Santana Fossils—Delighting in the Details

One of my first assignments
when I attended college in
Brazil involved fossils. We
had to write and present a paper about
the astonishing mix of well-preserved
dinosaurs, pterosaurs, fish, and insects
buried in my native country’s famous
Santana Formation. Since I was a teenager,
I had heard about them, and here
I was as an undergrad, about to study
those fossils closely. I was excited.

As the director of the museum
showed us the fossils, he kept talking
about their age, around 120 million
years old. He believed in evolution and
millions of years, but at the same time
he was showing how many fine details
have been preserved, such as skin,
muscles, colors, hair, food in their
stomachs, and even blood cells. That
amazed me!

The preservation of fine details is
what has made Santana so famous.
Every time I took a field trip, I especially
looked for my favorite fossil, fish.
You can see their little bones and their
fins as though they had been buried
yesterday. More than that, Santana is
famous for the sheer quantity of fish,
which many scientists admit must
have died and been preserved in mass
graves by rare catastrophic conditions,
such as the sudden release of toxic
chemicals in the sediment or bacterial
blooms. Some studies also suggest that
changes in the concentration of salt or
oxygen in the water may be factors.

During my last year of college, I
started working at a geologic park, and
again I was surrounded by fossils from
the Santana Formation. I realized that
this formation is what the Lord wanted
me to study. As a biblical creationist
working in a field filled with evolutionary
assumptions, I felt a burden
to dig up the wonderful truths these
fossils teach us about the catastrophic
effects of God’s judgment during the
worldwide flood recorded in Scripture.

Specializing in Creeping Things

The Santana Formation is one of
the most-sought-after paleontological
sites in the world because of the beautiful
preservation of so many different
kinds of plants, insects, fish, dinosaurs,
pterosaurs, birds, and other life forms.
For example, the Santana Formation has a
relative of the famous Tyrannosaurus
rex dinosaur. Its name is Santanaraptor
placidus.

There are so many different kinds
of creatures that for my master’s program
I needed to narrow down which
group to study. I decided to research a
vast group called Hymenoptera, which
includes wasps, ants, and bees. They
became my new favorite. (It seems I
have many favorites.) They may be very
small, but they display astonishingly
fine details. Veins, the name given to
the lines and traces that mark the
wings, are so visible that even in cases
where those lines are not grooved into
the rock, they are gently pressed on it
so you can still see the impressions.
Those lines and traces help us classify
the insects with great precision.

Photo courtesy Dr. Gabriela Haynes

Tiny insects like
this wasp from the
family Tiphiidae
are preserved in
exquisite detail in
Brazil’s Santana
Formation.

For example, when I am studying
some of the wasps, I can see the veins,
wrinkles, punctuations (little dots
on their body), hair, colored wings,
flagellomeres (tiny pieces that form
the antenna), spines, and spurs on the
leg. You can see some of those characteristics
without a magnifying glass,
but to see other details you need a special
microscope.

The preservation of these tiny fossils
amazes everybody in the field, even the
scientists who see them all the time.
They understand the specimens must
have been preserved by rapid burial
because the animals and plants didn’t
have time to go through the normal
body decay process. For example, a
study on cockroaches found they can’t
stay intact after 48 hours in a water
environment. Water starts destroying
their structures right away.

Rapid Preservation

Secular scientists don’t know how
so many insects could be preserved so
well. It’s almost as if they were buried
and fossilized while still alive! Yet all
evolutionary scientists agree on one
thing: this burial could not have taken
place only a few thousand years ago.
Currently, secular scientists also confidently
date the fossils in the Santana
Formation at 113 million years (but
those numbers change all the time).
How can they be so sure?

It’s certainly not because of the
physical evidence we have in front of
us: the finely preserved specimens of
past life and the surrounding rocks.
Those don’t come with dates on them.
No, these claims are built on layers of
assumptions developed by fallible people;
and the underlying assumption—even before they look at the evidence—is that all life evolved from a common
ancestor over millions of years. As a
creation scientist, my starting point is
the Bible. I believe the fossils found in
the Santana Formation are the result of
Noah’s flood recorded in Genesis chapters
6–9, and the evidence fits nicely
with that assumption.

The Bible tells us that the fountains
of the great deep broke up, the windows
of heaven were opened, and the rain
was heavy upon the earth 40 days and
40 nights (Genesis 7:11–12). It happened
very rapidly. Some of the animals were
carried by the water and imbedded in
the sediments while others were suddenly
buried alive. Some of them were
crawling, flying, and swimming, and
others were eating a meal or even giving
birth. We know that because their
activities were recorded in the rocks.

It is interesting that the evidence
keeps pointing to a rapid event that
buried everything we see in the fossil
record, but the secular scientists, even
knowing that rapid burial is a reasonable,
important, and necessary factor
for fossil preservation, keep their
model that each layer was deposited
over millions of years. Most believe
that there was not one global catastrophe
but that layers upon layers of sediments
were deposited slowly, gradually
covering the organisms.

The paleontologists are always
amazed and surprised by the fine
details they find in the fossils from the
Santana Formation and so many other
mass graves around the world. Scientists
worldwide are studying how those
details could get preserved. They don’t
have a good explanation as to how the
fossils could survive millions of years
and still show so many details. Unfortunately,
they won’t even consider the
biblical account because they are committed
to a different worldview that
won’t allow it as an option.

We as Christians know the answer
for this sudden burial. The Bible
explains it very well. Whenever I heard
comments about the puzzle of such
fine preservation, I often said to myself,
“It is because those fossils didn’t take
millions of years to be formed, but they
formed catastrophically.” Sadly, simply
because I was a Christian who believed
in creation, I couldn’t openly speak
about my perspective. But now that I
have finished my doctorate program,
I can and will. Those fine details presented
in the fossils are amazing evidence
of the Genesis flood, and it is a
privilege for me to study them to piece
together these organisms’ amazing
lives, death, and preservation!

SourceThis article originally appeared on answersingenesis.org

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