Many have heard about polystrate tree fossils, the thousands of trunks found standing upright through multiple rock layers. (Poly means many, strata means geological layer). Many polystrate fossils (see the list below) are claimed to have been buried in layers that are alleged to typically form over many thousands or even a million years. Areas noted for polystrate tree fossils include: - Joggins in Nova Scotia - Sydney, Nova Scotia (260 miles from Joggins) - Lancashire in England - Germany's Ruhr region - Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone - St. Etienne in France - Etc. as in Eastern U.S., France, Germany, Australia. Google ranks us #1 in searches for: list of polystrate fossils. Trees form one kind of polystrate fossil, and this list, as we will see, is not a list just of polystrate fossils, but it's a list of the kinds of polystrate fossils that exist. Regarding the formation of any kind of polystrate, of course, dead organisms cannot stand for thousands of years waiting to be buried. And characteristically such fossils, as with polystrates trees, show no greater erosion at their top than at their base. So a single polystrate fossil compresses the time it took to lay down its burial strata into a relative brief period. * Textbooks Skip Polystrates: Creationists claim that geology textbooks tend to omit any discussion at all of polystrate fossils. For example, a 2019 list of the top ten current geology textbooks includes Geology: A Complete Introduction. Yet a Google Books search reveals, "No results found in this book for polystrate." And there's The Changing Earth: Exploring Geology and Evolution published by Thomson Learning with offices in Australia, Canada, Spain, the UK, the U.S., Singapore, and Mexico. "No results found in this book for polystrate." Then there's Physical Geology 16th edition published by McGraw-Hill. "From inside the book, Your search - polystrate - did not match any documents." Those titles are searchable online. It appears there is a lack of interest in polystrate fossils among old-earth geologists. Just like with dinosaur soft tissue, which is the greatest discovery in the history of paleontology, scientists and the science media show a lack of interest in polystrates and what those fossils can tell us about the past. So, because evolutionists lack the scientific curiosity, and undoubtedly that's out of a fear of what polystrate fossils may reveal about the geologic record, it takes creationists to explore them, and explore them we will! * Evolutionary Explanations for Polystrates: Because geology textbooks ignore polystrate fossils, evolutionary explanations have to gleaned from anti-creation sources and from mainstream geology explanations for strata that contain polystrates. So the old-earth explanations include: EE1 Rapid Sedimentation: The layers burying a polystrate are the exceptions, being deposited during a "rapid rate of sedimentation" (e.g., river flooding burying growing trees; see this at NCSE, the site of Bob's opponent Eugenie Scott). That's the correct explanation, except that evolutionists refuse then to follow those layers to see the extent of the rapid deposition, and thus they close their eyes to the verifiable rapid speed of deposition of the geologic column generally! EE2 Persistent Trees: As at Yellowstone's Specimen Ridge where petrified trees stand through multiple strata that were long claimed to make up 50 successive forests, vertically, each growing and dying out, one on top of another, fifty times. Even though the Nat'l Park Service has removed the exhibit that makes that false claim, nonetheless it shows an inherent polystrate explanation, that trees can remain vertically long enough for the passage for sufficient geologic time to see the rise and demise of multiple layers successive forests. EE3 Persistent Organisms with Rapid Sedimentation: A combination of the first two explanation, with trees, for example, buried by fast sedimentation, followed by a layer of slow sedi
