The Pre-Flood Gulf Coast

© Robert E. Gentet 2010

The shorelines of the oceans of the pre-Flood world were not as fixed as they are today. Throughout pre-Flood time, sea levels would rise and then fall, creating transgressions of the sea upon limited areas of the ancient world. At the time the dinosaur footprints were made that are now preserved in the park, an ancestral gulf coast extended much further inland from the present Gulf of Mexico.

Later an extension of the shoreline cut the North American continent into two parts. An extension of a northern sea came south and joined the rising waters of the gulf coast. This transcontinental north/south inland sea produced spectacular Cretaceous sea fossils throughout central North America. For just one example, Elasmosaurus, a large 50 foot sea reptile, was found well preserved in the Niobrara chalk beds in Western Kansas.

Geologic evidence indicates that this inland sea had already retreated before the start of the universal Flood. The rocks bearing the fossils of this inland sea show erosion due to the Flood waters. Flood waters eroded sediment off the continent and deposited them in the ancestral gulf. The continent was extended over a hundred miles south of the ancestral gulf shore to its present position due to depositions during the Flood and subsequent post-Flood events.