Eggs, Nest and the 'Flood Theory'

Chinese dinosaur eggs
Dinosaur eggs - Nat'l Geographic
Dino Russ's Dino egg page
Dino eggs from South Korea
Dino eggs and nest - Emory University
Dino eggs and reproduction
Dino eggs and footprints - Sheffield University
Dino eggs - McClung Museum
Dino eggs - Nakasato dinosaur Center

According to the "Noah's flood theory" promoted by Answers in Genesis, virtually the entire sedimentary record originated as the result of a single, months-long catastropic flood. Though the text of Genesis states that the flood itself lasted approximately one year, but that by the end of the 40 days of rain, all the mountains were covered with water and "every living thing that moved on the earth perished--birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth" (7:17). This leads to the expectation that trackways and burrows, if they occur at all, should occur only in the lowest flood deposits. Contrary to this expectation, evidence of living, breathing terrestrial animals are found in strata from the Ordovician onward in the form of burrows (Retallack, 2001) and from the Devonian onward in the case of trackways (Lockley and Hunt, 1995). This directly contradicts the predictions of "flood geology." We would not expect dinosaurs or other terrestrial animals to be walking around underwater at the sediment-water interface, throughout the flood.

Dinosaur nests are another problem for the Noah's Flood" hypothesis. Obviously it is absurd to suppose that dinos swam beneath the flood waters to construct nests and deposit their eggs, often in carefully arranged patterns. [Eggs are found arranged in various patterns within the nest, including circular and spiral arrangments, erect and flat-lying. Individual clutches with up to 26 eggs are known. Some "nesting sites" are huge and laterally extensive.] Flood geologist Paul Garner has recognized the obvious contradiction here. He suggests that dino eggs and nests are all necessarily post-flood (Garner, 1996).

The appendix in Kenneth Carpenter's book, Eggs, Nest and Baby Dinosaurs, lists about 230 Mesozoic sites, scattered all over the world, containing eggs, nests, or baby dino skeletons. Some of the richest sites listed by Carpenter includes "Nemegt, Bayn Dzak, and Toogreek in Mongolia, Henan, Nanxiong, and Laiyang Provinces in China, the Kheda District in India, Tash-Kumyr in Kyrgyzstan, Aix-en Provence in southern France, and the recently discovered Auca Mahuevo, Argentina. Literally thousands of eggs and millions of eggshells are known from these sites. The richest of all may be Tash-Kumyr where there are over 629m (2,095') of egg-bearing strata spanning most of the Cretaceous" (p. 173-74).

Thousands of sauropod eggs have been discovered from a site at Auca Mahuevo, Argentina (Chiappe et al,, 2001). This site is interesting because several of the eggs are unhatched and preserve sauropod embryos. The eggs at this site are found at 4 or 5 seperate levels, and are preserved in a type of paleosol called a vertisol. Vertisols develop in clay soils subjected to repeated wetting and drying, which causes the clay soil to swell and then shrink, forming "slickensides" along sheer planes within the soil. Since vertisols only form in semiarid or seasonally arid climates, this too is inconsistent with the flood. In Mongolia an Oviraptor was preserved directly on top of a clutch of eggs, in what appears to be a "brooding" position.

Dinosaur eggs which have *hatched* demonstrate temporal breaks in sedimentation long enough to rule out the flood model all by themselves, because they show that the eggs were laid and subsequently remained unburied long enough for incubation to be completed. Carpenter notes:

"How dinosaurs hatched is, of course, not known with certainty. However, from hatched eggs we can assume that the hatchling pushed its way out of the egg much like a megapode bird. We know these eggs are hatched because the upper portion of the eggs is missing, the inside is filled with the same rock as surrounds the egg, and the mammillae are heavily cratered. The absence of eggshell within the egg within the egg shows that the eggshell exploded outward as the hatchling emerged; predation would have caused the eggshell to implode as the predator pushed its way into the egg, The opening of hatched dinosaur eggs is always on top, implying that the dinosaur hatchling pushed upward on its way out" (p. 214).

Incubation time in dinos

Obviously it cannot be known with certainty how long dinosaur incubation periods were. However, we can make some strong inferences by looking at incubation in birds and crocodiles, which, like dinos and pterosaurs, are part of the archosauria clade. See Dinosaur World at NC State University. Look about half-way down the page for info on dino incubation.

This page lists incubation periods for all known species of Crocodile, which generally are between about 40 and 100 days. Carpenter's book also discusses incubation in birds as a model for dinos. The incubation period in birds is strongly correlated with egg weight, although there are exceptions. Weight of dino eggs can be "guesstimated" from the egg volume, and again there are bound to be some margin of error. Assuming that a similar relationship between size/incubation period exists for avian-like dino eggs, Carpenter estimates incubation times for various egg types:

Oviraptor, and avian-like theropod, had an egg 18cmx6.5cm (Norell and others, 1995) with a volume of 388cm3 and a probable weight of about 423g. Using Figure 11.23, we can deduce that thge egg would take about 45 days to incubate. On the other hand, the giant egg Macroelongatoolithus, also belonging to an avianlike theropod based on the shell structure, is about 45cm x 15cm, has a volume of 5,164cm3, weighed about 5,268g, and took about 80 days to incubate" (p. 200).

References

Carpenter, K., 1999. Eggs, Nests, and Baby Dinosaurs. Indiana University Press, USA. 336p.

Chiappe, L., 2001. et al, Walking on Eggs. Scribner, 224p.

Garner, P. 1996. Where is the Flood/post-Flood boundary? Implications of dinosaur nests in the Mesozoic, Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 10, 101- 106

Lockley, M.G. and Hunt, A.P., 1995. Dinosaur Tracks and other fossil footprints of the Western United States.Columbia University Press, New York

Retallack, G.J.  2001.  Scoyenia burrows from Ordovician palaeosols of the Juniata Formation in Pennsylvania.  Palaeontology, 44:209-235