Fossils found at Geebung, Australia, were buried by Noah’s Flood

Overpass construction at Geebung, a northern Brisbane suburb, has dug up fossils of crocodiles, frogs, fish, shells and plants, buried in the last stages of Noah’s Flood, about 4,500 years ago.¹

A piling rig recovered the fossils from a layer of oil shale some 15 m underground and dumped them in a spoil heap, where they were noticed.

The fossils were within an area of sedimentary deposits that geologists have called the Petrie Formation. These cover an area of some 50 km² north of the mouth of the Brisbane River.

The Petrie Formation is one of a number of Tertiary basins in the Brisbane area, which include the Booval and Oxley Groups south of the Brisbane River. These basins consist of a mixture of different types of rock, including mudstone, shale, and sandstone, as well as limestone and brown coal.² The basins also contain basalt flows that were deposited from volcanoes.

Crocodile remains have long been known from the Oxley Group sediments, which also contain fossils of turtles, fish, branchiopods (crustaceans), freshwater mussels, and leaves of flowering plants.² These basins are some of the last sedimentary structures to be deposited in the area. They sit on top of some enormous geological structures, such as the sediments of the Great Artesian Basins, the Ipswich Basin, and the folded rocks of the New England Fold Belt.

Because these basins are so late in the geological sequence, and because of the sorts of fossils found in them, geologists have assigned them to the Lower Tertiary (this is now known as the Paleogene). This is why the fossils were said to be 50 million years old, according to mainstream geological philosophy. In other words, just because they dug the fossils out of the sediments of the Petrie Formation they said the fossils were 50 million years old.

However, the geology of eastern Australia is well explained by the events of Noah’s Flood. Although this event is ignored by mainstream geologists there is much evidence that the Flood was a real event in recent earth history. Various geological units of eastern Australia have already been classified within this event.

The rocks comprising the New England Fold belt have been determined to have formed early in the first ‘half’ of the Flood when the waters were rising, during the Ascending phase.³ The rocks comprising the Great Artesian Basin were found to have been deposited later in the first ‘half’ of the Flood, as the waters were reaching their peak.⁴ The entire geological history of South-east Queensland has been interpreted within this geological framework.⁵

The Petrie Formation was deposited very late in the Flood for the following reasons:

1. The Petrie Formation overlies the rocks of the New England Fold Belt.⁶ So it is younger than these.

2. The Petrie Formation overlies the rocks of the Great Artesian Basin.⁷ So is also younger than these.

3. The underlying rocks (New England Fold Belt and the Great Artesian Basin) have been greatly eroded. This occurred as the waters of Noah’s Flood were receding from the continent of Australia as the ocean basins opened up and deepened. In other words, the Petrie Formation was deposited after most of the floodwaters had receded.

4. The Petrie Formation and the associated Oxley and Booval Groups are quite extensive. It is thought that the Petrie Formation is continuous with the Oxley Group under the Brisbane River.² In other words, although the area covered is much smaller than the area of the early Flood sediments, it is still quite large geographically compared with what we see happening in the modern world. This suggests that deposition was not post-Flood but occurred during the Flood when there was much more water involved.

5. The sediments are estimated to be up to 320 m thick as estimated from composite sections.² This is thick, compared with modern sediments, suggesting they were not deposited post-Flood but during the Flood.

6. The sediments tend to sit at higher elevations. They have been significantly eroded since deposition and the present drainage follows the pattern set up by this erosion. Such erosion is not expected by the normal erosive processes we see happening after the Flood. The erosion suggests there was more water involved, and points to the late state of the Flood.

7. Much organic material is present in the sediments in the form of brown coal and oil shale, indicating contemporaneous deposition of vegetation and sediment. The Flood ripped up the pre-Flood vegetation and buried much of it to form vast coal deposits. The presence of this brown coal and oil shale suggests that deposition occurred during the Flood.

So the fossils found at Geebung were buried in the late stages of Noah’s Flood after the majority of water had already drained from the continent of Australia. It is instructive to read this careful record that we have of what happened on the earth in those months as the water was draining from the Geebung area north of Brisbane some 4,500 years ago:

After forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth.

Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find no place to set its feet because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.

By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry. (Genesis 8:6–14)

The latest fossils discovered at Geebung provide more evidence for the events of Noah’s Flood. The remains of the crocodiles, frogs, fish, shells and plants, were buried during its final stages—the Dispersive phase after most of the floodwaters had drained from the earth. They were deposited after the really energetic phase that eroded the present landscapes had passed. These sediments were deposited in large bodies of water that quickly filled with sediment deposited from large rivers draining the last water from the global Flood. These sediments were then eroded as by those large-volume water flows as the sea level continued to fall.

References and Notes

1. Ironside, R., Construction work in Brisbane suburb Geebung unearths fossils of 50-million year-old crocodiles, fish and plants, The Courier-Mail, July 16, 2013.

2. Cranfield, L.C., Schwarzbock, H., and Day, R.W., Geology of the Ipswich and Brisbane 1:250000 Sheet Areas, Report No. 95, Geological Survey of Queensland, Table 3, p.68, 1976.

3. Walker, T.B., The basement rocks of the Brisbane area, Australia: Where do they fit in the creation model? Journal of Creation 10(2):241–257, 1996. In this paper application of classification criteria eliminated all phases in the biblical model except the Eruptive and Ascending phases. The paper concludes by classifying the basement rocks as Eruptive, but I would now consider they should be assigned to the Ascending phase.

4. Walker, T.B., The Great Artesian Basin, Australia, Journal of Creation 10(3):379–390, 1996;

5. Walker, T., The Geological History of the Brisbane area, Australia, from a biblical Flood perspective, 2005.

6. Ref. 2. The Petrie Formation overlies the Palaeozoic Rocksberg Greenstone, Bunya Phyllite, and Neranleigh-Fernvale Beds.

7. Ref. 2. The Petrie Formation overlies the Triassic to Jurassic Woogaroo Subgroup and the Jurassic Marburg formation.