I was thinking about tar pits, recently, and did a little digging about them.
Tar pit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tar pits are interesting natural occurrences, where subterranean bitumen leaks to surface and creates a giant lake of deadly asphalt. Anything that gets stuck in these lakes is pretty much dead - animals can't get out, they die of exposure and starvation, they die, they sink. Someone one more knowledgeable like RickG can correct me if I'm wrong, but that's my basic understanding.
What's interesting here is that it basically makes tar pits sort of a fossil maker. We've found about a million fossils thanks to them.
https://student.societyforscience.org/article/south-americas-sticky-tar-pits
But the funny thing is, we don't just find ANY fossils in these things, we find fossils from the Pleistocene epoch and upwards. This makes sense in an old earth - the traps only formed in the Pleistocene Epoch, so naturally, only animals that lived during that time would get caught in them.
In a young-earth, though, I'm curious how this would work. Why, out of the millions of animals caught in these traps, are there only animals we find in Pleistocene strata and upwards? Why have we never found any dinosaurs or animals that are often found with dinosaurs in this strata? No T-Rexs, no compsognathus, no triceratops. To the best of my knowledge, nothing like that has ever been found in a tar pit - why is that?
Tar pit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tar pits are interesting natural occurrences, where subterranean bitumen leaks to surface and creates a giant lake of deadly asphalt. Anything that gets stuck in these lakes is pretty much dead - animals can't get out, they die of exposure and starvation, they die, they sink. Someone one more knowledgeable like RickG can correct me if I'm wrong, but that's my basic understanding.
What's interesting here is that it basically makes tar pits sort of a fossil maker. We've found about a million fossils thanks to them.
https://student.societyforscience.org/article/south-americas-sticky-tar-pits
But the funny thing is, we don't just find ANY fossils in these things, we find fossils from the Pleistocene epoch and upwards. This makes sense in an old earth - the traps only formed in the Pleistocene Epoch, so naturally, only animals that lived during that time would get caught in them.
In a young-earth, though, I'm curious how this would work. Why, out of the millions of animals caught in these traps, are there only animals we find in Pleistocene strata and upwards? Why have we never found any dinosaurs or animals that are often found with dinosaurs in this strata? No T-Rexs, no compsognathus, no triceratops. To the best of my knowledge, nothing like that has ever been found in a tar pit - why is that?