Science Article

September 2000

The Curious Trilobite

"Staggering" in number is how the eminent Dr. Ricarrdo Levi-Setti described the quantity of one species of trilobite alone that are taken from the Anti-Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Fred Wessman, an American dealer and expert on trilobites, relates that a huge potash mine in Morocco produces so many trilobites that children from the villages ride conveyor belts that are fifty miles long collecting them to sell to foreign dealers.

Some 2000 species of trilobites are buried in the lower rocks in vast profusion all over the globe. They are found all over the United States, around the world and in huge numbers in the Sahara desert.

Because such vast numbers of so many species of trilobites have been perfectly preserved we know a good deal about their structure. They resemble today's "pill bugs" or horse-shoe crabs and are listed as arthropods, like spiders and millipedes. In size they very from a half inch long to nearly two feet in length. Their hard jointed shells were like horse-shoe crabs or lobsters and were apparently able to replace them annually. Many had a dozen pair of legs or more and their complicated compound eyes are one of their most astounding features.

Their extraordinary complexity argues against evolution, as the compound eye appears in the presumed earliest forms in beautifully organized patterns, resembling precisely made mechanical structures. There is nothing crude or primitive about them. Evolutionists themselves believe that trilobites appeared suddenly, already complex and stayed that way for 300 million years, and that were it not for some mass extinction 200 million years ago, they would be around today.

Evolutionists sometimes speak of a catastrophic extinction happening to the trilobites and we as biblical creationists would say amen to that! But how did the extinction occur? Lets take a closer look. Earlier this century there was a massive underwater mudslide off the coast of Newfoundland triggered by an earthquake. It covered an area of over fifty miles with a layer of mud 2 feet thick. Something like this could have occurred when the fountains of the deep as described in the Bible, were opened up on the world during the flood of Noah's day. The reason we see so many of them in the lower part of the geologic column is that most of the bottom dwellers would have been caught in this mudflow and captured unable to escape.

Evidence of this rapid burial is the trilobite tracks that have been found preserved in rock. They must be buried quickly and with a depth of sediment sufficient( usually two times the depth of the impression) to preserve the pattern in the rock. Another evidence is the lack of fish buried with trilobites, implying more mobile creatures had a better chance of escaping the initial mudflows. Interestingly when a Moroccan trilobite salesman was asked which layer a particular trilobite came from he replied "all trilobites come from same layer". The fossil record seems to be a case of catching "flash pictures" of different ecological zones. There have been cases of some trilobites in cretaceous rocks and other rock layers as well, which would indicate that some escaped the first mudflows of the flood and were later trapped by other upheavals during the year of Noah's Flood. There are even some undocumented sightings into this century, which would be understandable if the flood only occurred a few thousand years ago as recorded in the Bible.

Parts of this discussion were taken from Joe Taylor's book, "Fossils, Fact and Fantasy" which is available through Joe Taylor's ministry, Mt. Blanco Museum, Mt Blanco Texas.