Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
In this video I return to dinosaur footprints—because Ken Ham still doesn’t seem to understand what they actually tell us about Earth’s history. I walk through a recent Answers in Genesis article by Gavin Cox and a follow-up blog post by Ken Ham, both claiming that long dinosaur trackways “stomp on deep time” and make best sense in a global flood. I contrast those claims with basic sedimentology, taphonomy, and what we actually observe in both modern environments and the fossil record.
I start by explaining how popular news stories about a spectacular sauropod trackway in the UK are being misused. Ken Ham treats rhetorical questions from a BBC article (“How on earth were these footprints still here after 166 million years?”) as if scientists are baffled, rather than simply engaging readers. I then answer his supposed “mystery” directly: tracks survive for millions of years because they are buried and protected within rock, and only erode rapidly once they are re-exposed at the surface.
From there, I dig into the deeper problem: a global, year-long catastrophic flood is actually a terrible way to generate billions of preserved footprints spread across multiple horizons and environments. I revisit earlier discussions about the sheer abundance of dinosaur trackways and show why they do not follow from flood geology’s expectations. Instead, I take you to present-day analogs—mudflats, salt flats, and shallow lakes in places like Death Valley—where our own footprints and boot prints can dry, harden, and be buried under new sediment, demonstrating exactly the sort of processes that preserve tracks over long periods of time.
Then I take you out to Red Gulch in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming. On the ground, I show how dinosaur tracks sit on a hard limestone surface associated with shallow marine and lagoonal conditions, complete with clams, gastropods, algal mats, ripple marks, and evidence of repeated drying and reflooding. We look at how different fossil assemblages stack vertically, recording shifts from very shallow lagoonal settings to somewhat deeper marine conditions over time. I explain how burrowing clams, algal layers, seasonal drying, and changing sea level all fit a long-term, dynamic environment—not a single, chaotic global catastrophe.
By the end, I argue that sites like Red Gulch make excellent sense on an ancient Earth with slowly changing coastal and lagoonal systems, but pose serious problems for young-earth flood geology. There is no mystery here for a deep-time perspective, but there is a major challenge for any model that tries to cram all these communities, surfaces, and trackways into a single year-long flood.
Chapters
00:00 – Why we’re talking about dinosaur footprints (again)
01:50 – Ken Ham, the BBC article, and “166 million years”
05:40 – Why a global flood can’t explain billions of fossil footprints
09:55 – Modern mudflats & Death Valley as trackway analogs
14:50 – Red Gulch dinosaur tracks in a “marine” setting
19:40 – Algal mats, clams, burrows & seasonal lagoon dynamics
24:00 – Why these trackways fit an ancient Earth, not flood geology
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Joel Duff (aka Dr. Duff or The Natural Historian) resources:
About: joelduff.org
Blog: thenaturalhistorian.com
Twitter: twitter.com/NaturalHistoria
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thenaturalhi...
Photography "Portraits of Creation:" beechnutphotography.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In this video I return to dinosaur footprints—because Ken Ham still doesn’t seem to understand what they actually tell us about Earth’s history. I walk through a recent Answers in Genesis article by Gavin Cox and a follow-up blog post by Ken Ham, both claiming that long dinosaur trackways “stomp on deep time” and make best sense in a global flood. I contrast those claims with basic sedimentology, taphonomy, and what we actually observe in both modern environments and the fossil record.
I start by explaining how popular news stories about a spectacular sauropod trackway in the UK are being misused. Ken Ham treats rhetorical questions from a BBC article (“How on earth were these footprints still here after 166 million years?”) as if scientists are baffled, rather than simply engaging readers. I then answer his supposed “mystery” directly: tracks survive for millions of years because they are buried and protected within rock, and only erode rapidly once they are re-exposed at the surface.
From there, I dig into the deeper problem: a global, year-long catastrophic flood is actually a terrible way to generate billions of preserved footprints spread across multiple horizons and environments. I revisit earlier discussions about the sheer abundance of dinosaur trackways and show why they do not follow from flood geology’s expectations. Instead, I take you to present-day analogs—mudflats, salt flats, and shallow lakes in places like Death Valley—where our own footprints and boot prints can dry, harden, and be buried under new sediment, demonstrating exactly the sort of processes that preserve tracks over long periods of time.
Then I take you out to Red Gulch in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming. On the ground, I show how dinosaur tracks sit on a hard limestone surface associated with shallow marine and lagoonal conditions, complete with clams, gastropods, algal mats, ripple marks, and evidence of repeated drying and reflooding. We look at how different fossil assemblages stack vertically, recording shifts from very shallow lagoonal settings to somewhat deeper marine conditions over time. I explain how burrowing clams, algal layers, seasonal drying, and changing sea level all fit a long-term, dynamic environment—not a single, chaotic global catastrophe.
By the end, I argue that sites like Red Gulch make excellent sense on an ancient Earth with slowly changing coastal and lagoonal systems, but pose serious problems for young-earth flood geology. There is no mystery here for a deep-time perspective, but there is a major challenge for any model that tries to cram all these communities, surfaces, and trackways into a single year-long flood.
Chapters
00:00 – Why we’re talking about dinosaur footprints (again)
01:50 – Ken Ham, the BBC article, and “166 million years”
05:40 – Why a global flood can’t explain billions of fossil footprints
09:55 – Modern mudflats & Death Valley as trackway analogs
14:50 – Red Gulch dinosaur tracks in a “marine” setting
19:40 – Algal mats, clams, burrows & seasonal lagoon dynamics
24:00 – Why these trackways fit an ancient Earth, not flood geology
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joel Duff (aka Dr. Duff or The Natural Historian) resources:
About: joelduff.org
Blog: thenaturalhistorian.com
Twitter: twitter.com/NaturalHistoria
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thenaturalhi...
Photography "Portraits of Creation:" beechnutphotography.com
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