Claim CC332:

The Specimen Creek fossil forests in Yellowstone National Park show up to fifty layers of fossil forests with upright trees. The conventional explanation is that each new forest grew atop the previous ones as the previous forests were buried in volcanic ash. This explanation fails; instead, the fossil forests result from the deposition of trees uprooted from elsewhere.

Source:

Response:

1. Specimen Creek and the surrounding area show evidence of some trees transported and others buried in place. The rock layers include conglomerates from meandering and braided streams, conglomerates from mud flows, and tuffaceous sandstones composed mostly of water-transported volcanic ash. In the Eocene, the area would have been between two volcanic chains. Occasional mud flows from the slopes of the mountains would have uprooted and transported trees from the slopes and buried lowland trees in place (Fritz 1980; 1984).
   
   Evidence that some of the trees, especially those on Specimen Ridge, were buried in place, includes the following (Retallack 1981; Yuretich 1984a; 1984b):
   • There are tree stumps that are rooted in fine-grained tuffaceous sandstone but buried in conglomerates.
   • Upper parts of some stumps and logs, surrounded by conglomerates, were severely abraded, but the lower parts in sandstone have good root systems.
   • Flow structures in some conglomerates show they buried in-place trees.
   • Thin sections show evidence of soil around the roots.
   • There are clear soil horizons around some root systems.
   
   Most of the horizontal logs and some stumps (up to 15 percent of the upright stumps, according to Fritz 1984) were transported, but most of the upright Specimen Ridge fossil trees were buried in place.
   
   
2. Upright stumps and trees on Specimen Ridge cannot be explained as floating stumps settling out of standing water, as proposed by Coffin (1983) based on observations of trees washed into Spirit Lake.
   • Most tree fossils in Yellowstone occur in sediments from high-energy flows, not a low-energy lake environment (Fritz 1983).
   • The percentage of erect trees in Yellowstone is more than 50 percent on Specimen Ridge, but only about ten to twenty percent of trees stay upright in flows such as in Spirit Lake (Fritz 1983).
   • Many of the Specimen Ridge trees are rooted in soils, as noted above.

References:

---

---