Fossil footprints can provide useful insights about ancient conditions. The state of the ground the prints were made in, the direction the tracks lead, and the connection between the footprints and actual fossils can tell us about the animals’ lives and deaths. This information can help us better understand catastrophism.

The Ground

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In the Grand Canyon and other places around the world, there is a portion of the fossil record that seems to indicate a desert period. The Coconino Sandstone in the Grand Canyon is one example of this. It is made of quartz sand and is up to 1000 feet deep in some areas.

This sand is crossbedded, indicating the presence of moving wind or water. These crossbedded dunes lead scientists to believe that this layer of the fossil record is a desert.

The Prints

The Coconino Sandstone layer contains fossil tracks of both vertebrates and invertebrates. Most of these tracks were made while the animals were moving uphill. Studies of these prints show that these tracks were made in wet sand.ⁱ The tracks look like those made by animals trying to escape rising water levels.

If these animals were in fact escaping a flood, then the crossbedded dunes are not deserts but rather underwater formations. In the 1970s, Coconino and other regions were reevaluated, and many scientists agree that these dunes were more likely formed by water than by wind.ⁱⁱ^,ⁱⁱⁱ

The Connection to Animal Fossils

The distribution of animal fossils and their prints among layers of the fossil record is in line not with a slow evolution, but rather a catastrophic history.

We would expect that fossil layers containing footprints of an animal would also contain the fossils of the animals themselves. However, this is not always the case.^iv Bird and mammal footprints and fossils occur mostly in the same layer. Amphibian and reptile fossils, however, don’t match up with the footprints. For example, there are very few reptile footprints and no amphibian prints in the Cretaceous layer. The only reptile prints are from dinosaurs. However, amphibians and reptile body fossils are extremely abundant in the Cretaceous layer.

If each layer in the fossil record really represents millions of years, how do the footprints and the body of an animal end up in different layers? If, however, the layers were deposited quickly during a global flood, it’s logical that animals and their prints turn up in different layers.

Mammals and birds float in water, and therefore would not make footprints deep underwater. These animals would also be inclined to seek high ground during initial flood events. During these early flood events, reptiles and amphibians would be moving about, thus producing footprints that would be covered by rapid mudflows. This mud would preserve the footprints.

Later in the flood, very few reptiles and amphibians would be making footprints. Only larger creatures were still alive, such as dinosaurs. This explains how there could be few footprints but many body fossils in the Cretaceous layer. Only dinosaurs were making prints because the other reptiles had died, producing the abundant amphibian and reptile body fossils in that layer.

The catastrophic model of origins fits the earth’s evidence better than the evolutionary model. Fossil footprints help lead us to that truth.

Find out more about fossils and the Flood in our next article: Dinosaurs and the Flood

i. L. Brand, “Footprints in the Grand Canyon,” Origins 5 (1978):64-82.

ii. R. Batten and R. Dott, Evolution of the earth (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1971) 359.

iii. R. Dott, W. Jordan and K. Stanley, “New hypothesis of early Jurassic paleography and sediment dispersal for western United States,” American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin 55 (1971): 10-19.

iv. L. Brand and J. Florence, “Stratigraphic distribution of vertebrate fossil footprints compared with body fossils,” Origins 9 (1982): 67-74.