Do Fossil Footprints Falsify Flood Geology?
A response to “Outpaced by the Evidence: How Fossil Footprints Shoot Flood Geology in the Foot”
J. D. Longmire
11 September 2026
This response engages a March 2026 article published by my fellow blogger at The Evidence Is Plain. Readers should consult the original article directly so that its argument can be evaluated in its own words and context.
The article argues that fossil footprints expose a fatal contradiction in Flood geology. The argument deserves a careful answer because it identifies a real constraint that any catastrophic model must explain. It may have considerable force against Flood models that assign essentially the entire relevant fossil-bearing sequence to a single year of continuously catastrophic deposition.
My response is narrower. I am asking whether the objection succeeds against the specific developing framework I am proposing, and what evidence would actually force that framework to change.
Which model is being tested?
Two related terms will appear throughout this response.
Designed Functional Maturity (DFM) is the broader research programme. It begins with the proposal that creation was deliberately initialized as a coherent, functionally mature system and thereafter operated according to stable physical regularities. DFM therefore distinguishes between observing how a system operates after initialization and reconstructing how its initial state came to exist. Stable operational laws warrant backward calculation, but backward calculation alone does not establish that every calculated prior state was once an actual state of the system.
The Catastrophic Hydrotectonic Flood Model (CHFM) is a developing geological hypothesis within that broader framework. It explores whether the biblical Flood can be modeled as a physically consequential global catastrophe involving multiple hydrodynamic, tectonic, erosional, depositional, and stabilization regimes. CHFM does not assume that every location on Earth experienced the same energy state at the same time throughout the event.
The historical framework is multi-stage:
initialization and normalization → substantial pre-Fall natural history → Fall → post-Fall/pre-Flood history → catastrophic Flood → post-Flood stabilization → written human history.
A current working estimate places the pre-Fall interval on the order of 50,000–60,000 years and the period represented by written human history on the order of 5,000–6,000 years. Those numbers are model-level estimates under investigation. They are not presented as dates explicitly supplied by the Genesis text.
That pre-Fall interval is not geological dead space. Under DFM it can include real, comparatively gentle erosion, fluvial and shoreline sedimentation, repeated layering, exposure surfaces, soil development, microbial growth, track formation, compaction, and early diagenesis. The stratigraphic record is therefore not divided simply into “created” and “Flood.” Some genuine geological history may precede the Flood by tens of thousands of years.
The biological model also does not require universal pre-Fall non-human immortality. Scripture explicitly ties human death to Adam’s transgression, while DFM presently permits natural non-human mortality before the Fall within a non-predatory ecological order. That matters because a fossilized animal or trackway is not automatically a post-Fall or Flood marker. Evidence of predation, destructive parasitism, or human death would carry greater phase-discriminating weight than non-human death by itself.
“Initialization and normalization” refers to the transition from God's creative initialization of a functionally mature world to its subsequent operation under the regular physical processes available to empirical investigation. The model therefore allows real elapsed natural history outside the Flood interval.
This matters because evidence for elapsed time does not test every stage of the model in the same way. Before a geological feature can be used to falsify the duration of the Flood, we first need reason to assign that feature to the Flood interval.
I will call that phase assignment: determining where an observed geological feature belongs within the proposed historical sequence.
What the footprints actually establish
The basic observation is straightforward. Fossil trackways require a substrate that an animal could traverse, impressions that survived long enough to remain recognizable, and subsequent burial sufficient to preserve them. A model that required uninterrupted, high-energy erosion at the same location throughout the entire Flood could not easily account for such surfaces.
That is a legitimate criticism of such a model.
A trace fossil directly establishes a limited historical sequence:
- a mechanically traversable substrate existed;
- an organism crossed it;
- the resulting impressions survived subsequent disturbance;
- later processes buried and lithified the surface.
The footprint itself does not contain a clock telling us whether the relevant interval lasted minutes, days, years, or much longer. Duration has to be established by additional evidence.
A locally stable surface also does not entail a regionally stable geological regime. Large catastrophes are spatially and temporally heterogeneous. High-energy erosion in one location can occur contemporaneously with deposition, temporary exposure, ponding, drainage, or relative quiescence elsewhere. The same location can move through different energy regimes as an event develops.
But heterogeneity does not solve everything. The harder problem is the number, stacking, regional extent, ecology, and duration of track-bearing surfaces. Repeated exposure horizons, microbial generations, burrows, paleosols, roots, weathering, and regional trackways can impose much stronger constraints than a single footprint-bearing slab.
Accordingly, the relevant CHFM question is not merely whether one quiet interval is possible:
Can CHFM generate the observed number and sequence of mechanically stable, biologically usable surfaces, together with their associated ecological and sedimentological signatures, within the historical phase to which CHFM independently assigns them?
If it cannot, the evidence is adverse to CHFM. Merely inventing additional quiet intervals after the fact would not be enough.
A one-of-one catastrophe and the use of modern analogues
If the biblical Flood was genuinely global and physically exceptional, we do not possess a directly observed modern event of the same class and scale. CHFM is therefore reconstructing a putative one-of-one global catastrophe from component physics, preserved evidence, and smaller-scale analogues.
That does not suspend physics. Conservation laws, thermodynamics, material strength, sediment budgets, biological constraints, and measured process limits remain binding. “The Flood was unique” cannot function as an escape hatch.
At the same time, a local modern rate is not automatically a hard rate limit for a whole-Earth event under radically different forcing, sediment supply, water depth, tectonic regime, chemistry, and boundary conditions. Modern processes should be used as constrained, scale-aware analogues. Where a duration claim depends on analogue transfer, the controlling variables and the strength of that transfer should be made explicit.
The evidence is more interesting than the headline
Several track sites illustrate why the broad claim is too strong while also showing where the real pressure lies.
At the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site in Utah, track-bearing surfaces preserve mud cracks, ripple structures, scours, exposed mudflat conditions, shallow-water conditions, and repeated track-making. Utah Geological Survey descriptions also identify rapid sediment emplacement capable of preserving fine details of underlying surfaces. The evidence therefore records environmental oscillation and rapid burial. That is compatible with the physical possibility of short-lived exposure and depositional pulses.
The Paluxy River track sites in the Glen Rose Formation of Texas likewise record dinosaurs traversing soft carbonate mud followed by burial. Multiple track layers and extensive invertebrate burrowing deserve further investigation because biological colonization may supply useful minimum-duration constraints. Track preservation itself does not establish those durations.
Dinosaur Ridge in Colorado presents the stronger case.
Noffke, Hagadorn and Bartlett (2019) documented microbially induced sedimentary structures associated with dinosaur trackways in the Dakota Group, including microbial growth, disturbance, erosion, healing, and renewed track-making. A later study by Noffke, Murphey, Buntin and Lockley (2025) examined microbial mats across twelve Jurassic and Cretaceous track sites in Utah and Colorado. The authors report minimum exposure times ranging from hours or days for some endobenthic mats to months for epibenthic mats, with preservation requiring relatively short exposure followed by gentle burial. The paper was first published online in 2025 and appears in Sedimentology under DOI 10.1111/sed.70037.
The longer Dinosaur Ridge chronology discussed in the literature therefore deserves careful treatment, but it should not be reduced to a slogan such as “microbial mats prove years.” Different mat types carry different minimum timescales, and any stronger annual or multi-year inference has to be defended from the specific structures and sequence present at the site.
CHFM should not evade such evidence by simply asserting that microbial mats grew faster during the Flood. Any departure from empirically constrained growth behavior would require a physical reason and supporting evidence.
Chronology testing follows phase assignment
Because DFM/CHFM contains substantial real history outside the Flood interval, a geological surface demonstrating months or years of actual elapsed time does not by itself falsify the Flood chronology. It would do so only if the model also requires that surface to have formed during the Flood.
That point becomes concrete at Dinosaur Ridge because creationist models do not all carry the same stratigraphic assumptions. The Institute for Creation Research, for example, explicitly places the Jurassic and Cretaceous units exposed at Dinosaur Ridge in the upper Zuni Megasequence, during the Flood year as waters approached their maximum extent. Under that assignment, duration evidence from Dakota Group track surfaces directly pressures the Flood chronology.
CHFM is not committed to inheriting that assignment merely because it is a young-earth proposal. Its developing stratigraphic method is a synthesis: process-first phase architecture, local and basin-scale physical classification before global correlation, quantitative sediment-volume and megasequence data where useful, and explicit retention of trackways, paleosols, microbial mats, burrows, and ecological succession as possible falsification constraints.
Therefore, before Dinosaur Ridge can falsify CHFM's Flood chronology, two propositions must be established:
- the relevant structures independently require more elapsed time than the Flood interval permits; and
- the relevant horizon independently belongs within the CHFM Flood interval.
If the second proposition is not established, a long-duration surface may instead constrain where CHFM places the Flood boundary in the stratigraphic record.
This is not permission to relocate every difficult horizon outside the Flood. That would immunize the model against evidence. Phase assignments must be constrained by sedimentology, stratigraphy, basin geometry, paleoflow, paleontology, ichnology, geochemistry, tectonics, regional continuity, and the model's prior commitments. A pattern of reactive reassignment would count against CHFM.
The pre-Fall interval also cannot become a dumping ground for inconvenient strata. Any proposed pre-Fall assignment must fit the available 50,000–60,000-year working window, the model's biological constraints, the observed depositional environment, and regional correlations.
Retrodiction and elapsed history
There is a broader methodological issue here.
Operational regularity warrants defeasible extrapolation. Here, defeasible means justified provisionally but open to revision if contrary evidence appears. Operational regularity does not entail that the system's initial state was generated by indefinitely extrapolating those same regularities backward.
Consider the distinction in ordinary terms. If we encounter a mature system and know how systems of that type normally develop, we can calculate a developmental history that would produce its present state. That calculation can be entirely correct given its assumptions. A separate question remains: did this particular system actually arrive at its initial observed state through that calculated history?
DFM applies that distinction to origins. It does not license arbitrary rejection of historical inference. Once a geological feature is independently assigned to ordinary post-initialization history, its physical evidence should constrain elapsed time normally.
That is why DFM does relatively little work for Dinosaur Ridge once the horizon has been assigned to a genuine post-initialization historical phase. The stratigraphic task becomes empirical: which phase, and what duration does the evidence actually require?
The asymmetry question
The original article offers fossil footprints as evidence against Flood geology, but it does not state falsification criteria for the conventional historical reconstruction it favors.
That omission does not invalidate an internal critique. One can identify a contradiction in model A without first constructing model B.
The evidential situation changes when the conclusion becomes comparative: therefore conventional deep-time geology is confirmed or should be preferred.
At that point both historical reconstructions should expose their assumptions and failure conditions. Conventional sedimentary geology has mature local facies tests and multiple independent proxies. CHFM should acknowledge that rather than pretending the comparison is methodologically empty. The remaining question is broader: which observations would materially lower confidence in the long-duration historical reconstruction itself, rather than merely revise a local facies interpretation?
CHFM can state some of its own failure conditions plainly. A horizon would constitute serious adverse evidence if it is independently assigned to the Flood yet requires more elapsed time than the Flood allows. Likewise, repeated ecological succession, soil development, chemical weathering, microbial growth, biological colonization, or other processes with defensible minimum durations can falsify particular CHFM phase assignments.
Where the evidence currently stands
The responsible conclusion is narrower than either polemic would suggest.
Fossil footprints do not intrinsically falsify every catastrophic Flood model. Sites such as St. George demonstrate that track formation, environmental oscillation, and rapid burial can coexist.
The cumulative trackway record is a harder problem than any one surface. Repeated stacked horizons, regional continuity, microbial growth, bioturbation, paleosols, and ecological succession can collectively impose duration requirements that a one-year model must earn rather than assume away.
Dinosaur Ridge is therefore a legitimate high-priority test case. The next CHFM task is not another generic methodological defense. It is a measured-section analysis of the Morrison–Dakota interval that:
- identifies the relevant exposure surfaces, microbial structures, track horizons, paleosols, burrows, weathering signatures, and burial facies;
- compares major young-earth phase assignments, including Zuni/Flood-year placement;
- assigns CHFM phases independently from physical criteria;
- classifies each duration estimate as directly measured, experimentally constrained, analogue-derived, model-derived, or inherited from conventional chronostratigraphy; and
- states what observations would falsify each CHFM assignment.
If the evidence contradicts the model, the contradiction should remain on the ledger.
If the evidence proves compatible with more than one historical reconstruction, it should not be advertised as uniquely establishing any of them.
That is the standard I want applied to CHFM. It is also the standard I would ask its critics to apply to their own reconstruction.
References
Noffke, N., Hagadorn, J.W. and Bartlett, S. (2019) ‘Microbial structures and dinosaur trackways from a Cretaceous coastal environment (Dakota Group, Colorado, U.S.A.)’, Journal of Sedimentary Research, 89(11), pp. 1096–1108. doi:10.2110/jsr.2019.57.
Noffke, N., Murphey, P.C., Buntin, R.C. and Lockley, M.G. (2025) ‘Microbial mats in dinosaur ichnocoenoses’, Sedimentology. Advance online publication. doi:10.1111/sed.70037.
The Evidence Is Plain (2026) ‘Outpaced by the Evidence: How Fossil Footprints Shoot Flood Geology in the Foot’, March 2026. (Accessed: 11 September 2026).
Clarey, T.L. (2026) ‘Dinosaur Ridge: Last Stand of the Dinosaurs’, Institute for Creation Research.
Utah Geological Survey (n.d.) ‘The Case for Fishing Dinosaurs at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm’.
Farlow, J.O. et al. (2012) ‘Dinosaur Tracksites of the Paluxy River Valley (Glen Rose Formation, Lower Cretaceous), Dinosaur Valley State Park, Somervell County, Texas’.
This response is part of an active research programme. Findings, phase assignments, and model dispositions are revised when better evidence warrants revision.