From Ararat to America: In Centuries or Less?

There has been much discussion among creationists concerning the flora, fauna and climate of the world before it was utterly destroyed by the global Flood described in the seventh chapter of Genesis. But what was the world like immediately after the Flood? Since the Bible’s specific details on this period of time are scant, creation geologists must turn to the fossil and rock records for a better understanding of how our planet recovered from the greatest cataclysm in its history.

Geologist John Whitmore and Paul Garner [1] did just such research on the Green River Formation (GRF), a series of fossil deposits situated in three low-lying areas at the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. These deposits occur on top of the thick and uniform sediments that carpet the continents and are attributed to the global Flood by many creation geologists, but they are below those of the Ice Age that followed the Flood. This would indicate that the GRF is a series of early post-Flood deposits. There are no human fossils found in the GRF, which probably means they pre-date the Babel dispersion (Genesis 11), seeing as all humans were located in the Plains of Shinar up until that time.

Dr. Whitmore has interpreted the GRF deposits as the remnants of at least three intermountain lakes: Lake Gosiute, Lake Uinta, and Fossil Lake. Fossils of bird tracks, bird nests, stromatolites (boulder-looking colonies of bacteria), and large caddis fly mounds are found along the perimeters of the basins (the lakeshores). Numerous fossils of fish and other freshwater creatures dominate the fossil record within what would have been the deeper regions of the lake. Contrary to popular belief, most GRF fish fossils are not perfectly preserved, as they often show various stages of decay; nevertheless, the details on the ones that are well-preserved are exquisite. Some were buried and fossilized in the act of swallowing other fish!

Fossils of land animals are comparatively rare in the GRF, likely due to the fact that it represents lake deposits. Despite this, Wyoming today has far fewer orders, families and genera versus the number of species compared to GRF Wyoming. This demonstrates that there is a lot of diversity within that smaller number of mammal groupings.

This is significant because the GRF occurs very soon after a major extinction event (either the Flood from a biblical perspective, or the end-Cretaceous extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs from a secular perspective). Evolutionists would expect diversity to have occurred first, only followed by disparity as species evolved with the passage of time. Whereas creationists would expect to see disparity in the earliest post-Flood deposits because each of the created kinds represented in the GRF did not have to evolve from a common ancestor, but rather are only a handful of generations removed from the created kinds that walked off Noah’s Ark after the Flood. Not enough time had passed for much within-kind diversification.

Whitmore and Garner have suggested that the GRF lakes and their associated ecology began within decades to centuries following the Flood. If so, then the mammals represented here must have made the trip to America from the Ark in the Middle East in that period of time. How was this possible? They point out that most created kinds that contain large animals in the present are quite small in the GR; for example, the early post-Flood horse Eohippus (above, sometimes called Hyracotherium) was the size of a dog. Smaller animals generally have a much faster reproductive rate and larger litter sizes than their larger relatives, suggesting that God may have specifically chosen smaller members of created kinds to be represented on the Ark with this in mind.

With a robust population just a few years after the Flood, these pocket-sized varieties of mammal kinds could have colonized much of the world within just a century or so, possibly utilizing land bridges and rafts of vegetation that floated along by ocean currents.

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