When the Tortoise Shell Cracked Open

“What do you think those lumpy rocks are?” my sister asked as we wandered past tables of knick-knacks, toy tractors, and antiques at the flea market.

I admit that I have an unusual obsession with rocks. When we go on a family vacation, I can be found sifting through the landscaping rocks outside of our cabin saying, “Wow! Look at the olivine phenocrysts in this basalt. These are amazing!” (I just say this to myself of course, because I don’t think anyone else in my family is that interested in olivine phenocrysts). Once we went hiking in a local state park and we were walking up a newly laid trail. I vividly remember the landscape that day, which I glanced at momentarily now and then. The blue sky was set like an open dome over the world. The land was a rolling circle of late-summer green slashed through by ellipses of blue lake water in every direction. But I had a hard time taking my eyes off the gravel on the new trail, kicking at it, turning it over, taking pictures and muttering all the while: “This is not local rock. This is like… Iron Range or Lake Superior stuff…why did they haul this all the way here?…it must be really good for paving hiking trails or something.”

But on that day at the flea market I almost ignored my sister and the lumpy rocks. I was on a single-minded mission for certain pieces of furniture, so I was screening out everything at the flea market that was not furniture. “I don’t know,” I answered, hardly giving the lumpy rocks more than a passing glance.

“I think they’re dinosaur poop,” she said.

“WHAT??!!” I wheeled around and really looked at the lumpy rocks this time.

“No way. Who sells dinosaur poop at the flea market?” I wondered out loud. By now I was back to my normal rock obsessed self and was not going to let the matter drop…

So I marched over to the stand with the “lumpy rocks”. Some of them were sitting among the jackknives, rusty vintage coffee cans and such, and some were unceremoniously tied to tent poles, helping to hold down the umbrella tent covering the stand. I looked at the rocks. They were like large bubbles of cement clumped together. They came in varying shades and most were broken. Although I remember one large, long specimen that was wholly intact. They did look like very large coprolites — the scientific term for fossilized poop. “What are these rocks?” I asked the lady behind the table. “They’re dinosaur poop,” she said as if every third table at the flea market was selling Jurassic fossils. “Where did you get them?!” I asked, somewhat incredulous, somewhat suspicious. “Well, I grew up near Mandan, North Dakota, and my parents still live there. My parents’ neighbor, a farmer, has been finding these in his field each spring for years. At first, he didn’t know what they were and just threw them in his rock pile. But then he found someone and asked about them and found out they were dinosaur poop. He has so many of them, he sells them to whoever wants them. We buy some each year to sell at the flea markets we go to.”

“Oh. Wow.” I said, looking them over for a bit.

“You were right…!” I told my sister who showed me that she could smile ‘I-told-ya-so’ every bit as glamorously as when she was thirteen.

I did not buy any that day because I felt like I had to think this story through. Could they have possibly faked them? Made them out of cement molds…applied different stains to create the varying gray to light brown colors? But true coprolites are fossilized with silica rich minerals. The “lumpy rocks” were all different shapes, clearly not from one mold, and the broken ones showed a smooth silica interior. That would be practically impossible to fake without a lot of money and a science lab. Even if someone could make fake coprolites, they could not turn around and sell them for $40 at the flea market. But if you were a farmer finding them for free and selling them for $20 to $40 a piece, a buyer could certainly turn around and sell them for double that and call it good business. Furthermore, the story made sense. Mandan is in the unglaciated part of North Dakota where the rocks found on the surface are associated with the underlying bedrock of the region [1]– some of that bedrock being of the Hell Creek formation which contains dinosaur fossils.

Two weeks later I went back and bought my first piece of dinosaur poop. And two years later I went back and bought almost everything they had left; three more pieces. The dinosaur-poop sellers said that they might not be getting any more. The farmer-neighbor in Mandan sold his farm and they didn’t know the new owner, and didn’t know if he even knew about the dinosaur poop.

So why all the excitement about dinosaur poop? Like most of the rocks I collect, I consider these to be flood souvenirs. And I love flood souvenirs. They are quiet reminders of the greatest disaster to befall the planet.

Water from the Tortoise Shell

The global flood is often called “Noah’s Flood” with good reason. It is recorded over five chapters in the Bible, and Noah is the patriarch of the family who survived it. If you did not happen to hear about it in Sunday school, you probably at least noticed the 2014 release of Darren Aronofsky’s version of the story in the film: Noah.

But I also like to think of it as “The World’s Flood”, because the story does not just belong to Bible-believing people, or cultures which have had a Bible-influenced history. Versions of the flood story exist among every people group on earth. The stories vary widely in the details, but are remarkably similar as to the cause, scale and small number of people and animals who survived the flood. The basic story is repeated over and over; the Creator, or the gods sent the flood as punishment for human wickedness. The earth split open, the whole earth was flooded, and only a few animals and people survived in some kind of boat, raft, canoe or sealed box. From the legend of the Lost City of Atlantis, to the Sioux Dakota Creation-Flood story, from China to South America, from Australia to the Arctic Circle and everywhere in between we have hundreds and hundreds of ancient flood stories [2,3]. In the Bible, as in many of these stories, the flood is a geologic event. The earth itself splits open, and this is the primary source of the flood waters.

For example, since we started talking about dinosaur poop from Mandan, ND, here is the flood story according to the Mandan people who originally lived there: “The earth is a large tortoise. Once a tribe, digging for badgers, dug deep into the earth and cut through the shell of Tortoise. Tortoise began to sink, and water rose through the knife cut. The water covered all the ground and drowned all the people except one man, Nu-mohk-muck-a-nah, who escaped in a large canoe to a mountain in the west.” [4]

And here is a fragment from the Lakota version: “The earth split open, and water flowed from the cracks and covered everything. The Creating Power floated on the sacred pipe and his huge pipe bag. All people and animals were destroyed except Kangi, the crow. It was very tired and three times asked the Creating Power to make a place for it to rest”. [5]

And here is what the Bible says, “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month – on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth….”[6]

Did you know that in a volcanic eruption 70% of the material released is water vapor? We have evidence of an age of massive volcanic activity on a scale unimaginable to us today. If the ash and rocks left behind from these events represent only 30% of the material expelled, and the rest was water, then we indeed have evidence for a steamy hot global flood.

A few examples: Lake Vermillion in northern Minnesota is the 35-mile-long mouth of a tipped over, eroded volcano. Furthermore, the lake is flanked by pillow lava which only forms when lava is released under water. Minnesota was under water when the Lake Vermillion volcano was erupting. [7]

The Yellowstone volcanic crater measures 35 x 45 miles, making it a 1,575 square mile opening. The ash believed to have formed from this eruption is called Huckleberry Ridge Tuff. This ash alone consists of 2,500 cubic kilometers of material [8]. (In comparison, when Mt. St. Helens erupted it left behind a crater that varies from one to five miles across and deposited one cubic kilometer of ash).

The Mid-continental rift system runs in part beneath Lake Superior and down the eastern edge of Minnesota. This is a massive break in the earth’s crust that is 50 miles wide. The rift contains an estimated 480,000 cubic miles of volcanic rock which is at least 11 miles deep [9]. The volcanic rock was then covered by layers of sedimentary (water-deposited) rocks. The layers of sedimentary rock beneath Lake Superior are 30,000 feet thick [10]. The Pacific Northwest is similarly blanketed with enormous lava flows that dwarf the largest volcanoes in historic times. [11]

The geologic record is a layer cake of volcanic materials and sedimentary rocks thought to have been laid down in a succession of “shallow in-land-seas” (which would be a good, albeit calmer, description of flood waters lapping up over the continents). Certain sequences of rocks are completely wiped out in some regions by massive erosion (which, by the way, requires “massive” amounts of water) [12].

While these events are conventionally thought to have happened slowly over billions of years, it is also quite reasonable to consider that the earth is capable of experiencing a massive all-at-once disaster in a chain of catastrophic geologic events; one leading to the next like dominoes falling. In this scenario, a series of violent volcanic eruptions caused the earth’s crust to break up, spewing out lava and water in quantities great enough to cause global flooding, mass extinction and fossil formation. In this view, the earth’s geologic features formed quickly under violently strong forces, rather than by weak forces acting over a great deal of time.

I honestly think that the rocks are screaming out this sort of violent scenario, and I think it would be the go-to explanation if it were not for one problem: While the disaster is explainable in natural terms, surviving it would take a miracle. And the scientific community today is not fond of miraculous explanations.

But what if all the flood stories are remembering something true? When the Mandan children gathered around their village’s great-great-grandmother and begged for their favorite story…what if her story was closer to the truth than the one in the geology textbook?

Fast Fossils

Fossils, including dinosaur coprolites, do not take “millions of years” to form. You can argue that they have sat around for millions of years if you want to, but they do not require millions of years to form. In order for an organic thing to become fossilized it has to be buried quickly and in just the right conditions or it will rot, be scavenged or disintegrate. This is every bit as true for a hadrosaur as it is for a leaf, a jellyfish, or any sort of animal dropping – all of which have been beautifully preserved in the fossil record. None of these things can die or sit around for very long without dissolving. In order to preserve anything organic – especially something ‘delicate’ like a jellyfish, or a pile of scat — it must be buried rapidly and completely in the right kind of sediment. It also must have just the right amount of heat and pressure to quickly transform it into a rock or carbon imprint. In the case of a coprolite, which is transformed by permineralization, it is not millions of years which are required to change it into rock. It simply needs to be submerged in water or sediment that is very rich in dissolved minerals like silica. There are many modern man-made objects that have been permineralized in a matter of days or weeks just by suspending them in mineral rich waters. (Google fossilized teddy bears if you would like to see some examples).

Scientists have already proven that by using heat and pressure, carbon-imprint fossils can be made in a laboratory in just twenty-four hours [13]. However, because there is an absolute commitment to the paradigm of deep time, the researchers insist that what they have actually done is smooshed the work of millions of years into a day.

Interestingly, the same scientists found that their attempts to ‘slowly’ make fossils did not work. (By slowly, we are talking about a matter of weeks, which is still lightning fast compared to millions of years). The organic matter in the longer experiments turned to mush before it could be formed into the sort of pristine fossils that we find in the fossil record. This would seem to imply that in fact, pristine fossils only can be made in twenty-four hours or thereabouts, and that taking any longer — be it three weeks or three million years — is actually impossible since organic matter decays very quickly.

The last time I was buying dinosaur poop at the flea market, the seller (the husband this time) and another curious customer were speculating as to its origin. “I guess it must have sat there for a really long time in order to turn into a rock,” said the seller. I listened for a while and then asked, “Do you have a dog?” He said he did.

“When it does its business all over your yard, is any of it lasting long enough to sit around and turn into rock?”

“Well, no.” he said.

“In order for a piece of poop to turn into a rock, it has to be quickly buried by just the right kind of mud and be exposed to heat and pressure,” I explained. “Otherwise it will disintegrate into the ground just like your dog poop.”

“That makes sense,” said the seller, thinking for a moment. “Well, the river there does flood sometimes, I guess.”

“Mmmm, no, bigger flood.” I suggested as I gathered up my heavy-as-a-cement-block dinosaur poop, and set off for my car. A bigger and hotter flood.