old earth paradigm has difficulty explaining this catastrophic event. Could this be evidence of a biblical global flood as written in the Old Testament book of Genesis?
1Oard, M. “Dead Whales: Telling Tales?”, answersingenesis.org, Answers In Genesis, 1 Sept 2004, https://answersingenesis.org/fossils/dead-whales-telling-tales/. Accessed Feb 28, 2022.
2Brand, L.R., Esperante, R., Chadwick, A.V., Porras, O.P. and Alomia, M., Fossil whale preservation implies high diatom accumulation rate in the Miocene-Pliocene Pisco Formation of Peru, Geology 32(2):165–168, 2004.
