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Earth in Upheaval - Velikovsky
Chapter II
The Aquatic Graveyards
The Old Red Sandstone is regarded as one of the oldest strata with signs of extinct life in it. No animal life higher than fish is found there. Whatever the age of this formation, it carries the testimony and "a wonderful record of violent death falling at once, not on a few individuals, but on whole tribes."
In the late thirties of the last century Hugh Miller made the Old Red Sandstone in Scotland the special subject of his investigations. He observed: "The earth had already become a vast sepulchre, to a depth beneath the bed of the sea equal to at least twice the height of Ben Nevis over its surface." Ben Nevis in the Grampian Mountains is the highest peak in Great Britain, 4406 feet high. The stratum of the Old Red Sandstone is twice as thick (1.66 miles).
This formation presents the spectacle of an upheaval immobilized at a particular moment and petrified forever. Hugh Miller wrote:
"The first scene in [Shakespeare's] The Tempest opens amid the confusion and turmoil of the hurricane—amid thunders and lightnings, the roar of the wind, the shouts of the seamen, the rattling of cordage, and the wild dash of the billows. The history of the period represented by the Old Red Sandstone seems, in what now forms the northern half of Scotland, to have opened in a similar manner. . . . The vast space which now includes Orkney and Loch Ness, Dingwall and Gamrie (Gardenstown, East coast), and many a thousand square miles besides, was the scene of a shallow ocean, perplexed by powerful currents, and agitated by waves. A vast stratum of water-rolled pebbles, varying in depth from a hundred feet to a hundred yards, remains in a thousand different localities, to testify of the disturbing agencies of this time of commotion." Miller found that the hardest masses in the stratum—"porphyries of vitreous fracture that cut glass as readily as flint, and masses of quartz that strike fire quite as profusely from steel,—are yet polished and ground down into bullet-like forms. . . . And yet it is surely difficult to conceive how the bottom of any sea should have been so violently and so equally agitated for so greatly extended a space . . • and for a period so prolonged, that the entire area should have come to be covered with a stratum of rolled pebbles of almost every variety of ancient rock, fifteen stories' height in thickness." (Hugh Miller. The Old Red Sandstone (Boston, 1865; first published In England in 1841).
In the red sandstone an abundant aquatic fauna is embedded. The animals are in disturbed positions. At the period of the past when these formations were composed, "some terrible catastrophe involved in sudden destruction the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, contracted, curved; the tail in many instances is bent around to the head; the spines stick out; the fins arc spread to the full, as in fish that die in convulsions. The Pterichthys (an extinct fishlike animal with wlngllke projections and with the anterior of the body encased in bony plates) shows its arms extended at their stiffest angle, as if prepared for an enemy. The attitudes of all the ichthyolites [any fossil fish] on this platform are attitudes of fear, anger and pain. The remains, too, appear to have suffered nothing from the after-attacks of predaceous fishes; none such seem to have survived. The record is one of destruction at once widely spread and total. ..."
What agency of destruction could have accounted for "innumerable existences of an area perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent [being] annihilated at once"? "Conjecture lacks footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates in uncertainty over all the known phenomena of death," wrote Miller.
The ravages of no disease, however virulent, could explain some of the phenomena of this arena of death. Rarely does disease fall equally on many different genera at once, and never does it strike with instantaneous suddenness; yet in the ruins of this platform from ten to twelve distinct genera and many species were involved; and so suddenly did the agency perform its work that its victims were fixed in their first attitude of surprise and terror.
The area of the Old Red Sandstone investigated by Miller comprises one half of Scotland, from Loch Ness to the land's northern extremity and beyond to the Orkney Islands in the north. "A thousand different localities" disclose the same scene of destruction.
An identical picture can be found in many other places all around the world, in similar and dissimilar formations. Of Monte Bolca, near Verona in northern Italy, Buckland wrote: "The circumstances under which the fossil fishes are found at Monte Bolca seem to indicate that they perished suddenly. . . . The skeletons of these fish lie parallel to the laminae of the strata of the calcareous slate; they are always entire, and closely packed on one another. . . . All these fishes must have died suddenly . . . and have been speedily buried in the calcareous sediment then in the course of deposition. From the fact that certain individuals have even preserved traces of colour upon their skin, we are certain that they were entombed before decomposition of their soft parts had taken place.
The same author wrote about the fish deposits in the area of the Harz Mountains in Germany: "Another celebrated deposit of fossil fishes is that of the cupriferous slate surrounding the Harz. Many of the fishes of this slate at Mansfeld, Eisleben, etc., have a distorted attitude, which has often been assigned to writhing in the agonies of death. . . . As these fossil fishes maintain the attitude of the rigid stage immediately succeeding death, it follows that they were buried before
putrefaction had commenced, and apparently in the same bituminous mud, the influx of which had caused their destruction."
The story of agony and sudden death and immediate encasing is told by the red sandstone of Scotland; the limestone of Monte Bolca in Lombardy; the bituminous slate of Mansfeld in Thuringia; and also by the coal formation of Saarbrucken on the Saar, "the most celebrated deposits of fossil fishes in Europe"; the calcareous slate of Solenhofen; the blue slate of Glarus; the marlstone of Oensingen in Switzerland and of Aix-in-Provence, to mention only a few of the better-known sites in Europe.
In North America similar strata, "packed full of splendidly preserved fishes," are found in the black limestone of Ohio and Michigan, in the Green River bed of Arizona, the diatom beds of Lompoc, California, and in many other formations.
In cataclysms of early ages fishes died in agony; and the sand and the gravel of the upthrust sea bottom covered the aquatic graveyards.
Chapter II
The Aquatic Graveyards
The Old Red Sandstone is regarded as one of the oldest strata with signs of extinct life in it. No animal life higher than fish is found there. Whatever the age of this formation, it carries the testimony and "a wonderful record of violent death falling at once, not on a few individuals, but on whole tribes."
In the late thirties of the last century Hugh Miller made the Old Red Sandstone in Scotland the special subject of his investigations. He observed: "The earth had already become a vast sepulchre, to a depth beneath the bed of the sea equal to at least twice the height of Ben Nevis over its surface." Ben Nevis in the Grampian Mountains is the highest peak in Great Britain, 4406 feet high. The stratum of the Old Red Sandstone is twice as thick (1.66 miles).
This formation presents the spectacle of an upheaval immobilized at a particular moment and petrified forever. Hugh Miller wrote:
"The first scene in [Shakespeare's] The Tempest opens amid the confusion and turmoil of the hurricane—amid thunders and lightnings, the roar of the wind, the shouts of the seamen, the rattling of cordage, and the wild dash of the billows. The history of the period represented by the Old Red Sandstone seems, in what now forms the northern half of Scotland, to have opened in a similar manner. . . . The vast space which now includes Orkney and Loch Ness, Dingwall and Gamrie (Gardenstown, East coast), and many a thousand square miles besides, was the scene of a shallow ocean, perplexed by powerful currents, and agitated by waves. A vast stratum of water-rolled pebbles, varying in depth from a hundred feet to a hundred yards, remains in a thousand different localities, to testify of the disturbing agencies of this time of commotion." Miller found that the hardest masses in the stratum—"porphyries of vitreous fracture that cut glass as readily as flint, and masses of quartz that strike fire quite as profusely from steel,—are yet polished and ground down into bullet-like forms. . . . And yet it is surely difficult to conceive how the bottom of any sea should have been so violently and so equally agitated for so greatly extended a space . . • and for a period so prolonged, that the entire area should have come to be covered with a stratum of rolled pebbles of almost every variety of ancient rock, fifteen stories' height in thickness." (Hugh Miller. The Old Red Sandstone (Boston, 1865; first published In England in 1841).
In the red sandstone an abundant aquatic fauna is embedded. The animals are in disturbed positions. At the period of the past when these formations were composed, "some terrible catastrophe involved in sudden destruction the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, contracted, curved; the tail in many instances is bent around to the head; the spines stick out; the fins arc spread to the full, as in fish that die in convulsions. The Pterichthys (an extinct fishlike animal with wlngllke projections and with the anterior of the body encased in bony plates) shows its arms extended at their stiffest angle, as if prepared for an enemy. The attitudes of all the ichthyolites [any fossil fish] on this platform are attitudes of fear, anger and pain. The remains, too, appear to have suffered nothing from the after-attacks of predaceous fishes; none such seem to have survived. The record is one of destruction at once widely spread and total. ..."
What agency of destruction could have accounted for "innumerable existences of an area perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent [being] annihilated at once"? "Conjecture lacks footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates in uncertainty over all the known phenomena of death," wrote Miller.
The ravages of no disease, however virulent, could explain some of the phenomena of this arena of death. Rarely does disease fall equally on many different genera at once, and never does it strike with instantaneous suddenness; yet in the ruins of this platform from ten to twelve distinct genera and many species were involved; and so suddenly did the agency perform its work that its victims were fixed in their first attitude of surprise and terror.
The area of the Old Red Sandstone investigated by Miller comprises one half of Scotland, from Loch Ness to the land's northern extremity and beyond to the Orkney Islands in the north. "A thousand different localities" disclose the same scene of destruction.
An identical picture can be found in many other places all around the world, in similar and dissimilar formations. Of Monte Bolca, near Verona in northern Italy, Buckland wrote: "The circumstances under which the fossil fishes are found at Monte Bolca seem to indicate that they perished suddenly. . . . The skeletons of these fish lie parallel to the laminae of the strata of the calcareous slate; they are always entire, and closely packed on one another. . . . All these fishes must have died suddenly . . . and have been speedily buried in the calcareous sediment then in the course of deposition. From the fact that certain individuals have even preserved traces of colour upon their skin, we are certain that they were entombed before decomposition of their soft parts had taken place.
The same author wrote about the fish deposits in the area of the Harz Mountains in Germany: "Another celebrated deposit of fossil fishes is that of the cupriferous slate surrounding the Harz. Many of the fishes of this slate at Mansfeld, Eisleben, etc., have a distorted attitude, which has often been assigned to writhing in the agonies of death. . . . As these fossil fishes maintain the attitude of the rigid stage immediately succeeding death, it follows that they were buried before
putrefaction had commenced, and apparently in the same bituminous mud, the influx of which had caused their destruction."
The story of agony and sudden death and immediate encasing is told by the red sandstone of Scotland; the limestone of Monte Bolca in Lombardy; the bituminous slate of Mansfeld in Thuringia; and also by the coal formation of Saarbrucken on the Saar, "the most celebrated deposits of fossil fishes in Europe"; the calcareous slate of Solenhofen; the blue slate of Glarus; the marlstone of Oensingen in Switzerland and of Aix-in-Provence, to mention only a few of the better-known sites in Europe.
In North America similar strata, "packed full of splendidly preserved fishes," are found in the black limestone of Ohio and Michigan, in the Green River bed of Arizona, the diatom beds of Lompoc, California, and in many other formations.
In cataclysms of early ages fishes died in agony; and the sand and the gravel of the upthrust sea bottom covered the aquatic graveyards.
