Hell’s Creek

Hell’s Creek lies in Montana, and lends its name to a geological structure called the Hell Creek Formation, which we’ll abbreviate here as the HCF. The HCF spans eastern Montana and vast areas of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. It averages around 575 feet in depth, and is made up of sedimentary rock, rock laid down by water.

The HCF contains rich beds of dinosaur fossils. On August 12, 1990, Sue Hendrickson, an amateur paleontologist, discovered the most complete (approximately 90%) and largest Tyrannosaurus skeleton, known today as “Sue,” later purchased by the Field Museum of Chicago for $8.3 million. It is thought Sue reached full size at age 19 and died at 28, the longest estimated life of any Tyrannosaurus known. It appears the skeleton was immediately covered by mud, which preserved it well, and that the watery death was violent, because the hip bones were found above the skull and the ribs were mixed with the legs. Sue is 40 feet long and stands 13 feet high at the hips. The skull is 54 inches long and weighs 600 pounds; it is so heavy that it is kept separately and a replica is used in the main display.

In 2000 alone five T. rex skeletons were recovered from the HCF, including one called “B-Rex.” B-Rex contains soft tissues which indicate the specimen was female. The soft tissues preserve transparent, flexible, hollow blood vessels.

Sue and B-Rex are astonishing fossil finds. But, to me, what is most astonishing is that the HCF also contains, interspersed among these T. rex and similar specimens, fossils of six different species of sharks. The sixth shark species was announced in January 2019. Think about it – how could the fossil record, now preserved in rock, contain a mixture of huge land animals and sharks? What event produced that combination?

I submit the answer is undeniable. Only a global, catastrophic flood, the flood of Noah, could have this result. Only a massive tsunami could tear sharks out of the ocean and bury them together with retreating herds of land animals. Perhaps for that reason, secular scientists rarely discuss or admit the shark fossils in the HCF, and even many Biblical creationists are not aware. Two years ago I was told by a quite full-of-himself Harvard professor that there were absolutely no fossil beds that contained large dinosaurs and sharks. Yet the fossil record across all continents contains dinosaurs mixed with marine fossils. A 48-foot long Spinosaurus, “spine lizard,” one of those dinosaurs that looks like somebody glued half a fan to its back, was found in Morocco with car-size fossils of coelacanths, fish that still live in the deep ocean.

And let’s not overlook the soft tissue. The existence of dinosaur soft tissue is denied by some scientists, but there are now well over 100 finds reported world-wide. Last I read secular scientists have proposed five different theories for how very fragile tissue could survive for 60+ million years, all of which have been rejected by careful published scientific studies. Simply put, there is no scientific reason to think that biological soft tissue could survive anywhere near that long.

The flood of Noah and burial of those dinosaurs and sharks was not millions of year ago but thousands of years ago. If you date it using the Septuagint, the oldest known version of the book of Genesis that exists today, the flood occurred about 5,300 years ago.

True science confirms the Bible. Thanks for reading, and I urge you to share the good news.

Doug Ell