“Behold now behemoth, . . . he eateth grass as an ox. . . . He moveth his tail like a cedar:. . . he is the chief of the ways of God:. . . the willows of the brook compass him about. . . . He drinketh up a river” (Job 40:15-24).
It was hard to believe but there I was on a cold, sunny afternoon in October, cleaning off the fossil bones of a duckbilled dinosaur on an Alberta hillside along the Bow River.
I had flown into Alberta from Pennsylvania a few days earlier. As we flew to our landing at Calgary, I looked down at the flat Alberta plains and pondered the interesting geology in this part of God’s earth.
Alberta Geography
My daughter and son-in-law live in southeastern Alberta where the land is semi-arid and normally gets less than 10 inches of rainfall a year. However, the land is flat enough that in the 1920s thousands of acres were graded, using horses and scrapers, for flood irrigation. The soil is made up of fine, dense sediments. When it is wet, it is a pasty muck that builds up on boots. These fine sediments evidently settled out when floodwaters became still, near the end of the worldwide deluge described in Genesis 6-8.
Alberta Geology
The layered sediments below these flat Alberta plains contain numberless fossil remains of plants and animals. Ground water is not fit for drinking because of the oil, gas, and coal (fossil fuels) contained in thousands of feet of sedimentary flood layers. In our stressed Pennsylvania coal region, these layers are compressed, wrapped, and stood up past vertical (90 degrees) at places. However, in the Alberta prairie, the sedimentary layers remain close to the flat gravitational plane in which they were deposited.
The contents of these layers have been exposed to our view today by the Red Deer River. It has cut a canyon across the Alberta plains over a mile wide and 4,000 feet deep. Much of the layered deposits are bentonite soil. Bentonite is a gray clay of volcanic ash origin that swells to twice its size when wet. It shrivels and crumbles up like popcorn on the surface when it dries out. This is some of the worldwide evidence that there was also extensive volcanic action when “all the fountains of the great deep [were] broken up” in Genesis 7:11. The creatures in this area may have suffocated in ash instead of drowning.
The Royal Tyrrell Museum at Drumheller in the Red Deer River Valley has one of the best collections of dinosaurs in the world. Here many dinosaur skeletons have been reconstructed along with displays of the mammals, plants, and marine life that have been found with them. Over 300 museum-quality dinosaur skeletons have been found along the Red Deer River. At Dinosaur Provincial Park near Brooks, a few skeletons of dinosaurs have been simply cleaned off and a shelter with windows built over the site for people to view them.
Finding a Dinosaur
One day, my son-in-law, Kevin, asked if I wanted to go out along the Bow River to look for some bones some young people had seen on a hike. With my interest in fossils, I readily agreed. So we packed lunch for the family and all headed south to some eroded hills along the Bow River. We soon were walking over hills and gullies with holes and subterranean passages. It was the same volcanic bentonite soil with some hoodoos (pillars with a hard flat rack on top that prevented erosion) as is found in the Red Deer River Valley.
We found the hill we were looking for which had about a 60-foot drop-off on one side to the Bow River. We searched around the top and suddenly we saw it. A piece of white bone about one inch long was exposed on the side of the hill near the top. I cleaned around it and immediately contacted another bone surface.
We decided to go down to the van and eat lunch. Our plan was for Kevin to take the family back and get some pans and tools while I stayed and worked at the site. Thus, I spent the pleasant afternoon alone, carefully cleaning away the soil as more and more bones were exposed.
We also found a few pieces of bone lying around loose on the surface. A bone about a foot long was embedded in the surface about 15 feet to the right but too close to the edge of the cliff to reach. When Kevin came back towards evening, we collected two vertebra and parts of three ribs plus a seven-inch bone along one of the vertebra. We also saw a flat bone surface the size of a hand exposed when we left. Definitely, there was something bigger behind it.
The bones were fractured in 1-2 inch pieces. We worked till 11:00 that night gluing pieces together until our glue ran out. On Monday, we called and talked to the senior scientist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum at Drumheller who said he would look at the bones. When we got to the museum he immediately set the seven-inch bone on top of a round vertebra and said, “This is a caudal vertebra of a hadrosaur” (caudal refers to the tail). After some discussion of where the site was, he also said he must keep the bones. He said they often find fossils through other people like us. However, there is a law against excavating fossils in Alberta. (He noted they had not found much along the Bow River and will likely be interested in digging the site.) He has since been communicating with the organization controlling the grazing land where the hadrosaur was found.
Hadrosaurs
Hadrosaurs are the most plentiful kind found in the fossil record. Adults were 2-5 tons and up to 33 feet long. They had duckbills and webbed feet and evidently worked the lakes and streams of the early world. A flatter world with a land-water mix is indicated in 2 Peter 3:5, 6. “For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished.” The catastrophic geologic forces at work in the flood year pushed up the high mountains that we see today (Psalm 104:5-9). After the Flood, the climate produced adverse extremes of heat and cold, stressing large reptile creatures.
The names of some dinosaurs, Albertosaur and Edmontosaur (for the city of Edmonton) show how Alberta and the western United States are major dinosaur locations. Duckbill dinosaurs have been found at places here in all stages of growth from eggs (with embryos) to adults. Nesting sites like this indicate they took care of their young. It was astounding to touch the remains of animals that perished in the flood event. These ribs and vertebra were once living parts of a creature ranging in the pre-flood world.
Interpretations of Facts
We walked through the museum at Drumheller and took pictures of some hadrosaur skeletons showing vertebra and ribs like those we had found. A suggestion box was mounted on the wall at the desk of the museum. “You help us evolve” was written over a silhouette of Darwin’s head. Really! Did the amazing displays of dinosaurs and their environment at the museum happen by accident without any intelligent input! Even a child, if he is encouraged to think, knows better. In a discussion with one of the museum personnel, we told her we don’t have the faith to believe that all the complex biologic diversity of our world, self-organized from inorganic minerals. There are billions of bits of ordered genetic information on the genome of each plant and animal. God is the author of these genetic codes (Psalm 139:13-16).
Despite their best efforts to convince people of evolution by random processes, the museums themselves are evidence against accidental evolution and evidence for a Designer. God’s creation is much more intricate than anything man has ever made. Evolution is an impossible, unscientific belief system. “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called” (1 Timothy 6:20).
-by Elvin Stauffer