Creation Science Issues - Fossil Footprints

In an article by Leonard Brand and James Florence, titled Stratigraphic Distribution of Vertebrate Fossil Footprints Compared with Body Fossils (Footnote 1), the authors do a fascinating study of fossil footprint sites, and correlate them with the distribution of actual fossils. Fossil footprints are not true fossils, and are more correctly identified by the term "trace fossil." True fossils are the actual remains of the animal.

In their comparison, they show that the quantity of bird and mammal fossils correlate with the number of trace fossils. In other words, where you see a large quantity of fossils in the rock record, you have a corresponding number of trace fossil footprints. However, when comparing reptile, amphibian, and dinosaur trace fossils, they do not correspond to the number of actual fossils in the rock record.

They equate this to the fact that during the first part of the flood (the Triassic sediments) the dinosaurs were more active, and during the later part of the flood (upper Jurassic and Cretaceous sediments) there were very few live amphibians or reptiles to produce footprints, except for the large dinosaurs. (This is contrasted with the young earth creationist book, Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, in which all the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous sediments are all