Alberta, Canada, is famous for dinosaur fossils, including a densely packed “mass grave” of pachyrhinosaurs (members of the ceratopsian kind). This grave site is jam-packed with fossils—over 8,000 have already been uncovered, and they estimate there could still be 300 fossil bones for every 10.76 square feet in an area the size of a football field. What “massive event” could’ve buried all these dinosaurs?
Well, the article claims the site shows signs of “‘swirls of sediment’ from fast-flowing water,” and the “unknown” event that led to this jumbled burial is thought to be a flash flood of some kind. But it wasn’t a flash flood—it was a global flood!
Mass graveyards, like this one, point to the reality of a global flood. Such a flood would’ve rapidly overwhelmed creatures, including whole herds of large herbivores like these, deeply burying them away from scavengers or microbes. These dinosaurs were overwhelmed in an instant—by a massive global flood.
You see, this isn’t the only fossil graveyard we’ve found (though it is unique in that it represents so many land vertebrates, which are fairly rare as fossils, given that they would’ve been drowned and/or buried in the later stages of the flood catastrophe). For example, a fossil graveyard in Grand Canyon’s Redwall Limestone preserves billions of marine creatures called nautiloids, all buried in the same seven-foot-thick layer as if they were swimming along as a group before being catastrophically overwhelmed.
These monuments to catastrophe aren’t huge puzzles when we start with the eyewitness account of history—God. They are vivid reminders of the enormity of the flood—and therefore the enormity of God’s judgment on a wicked world as recorded in Genesis.
But it should also remind us that two of the ceratopsian kind were safe on Noah’s ark, riding above the devastation occurring beneath the waves. God always provides a way of salvation. And our “way of salvation” from God’s just wrath over our sin is the Lord Jesus Christ, his death on the cross in our place, and his triumphant resurrection from the grave.
