Did animals eat meat before the Flood?
Of course they did. That seems like an obvious answer. After all, I don't imagine T. rex sitting down to a salad every day. But sometimes the most obvious things are also kind of challenging to document. I knew the evidence was out there in museums and scientific literature, and I've long thought we needed a good review of the evidence that animals ate meat before the Flood.
What kind of evidence could we expect? How about bones with tooth marks on them? Even better: bones with tooth damage that has healed, indicating that there was some kind of attack while the animal was still alive. You could also look at stomach contents or even coprolite (fossil feces) contents. This stuff is known to most paleontologists, but putting together a single review of such evidence might not be all that interesting to those who don't believe that at least some fossils were deposited in the global Flood. (I could be wrong about that since I'm not really a paleontologist.)
So when I finally read through the latest Creation Matters (currently available to CRS members only), I was pleased to see the lead article by Andrew V. Ste. Marie addressed this very subject. I hesitate to get too enthusiastic about the paper since I'm not really qualified to evaluate it, but it looks to me like Ste. Marie has compiled a decent list of fossils that evidence pre-Flood carnivory, mostly documented from appropriate technical literature. It might not be exhaustive, but it's definitely a good start. So from a creation biology perspective, I think Ste. Marie's article is a great beginning to a very interesting and relevant question.
If you're a CRS member, you can read the article now, and if Mr. Ste. Marie ever happens to read this, something like this would make an excellent abstract for the CBS/CGS conference this summer. Send me an email, and we'll talk about it.
Ste. Marie. 2011. Did animals eat meat before the Flood? Creation Matters 16(1):1-4.
Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.
What kind of evidence could we expect? How about bones with tooth marks on them? Even better: bones with tooth damage that has healed, indicating that there was some kind of attack while the animal was still alive. You could also look at stomach contents or even coprolite (fossil feces) contents. This stuff is known to most paleontologists, but putting together a single review of such evidence might not be all that interesting to those who don't believe that at least some fossils were deposited in the global Flood. (I could be wrong about that since I'm not really a paleontologist.)
So when I finally read through the latest Creation Matters (currently available to CRS members only), I was pleased to see the lead article by Andrew V. Ste. Marie addressed this very subject. I hesitate to get too enthusiastic about the paper since I'm not really qualified to evaluate it, but it looks to me like Ste. Marie has compiled a decent list of fossils that evidence pre-Flood carnivory, mostly documented from appropriate technical literature. It might not be exhaustive, but it's definitely a good start. So from a creation biology perspective, I think Ste. Marie's article is a great beginning to a very interesting and relevant question.
If you're a CRS member, you can read the article now, and if Mr. Ste. Marie ever happens to read this, something like this would make an excellent abstract for the CBS/CGS conference this summer. Send me an email, and we'll talk about it.
Ste. Marie. 2011. Did animals eat meat before the Flood? Creation Matters 16(1):1-4.
Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.