Part of the fun of attending the CRS Conference in St. Louis, Missouri, at the end of July 2025 was participating in the pre-conference geology workshop, which included a morning field trip before the temperature became too hot (highs of 35°C every day of the conference). As a Canadian, I joked that I could finally thaw out completely.
The field trip started at the Mastodon State Historic Site and was led by Zachary Klein, from the Missouri Association for Creation (MAC). The site consists of 418 acres containing the Kimmswick Bone Bed, named for its proximity to the town of Kimmswick, where many Ice Age fossils have been found. Albert C. Koch, an entrepreneur and St. Louis museum owner, excavated some bones along Rock Creek. He thought he had discovered something new and named it the Missouri Leviathan (jennifer.sieg 2011). In fact, he had constructed a composite skeleton from bones of several different individuals. He added extra vertebrae and ribs, inserted pieces of wood between the vertebrae, and positioned the tusks so that they pointed sideways. The aim was to exaggerate the animal’s size as much as possible, creating something twice the size of an ordinary mastodon, which was approximately the size of an Asian elephant. Then he took it on tour around North America and even over to Europe (Lotzof, n.d.).
At the end of his European tour, Koch displayed his monster in an exhibition hall in London, England, where one of the visitors was Richard Owen. At the time, Owen was the Superintendent of Natural History at the British Museum. He purchased the fossils from Koch in 1844. Then he took the skeleton apart and rearticulated the bones in an anatomically accurate pose, making it the first accurately mounted mastodon skeleton anywhere. The Missouri Leviathan is still on display at the British Museum in Hintze Hall, much as Owen had assembled it roughly 180 years ago (Lotzof, n.d.).
Secular scientists believe there were as many as 50 Ice Ages, but they have trouble explaining how there could have been both lower temperatures and higher evaporation/precipitation at the same time. Creation scientists, on the other hand, have proposed that the global upheaval of the Genesis Flood was its cause. Genesis 7:11 says that “all the fountains of the great deep burst forth”. Underwater volcanoes would have warmed the oceans substantially, resulting in increased evaporation, which later became increased precipitation on the continents. Volcanic aerosols (tiny particles) from both submarine and terrestrial volcanoes would have reflected some of the sun’s light back into space, cooling the continents enough that the heavy snow during the winter didn’t have enough time to melt in the summer and accumulated as massive ice sheets (Hebert 2021).
The second stop on the field trip was at a road cut with an outcrop of the Kimmswick Nautiloid Bed (KNB). The KNB is part of a Late Ordovician medium- to coarse-grained limestone unit called the Kimmswick Formation. Both of these are also named for their proximity to the town of Kimmswick, but they are not associated with the Kimmswick Bone Bed. Secular scientists generally believe the Kimmswick Formation to have been deposited in a calm environment. However, it ranges from 10 to 30 meters thick and is described as having bedding that varies from massive to cross-bedded (Klein 2023). Massive bedding shows no visible internal layering or structure, suggesting rapid deposition or post-depositional disturbance, such as burrowing by animals or chemical alteration. This would mean that the sediment accumulated suddenly, burying creatures quickly and uniformly, as is believed to have happened during the Flood. Cross-bedding occurs where sediment is deposited by moving water or wind in thin layers at an angle to the bedding plane. The angle and orientation of the cross-beds can be used to try to figure out which way the current was moving. The Kimmswick Formation contains many fossils, some of which can be seen in the road cut and in rocks along the road where we stopped.
The KNB has an abundance of straight-shelled cephalopods called orthocones, which are concentrated in specific beds, rather than being distributed throughout the Kimmswick Formation (Klein 2023). Orthocones are similar to the nautilus living in the ocean today, but they have straight shells that resemble unicorn horns. In calm water, orthocones would be buried so they point randomly with no preferred direction. However, in a current, the tips of their shells would mainly point upstream, while a few will be oriented perpendicular to the current. A sample of the orientations of these fossils has been found to indicate that they were buried in a strong current, challenging the secular paradigm, but more research is needed (Klein 2023).
Our final stop on the field trip was at Blackburn Park in Pacific, Missouri. The park the field trip went to sits on a bluff overlooking Route 66 (now Interstate 44), on top of the St. Peter Sandstone, a Middle Ordovician sandstone layer made of pure quartz covering much of North America that makes up the base of the Tippecanoe Megasequence (Morris 2011).
Megasequences are groupings of sedimentary rock layers with an erosional surface called an unconformity at the top and bottom that can be traced across continents. A megasequence often starts with a sandstone layer at the bottom. The grain size becomes progressively smaller as you go up through the sequence. On top of the sandstone is usually a layer of shale or siltstone, made of really tiny particles, and then the layer on top of that tends to be made up of particles precipitated out of solution, such as limestone (Clarey 2020).
An amazing feature of the St. Peter Sandstone, which is 80 to 100 feet thick on average (Davis 2014), is that the unconformity below it is almost perfectly flat. Dr. John Morris compared this to “a sheet of paper 0.1 millimeters thick measuring 1 kilometer by 0.6 kilometer draped across a surface flattened with extreme care.” The uniformitarian explanation is that the sand was deposited during an ocean transgression (when the sea level rose and the ocean supposedly covered part of the continent) over millions of years. However, the only way for this unconformity to be so flat is by “sheet erosion,” which is when water flows rapidly across a wide area at an equal depth. This is believed to have happened as enormous tsunamis set off by “the fountains of the great deep” breaking open pushed the ocean onto land. Erosional forces today, such as rivers, leave uneven surfaces with valleys and gulleys (Morris 2011).
Below Blackburn Park are old sandstone mines. This is because the St. Peter Sandstone is 99.44% silica, making it suitable for glass manufacturing, which has been a local industry since the late 19th century. The sandstone crumbles easily when freshly exposed, but weathering hardens it, making it tough and durable. The hardened surface is called a patina, and it can protect the softer rock underneath. Another feature of the St. Peter Sandstone is that it contains almost no fossils. It is also quite uniform, with no bedding (Abeln 2009), and is described as massive with some localized cross-bedding (Davis 2014), which was explained earlier as evidence that it was deposited quickly during the Flood.
The field trip was a fast run through some interesting geological areas. I wish I had planned on staying a couple of extra days so I could go back and hike the trails at Mastodon State Historic Site and Blackburn Park.
References
Abeln, Mark Scott. 2009. “St. Peter’s Sandstone.” Rome of the West, February 14. http://www.romeofthewest.com/2009/02/st-peters-sandstone.html.
Davis, J.G. 2014. “St. Peter Sandstone Mineral Resource Evaluation, Missouri, USA.” In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Forum on the Geology of Industrial Minerals. Arizona Geological Survey Special Paper 9. https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/629315.
Hebert, Jake. 2021. The Ice Age and Climate Change: A Creation Perspective. Institute for Creation Research.
jennifer.sieg. 2011. “Historic Site HIstory.” Text. February 6. https://mostateparks.com/page/54983/historic-site-history.
Klein, Zachary. 2023. “Orthocone Cephalopods as Paleocurrent Indicators in the Ordovician Kimmswick Formation of Northeastern Missouri.” Article Section. The Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9: 680–81. https://doi.org/10.15385/jpicc.2023.9.1.74.
Lotzof, Kerry. n.d. “Missouri Leviathan: The Making of an American Mastodon | Natural History Museum.” Accessed October 10, 2025. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-making-of-an-american-mastodon.html.
Morris, John D. 2011. “The St. Peter Sandstone.” ICR.Org, December 29. https://www.icr.org/article/st-peter-sandstone.
Andrea Reitan
August 2026
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Part of the fun of attending the CRS Conference in St. Louis, Missouri, at the end of July 2025 was participating in the pre-conference geology workshop, which included a morning field trip before the temperature became too hot (highs of 35°C every day of the conference). As a Canadian, I joked that I could finally thaw out completely.
The field trip started at the Mastodon State Historic Site and was led by Zachary Klein, from the Missouri Association for Creation (MAC). The site consists of 418 acres containing the Kimmswick Bone Bed, named for its proximity to the town of Kimmswick, where many Ice Age fossils have been found. Albert C. Koch, an entrepreneur and St. Louis museum owner, excavated some bones along Rock Creek. He thought he had discovered something new and named it the Missouri Leviathan (jennifer.sieg 2011). In fact, he had constructed a composite skeleton from bones of several different individuals. He added extra vertebrae and ribs, inserted pieces of wood between the vertebrae, and positioned the tusks so that they pointed sideways. The aim was to exaggerate the animal’s size as much as possible, creating something twice the size of an ordinary mastodon, which was approximately the size of an Asian elephant. Then he took it on tour around North America and even over to Europe (Lotzof, n.d.).
At the end of his European tour, Koch displayed his monster in an exhibition hall in London, England, where one of the visitors was Richard Owen. At the time, Owen was the Superintendent of Natural History at the British Museum. He purchased the fossils from Koch in 1844. Then he took the skeleton apart and rearticulated the bones in an anatomically accurate pose, making it the first accurately mounted mastodon skeleton anywhere. The Missouri Leviathan is still on display at the British Museum in Hintze Hall, much as Owen had assembled it roughly 180 years ago (Lotzof, n.d.).
Secular scientists believe there were as many as 50 Ice Ages, but they have trouble explaining how there could have been both lower temperatures and higher evaporation/precipitation at the same time. Creation scientists, on the other hand, have proposed that the global upheaval of the Genesis Flood was its cause. Genesis 7:11 says that “all the fountains of the great deep burst forth”. Underwater volcanoes would have warmed the oceans substantially, resulting in increased evaporation, which later became increased precipitation on the continents. Volcanic aerosols (tiny particles) from both submarine and terrestrial volcanoes would have reflected some of the sun’s light back into space, cooling the continents enough that the heavy snow during the winter didn’t have enough time to melt in the summer and accumulated as massive ice sheets (Hebert 2021).
The second stop on the field trip was at a road cut with an outcrop of the Kimmswick Nautiloid Bed (KNB). The KNB is part of a Late Ordovician medium- to coarse-grained limestone unit called the Kimmswick Formation. Both of these are also named for their proximity to the town of Kimmswick, but they are not associated with the Kimmswick Bone Bed. Secular scientists generally believe the Kimmswick Formation to have been deposited in a calm environment. However, it ranges from 10 to 30 meters thick and is described as having bedding that varies from massive to cross-bedded (Klein 2023). Massive bedding shows no visible internal layering or structure, suggesting rapid deposition or post-depositional disturbance, such as burrowing by animals or chemical alteration. This would mean that the sediment accumulated suddenly, burying creatures quickly and uniformly, as is believed to have happened during the Flood. Cross-bedding occurs where sediment is deposited by moving water or wind in thin layers at an angle to the bedding plane. The angle and orientation of the cross-beds can be used to try to figure out which way the current was moving. The Kimmswick Formation contains many fossils, some of which can be seen in the road cut and in rocks along the road where we stopped.
The KNB has an abundance of straight-shelled cephalopods called orthocones, which are concentrated in specific beds, rather than being distributed throughout the Kimmswick Formation (Klein 2023). Orthocones are similar to the nautilus living in the ocean today, but they have straight shells that resemble unicorn horns. In calm water, orthocones would be buried so they point randomly with no preferred direction. However, in a current, the tips of their shells would mainly point upstream, while a few will be oriented perpendicular to the current. A sample of the orientations of these fossils has been found to indicate that they were buried in a strong current, challenging the secular paradigm, but more research is needed (Klein 2023).
Our final stop on the field trip was at Blackburn Park in Pacific, Missouri. The park the field trip went to sits on a bluff overlooking Route 66 (now Interstate 44), on top of the St. Peter Sandstone, a Middle Ordovician sandstone layer made of pure quartz covering much of North America that makes up the base of the Tippecanoe Megasequence (Morris 2011).
Megasequences are groupings of sedimentary rock layers with an erosional surface called an unconformity at the top and bottom that can be traced across continents. A megasequence often starts with a sandstone layer at the bottom. The grain size becomes progressively smaller as you go up through the sequence. On top of the sandstone is usually a layer of shale or siltstone, made of really tiny particles, and then the layer on top of that tends to be made up of particles precipitated out of solution, such as limestone (Clarey 2020).
An amazing feature of the St. Peter Sandstone, which is 80 to 100 feet thick on average (Davis 2014), is that the unconformity below it is almost perfectly flat. Dr. John Morris compared this to “a sheet of paper 0.1 millimeters thick measuring 1 kilometer by 0.6 kilometer draped across a surface flattened with extreme care.” The uniformitarian explanation is that the sand was deposited during an ocean transgression (when the sea level rose and the ocean supposedly covered part of the continent) over millions of years. However, the only way for this unconformity to be so flat is by “sheet erosion,” which is when water flows rapidly across a wide area at an equal depth. This is believed to have happened as enormous tsunamis set off by “the fountains of the great deep” breaking open pushed the ocean onto land. Erosional forces today, such as rivers, leave uneven surfaces with valleys and gulleys (Morris 2011).
Below Blackburn Park are old sandstone mines. This is because the St. Peter Sandstone is 99.44% silica, making it suitable for glass manufacturing, which has been a local industry since the late 19th century. The sandstone crumbles easily when freshly exposed, but weathering hardens it, making it tough and durable. The hardened surface is called a patina, and it can protect the softer rock underneath. Another feature of the St. Peter Sandstone is that it contains almost no fossils. It is also quite uniform, with no bedding (Abeln 2009), and is described as massive with some localized cross-bedding (Davis 2014), which was explained earlier as evidence that it was deposited quickly during the Flood.
The field trip was a fast run through some interesting geological areas. I wish I had planned on staying a couple of extra days so I could go back and hike the trails at Mastodon State Historic Site and Blackburn Park.
References
Abeln, Mark Scott. 2009. “St. Peter’s Sandstone.” Rome of the West, February 14. http://www.romeofthewest.com/2009/02/st-peters-sandstone.html.
Davis, J.G. 2014. “St. Peter Sandstone Mineral Resource Evaluation, Missouri, USA.” In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Forum on the Geology of Industrial Minerals. Arizona Geological Survey Special Paper 9. https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/629315.
Hebert, Jake. 2021. The Ice Age and Climate Change: A Creation Perspective. Institute for Creation Research.
jennifer.sieg. 2011. “Historic Site HIstory.” Text. February 6. https://mostateparks.com/page/54983/historic-site-history.
Klein, Zachary. 2023. “Orthocone Cephalopods as Paleocurrent Indicators in the Ordovician Kimmswick Formation of Northeastern Missouri.” Article Section. The Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9: 680–81. https://doi.org/10.15385/jpicc.2023.9.1.74.
Lotzof, Kerry. n.d. “Missouri Leviathan: The Making of an American Mastodon | Natural History Museum.” Accessed October 10, 2025. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-making-of-an-american-mastodon.html.
Morris, John D. 2011. “The St. Peter Sandstone.” ICR.Org, December 29. https://www.icr.org/article/st-peter-sandstone.
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Part of the fun of attending the CRS Conference in St. Louis, Missouri, at the end of July 2025 was participating in the pre-conference geology workshop, which included a morning field trip before the temperature became too hot (highs of 35°C every day of the conference). As a Canadian, I joked that I could finally thaw out completely.
The field trip started at the Mastodon State Historic Site and was led by Zachary Klein, from the Missouri Association for Creation (MAC). The site consists of 418 acres containing the Kimmswick Bone Bed, named for its proximity to the town of Kimmswick, where many Ice Age fossils have been found. Albert C. Koch, an entrepreneur and St. Louis museum owner, excavated some bones along Rock Creek. He thought he had discovered something new and named it the Missouri Leviathan (jennifer.sieg 2011). In fact, he had constructed a composite skeleton from bones of several different individuals. He added extra vertebrae and ribs, inserted pieces of wood between the vertebrae, and positioned the tusks so that they pointed sideways. The aim was to exaggerate the animal’s size as much as possible, creating something twice the size of an ordinary mastodon, which was approximately the size of an Asian elephant. Then he took it on tour around North America and even over to Europe (Lotzof, n.d.).
At the end of his European tour, Koch displayed his monster in an exhibition hall in London, England, where one of the visitors was Richard Owen. At the time, Owen was the Superintendent of Natural History at the British Museum. He purchased the fossils from Koch in 1844. Then he took the skeleton apart and rearticulated the bones in an anatomically accurate pose, making it the first accurately mounted mastodon skeleton anywhere. The Missouri Leviathan is still on display at the British Museum in Hintze Hall, much as Owen had assembled it roughly 180 years ago (Lotzof, n.d.).
Secular scientists believe there were as many as 50 Ice Ages, but they have trouble explaining how there could have been both lower temperatures and higher evaporation/precipitation at the same time. Creation scientists, on the other hand, have proposed that the global upheaval of the Genesis Flood was its cause. Genesis 7:11 says that “all the fountains of the great deep burst forth”. Underwater volcanoes would have warmed the oceans substantially, resulting in increased evaporation, which later became increased precipitation on the continents. Volcanic aerosols (tiny particles) from both submarine and terrestrial volcanoes would have reflected some of the sun’s light back into space, cooling the continents enough that the heavy snow during the winter didn’t have enough time to melt in the summer and accumulated as massive ice sheets (Hebert 2021).
The second stop on the field trip was at a road cut with an outcrop of the Kimmswick Nautiloid Bed (KNB). The KNB is part of a Late Ordovician medium- to coarse-grained limestone unit called the Kimmswick Formation. Both of these are also named for their proximity to the town of Kimmswick, but they are not associated with the Kimmswick Bone Bed. Secular scientists generally believe the Kimmswick Formation to have been deposited in a calm environment. However, it ranges from 10 to 30 meters thick and is described as having bedding that varies from massive to cross-bedded (Klein 2023). Massive bedding shows no visible internal layering or structure, suggesting rapid deposition or post-depositional disturbance, such as burrowing by animals or chemical alteration. This would mean that the sediment accumulated suddenly, burying creatures quickly and uniformly, as is believed to have happened during the Flood. Cross-bedding occurs where sediment is deposited by moving water or wind in thin layers at an angle to the bedding plane. The angle and orientation of the cross-beds can be used to try to figure out which way the current was moving. The Kimmswick Formation contains many fossils, some of which can be seen in the road cut and in rocks along the road where we stopped.
The KNB has an abundance of straight-shelled cephalopods called orthocones, which are concentrated in specific beds, rather than being distributed throughout the Kimmswick Formation (Klein 2023). Orthocones are similar to the nautilus living in the ocean today, but they have straight shells that resemble unicorn horns. In calm water, orthocones would be buried so they point randomly with no preferred direction. However, in a current, the tips of their shells would mainly point upstream, while a few will be oriented perpendicular to the current. A sample of the orientations of these fossils has been found to indicate that they were buried in a strong current, challenging the secular paradigm, but more research is needed (Klein 2023).
Our final stop on the field trip was at Blackburn Park in Pacific, Missouri. The park the field trip went to sits on a bluff overlooking Route 66 (now Interstate 44), on top of the St. Peter Sandstone, a Middle Ordovician sandstone layer made of pure quartz covering much of North America that makes up the base of the Tippecanoe Megasequence (Morris 2011).
Megasequences are groupings of sedimentary rock layers with an erosional surface called an unconformity at the top and bottom that can be traced across continents. A megasequence often starts with a sandstone layer at the bottom. The grain size becomes progressively smaller as you go up through the sequence. On top of the sandstone is usually a layer of shale or siltstone, made of really tiny particles, and then the layer on top of that tends to be made up of particles precipitated out of solution, such as limestone (Clarey 2020).
An amazing feature of the St. Peter Sandstone, which is 80 to 100 feet thick on average (Davis 2014), is that the unconformity below it is almost perfectly flat. Dr. John Morris compared this to “a sheet of paper 0.1 millimeters thick measuring 1 kilometer by 0.6 kilometer draped across a surface flattened with extreme care.” The uniformitarian explanation is that the sand was deposited during an ocean transgression (when the sea level rose and the ocean supposedly covered part of the continent) over millions of years. However, the only way for this unconformity to be so flat is by “sheet erosion,” which is when water flows rapidly across a wide area at an equal depth. This is believed to have happened as enormous tsunamis set off by “the fountains of the great deep” breaking open pushed the ocean onto land. Erosional forces today, such as rivers, leave uneven surfaces with valleys and gulleys (Morris 2011).
Below Blackburn Park are old sandstone mines. This is because the St. Peter Sandstone is 99.44% silica, making it suitable for glass manufacturing, which has been a local industry since the late 19th century. The sandstone crumbles easily when freshly exposed, but weathering hardens it, making it tough and durable. The hardened surface is called a patina, and it can protect the softer rock underneath. Another feature of the St. Peter Sandstone is that it contains almost no fossils. It is also quite uniform, with no bedding (Abeln 2009), and is described as massive with some localized cross-bedding (Davis 2014), which was explained earlier as evidence that it was deposited quickly during the Flood.
The field trip was a fast run through some interesting geological areas. I wish I had planned on staying a couple of extra days so I could go back and hike the trails at Mastodon State Historic Site and Blackburn Park.
References
Abeln, Mark Scott. 2009. “St. Peter’s Sandstone.” Rome of the West, February 14. http://www.romeofthewest.com/2009/02/st-peters-sandstone.html.
Davis, J.G. 2014. “St. Peter Sandstone Mineral Resource Evaluation, Missouri, USA.” In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Forum on the Geology of Industrial Minerals. Arizona Geological Survey Special Paper 9. https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/629315.
Hebert, Jake. 2021. The Ice Age and Climate Change: A Creation Perspective. Institute for Creation Research.
jennifer.sieg. 2011. “Historic Site HIstory.” Text. February 6. https://mostateparks.com/page/54983/historic-site-history.
Klein, Zachary. 2023. “Orthocone Cephalopods as Paleocurrent Indicators in the Ordovician Kimmswick Formation of Northeastern Missouri.” Article Section. The Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9: 680–81. https://doi.org/10.15385/jpicc.2023.9.1.74.
Lotzof, Kerry. n.d. “Missouri Leviathan: The Making of an American Mastodon | Natural History Museum.” Accessed October 10, 2025. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-making-of-an-american-mastodon.html.
Morris, John D. 2011. “The St. Peter Sandstone.” ICR.Org, December 29. https://www.icr.org/article/st-peter-sandstone.
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Part of the fun of attending the CRS Conference in St. Louis, Missouri, at the end of July 2025 was participating in the pre-conference geology workshop, which included a morning field trip before the temperature became too hot (highs of 35°C every day of the conference). As a Canadian, I joked that I could finally thaw out completely.
The field trip started at the Mastodon State Historic Site and was led by Zachary Klein, from the Missouri Association for Creation (MAC). The site consists of 418 acres containing the Kimmswick Bone Bed, named for its proximity to the town of Kimmswick, where many Ice Age fossils have been found. Albert C. Koch, an entrepreneur and St. Louis museum owner, excavated some bones along Rock Creek. He thought he had discovered something new and named it the Missouri Leviathan (jennifer.sieg 2011). In fact, he had constructed a composite skeleton from bones of several different individuals. He added extra vertebrae and ribs, inserted pieces of wood between the vertebrae, and positioned the tusks so that they pointed sideways. The aim was to exaggerate the animal’s size as much as possible, creating something twice the size of an ordinary mastodon, which was approximately the size of an Asian elephant. Then he took it on tour around North America and even over to Europe (Lotzof, n.d.).
At the end of his European tour, Koch displayed his monster in an exhibition hall in London, England, where one of the visitors was Richard Owen. At the time, Owen was the Superintendent of Natural History at the British Museum. He purchased the fossils from Koch in 1844. Then he took the skeleton apart and rearticulated the bones in an anatomically accurate pose, making it the first accurately mounted mastodon skeleton anywhere. The Missouri Leviathan is still on display at the British Museum in Hintze Hall, much as Owen had assembled it roughly 180 years ago (Lotzof, n.d.).
Secular scientists believe there were as many as 50 Ice Ages, but they have trouble explaining how there could have been both lower temperatures and higher evaporation/precipitation at the same time. Creation scientists, on the other hand, have proposed that the global upheaval of the Genesis Flood was its cause. Genesis 7:11 says that “all the fountains of the great deep burst forth”. Underwater volcanoes would have warmed the oceans substantially, resulting in increased evaporation, which later became increased precipitation on the continents. Volcanic aerosols (tiny particles) from both submarine and terrestrial volcanoes would have reflected some of the sun’s light back into space, cooling the continents enough that the heavy snow during the winter didn’t have enough time to melt in the summer and accumulated as massive ice sheets (Hebert 2021).
The second stop on the field trip was at a road cut with an outcrop of the Kimmswick Nautiloid Bed (KNB). The KNB is part of a Late Ordovician medium- to coarse-grained limestone unit called the Kimmswick Formation. Both of these are also named for their proximity to the town of Kimmswick, but they are not associated with the Kimmswick Bone Bed. Secular scientists generally believe the Kimmswick Formation to have been deposited in a calm environment. However, it ranges from 10 to 30 meters thick and is described as having bedding that varies from massive to cross-bedded (Klein 2023). Massive bedding shows no visible internal layering or structure, suggesting rapid deposition or post-depositional disturbance, such as burrowing by animals or chemical alteration. This would mean that the sediment accumulated suddenly, burying creatures quickly and uniformly, as is believed to have happened during the Flood. Cross-bedding occurs where sediment is deposited by moving water or wind in thin layers at an angle to the bedding plane. The angle and orientation of the cross-beds can be used to try to figure out which way the current was moving. The Kimmswick Formation contains many fossils, some of which can be seen in the road cut and in rocks along the road where we stopped.
The KNB has an abundance of straight-shelled cephalopods called orthocones, which are concentrated in specific beds, rather than being distributed throughout the Kimmswick Formation (Klein 2023). Orthocones are similar to the nautilus living in the ocean today, but they have straight shells that resemble unicorn horns. In calm water, orthocones would be buried so they point randomly with no preferred direction. However, in a current, the tips of their shells would mainly point upstream, while a few will be oriented perpendicular to the current. A sample of the orientations of these fossils has been found to indicate that they were buried in a strong current, challenging the secular paradigm, but more research is needed (Klein 2023).
Our final stop on the field trip was at Blackburn Park in Pacific, Missouri. The park the field trip went to sits on a bluff overlooking Route 66 (now Interstate 44), on top of the St. Peter Sandstone, a Middle Ordovician sandstone layer made of pure quartz covering much of North America that makes up the base of the Tippecanoe Megasequence (Morris 2011).
Megasequences are groupings of sedimentary rock layers with an erosional surface called an unconformity at the top and bottom that can be traced across continents. A megasequence often starts with a sandstone layer at the bottom. The grain size becomes progressively smaller as you go up through the sequence. On top of the sandstone is usually a layer of shale or siltstone, made of really tiny particles, and then the layer on top of that tends to be made up of particles precipitated out of solution, such as limestone (Clarey 2020).
An amazing feature of the St. Peter Sandstone, which is 80 to 100 feet thick on average (Davis 2014), is that the unconformity below it is almost perfectly flat. Dr. John Morris compared this to “a sheet of paper 0.1 millimeters thick measuring 1 kilometer by 0.6 kilometer draped across a surface flattened with extreme care.” The uniformitarian explanation is that the sand was deposited during an ocean transgression (when the sea level rose and the ocean supposedly covered part of the continent) over millions of years. However, the only way for this unconformity to be so flat is by “sheet erosion,” which is when water flows rapidly across a wide area at an equal depth. This is believed to have happened as enormous tsunamis set off by “the fountains of the great deep” breaking open pushed the ocean onto land. Erosional forces today, such as rivers, leave uneven surfaces with valleys and gulleys (Morris 2011).
Below Blackburn Park are old sandstone mines. This is because the St. Peter Sandstone is 99.44% silica, making it suitable for glass manufacturing, which has been a local industry since the late 19th century. The sandstone crumbles easily when freshly exposed, but weathering hardens it, making it tough and durable. The hardened surface is called a patina, and it can protect the softer rock underneath. Another feature of the St. Peter Sandstone is that it contains almost no fossils. It is also quite uniform, with no bedding (Abeln 2009), and is described as massive with some localized cross-bedding (Davis 2014), which was explained earlier as evidence that it was deposited quickly during the Flood.
The field trip was a fast run through some interesting geological areas. I wish I had planned on staying a couple of extra days so I could go back and hike the trails at Mastodon State Historic Site and Blackburn Park.
References
Abeln, Mark Scott. 2009. “St. Peter’s Sandstone.” Rome of the West, February 14. http://www.romeofthewest.com/2009/02/st-peters-sandstone.html.
Davis, J.G. 2014. “St. Peter Sandstone Mineral Resource Evaluation, Missouri, USA.” In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Forum on the Geology of Industrial Minerals. Arizona Geological Survey Special Paper 9. https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/629315.
Hebert, Jake. 2021. The Ice Age and Climate Change: A Creation Perspective. Institute for Creation Research.
jennifer.sieg. 2011. “Historic Site HIstory.” Text. February 6. https://mostateparks.com/page/54983/historic-site-history.
Klein, Zachary. 2023. “Orthocone Cephalopods as Paleocurrent Indicators in the Ordovician Kimmswick Formation of Northeastern Missouri.” Article Section. The Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9: 680–81. https://doi.org/10.15385/jpicc.2023.9.1.74.
Lotzof, Kerry. n.d. “Missouri Leviathan: The Making of an American Mastodon | Natural History Museum.” Accessed October 10, 2025. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-making-of-an-american-mastodon.html.
Morris, John D. 2011. “The St. Peter Sandstone.” ICR.Org, December 29. https://www.icr.org/article/st-peter-sandstone.
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Part of the fun of attending the CRS Conference in St. Louis, Missouri, at the end of July 2025 was participating in the pre-conference geology workshop, which included a morning field trip before the temperature became too hot (highs of 35°C every day of the conference). As a Canadian, I joked that I could finally thaw out completely.
The field trip started at the Mastodon State Historic Site and was led by Zachary Klein, from the Missouri Association for Creation (MAC). The site consists of 418 acres containing the Kimmswick Bone Bed, named for its proximity to the town of Kimmswick, where many Ice Age fossils have been found. Albert C. Koch, an entrepreneur and St. Louis museum owner, excavated some bones along Rock Creek. He thought he had discovered something new and named it the Missouri Leviathan (jennifer.sieg 2011). In fact, he had constructed a composite skeleton from bones of several different individuals. He added extra vertebrae and ribs, inserted pieces of wood between the vertebrae, and positioned the tusks so that they pointed sideways. The aim was to exaggerate the animal’s size as much as possible, creating something twice the size of an ordinary mastodon, which was approximately the size of an Asian elephant. Then he took it on tour around North America and even over to Europe (Lotzof, n.d.).
At the end of his European tour, Koch displayed his monster in an exhibition hall in London, England, where one of the visitors was Richard Owen. At the time, Owen was the Superintendent of Natural History at the British Museum. He purchased the fossils from Koch in 1844. Then he took the skeleton apart and rearticulated the bones in an anatomically accurate pose, making it the first accurately mounted mastodon skeleton anywhere. The Missouri Leviathan is still on display at the British Museum in Hintze Hall, much as Owen had assembled it roughly 180 years ago (Lotzof, n.d.).
Secular scientists believe there were as many as 50 Ice Ages, but they have trouble explaining how there could have been both lower temperatures and higher evaporation/precipitation at the same time. Creation scientists, on the other hand, have proposed that the global upheaval of the Genesis Flood was its cause. Genesis 7:11 says that “all the fountains of the great deep burst forth”. Underwater volcanoes would have warmed the oceans substantially, resulting in increased evaporation, which later became increased precipitation on the continents. Volcanic aerosols (tiny particles) from both submarine and terrestrial volcanoes would have reflected some of the sun’s light back into space, cooling the continents enough that the heavy snow during the winter didn’t have enough time to melt in the summer and accumulated as massive ice sheets (Hebert 2021).
The second stop on the field trip was at a road cut with an outcrop of the Kimmswick Nautiloid Bed (KNB). The KNB is part of a Late Ordovician medium- to coarse-grained limestone unit called the Kimmswick Formation. Both of these are also named for their proximity to the town of Kimmswick, but they are not associated with the Kimmswick Bone Bed. Secular scientists generally believe the Kimmswick Formation to have been deposited in a calm environment. However, it ranges from 10 to 30 meters thick and is described as having bedding that varies from massive to cross-bedded (Klein 2023). Massive bedding shows no visible internal layering or structure, suggesting rapid deposition or post-depositional disturbance, such as burrowing by animals or chemical alteration. This would mean that the sediment accumulated suddenly, burying creatures quickly and uniformly, as is believed to have happened during the Flood. Cross-bedding occurs where sediment is deposited by moving water or wind in thin layers at an angle to the bedding plane. The angle and orientation of the cross-beds can be used to try to figure out which way the current was moving. The Kimmswick Formation contains many fossils, some of which can be seen in the road cut and in rocks along the road where we stopped.
The KNB has an abundance of straight-shelled cephalopods called orthocones, which are concentrated in specific beds, rather than being distributed throughout the Kimmswick Formation (Klein 2023). Orthocones are similar to the nautilus living in the ocean today, but they have straight shells that resemble unicorn horns. In calm water, orthocones would be buried so they point randomly with no preferred direction. However, in a current, the tips of their shells would mainly point upstream, while a few will be oriented perpendicular to the current. A sample of the orientations of these fossils has been found to indicate that they were buried in a strong current, challenging the secular paradigm, but more research is needed (Klein 2023).
Our final stop on the field trip was at Blackburn Park in Pacific, Missouri. The park the field trip went to sits on a bluff overlooking Route 66 (now Interstate 44), on top of the St. Peter Sandstone, a Middle Ordovician sandstone layer made of pure quartz covering much of North America that makes up the base of the Tippecanoe Megasequence (Morris 2011).
Megasequences are groupings of sedimentary rock layers with an erosional surface called an unconformity at the top and bottom that can be traced across continents. A megasequence often starts with a sandstone layer at the bottom. The grain size becomes progressively smaller as you go up through the sequence. On top of the sandstone is usually a layer of shale or siltstone, made of really tiny particles, and then the layer on top of that tends to be made up of particles precipitated out of solution, such as limestone (Clarey 2020).
An amazing feature of the St. Peter Sandstone, which is 80 to 100 feet thick on average (Davis 2014), is that the unconformity below it is almost perfectly flat. Dr. John Morris compared this to “a sheet of paper 0.1 millimeters thick measuring 1 kilometer by 0.6 kilometer draped across a surface flattened with extreme care.” The uniformitarian explanation is that the sand was deposited during an ocean transgression (when the sea level rose and the ocean supposedly covered part of the continent) over millions of years. However, the only way for this unconformity to be so flat is by “sheet erosion,” which is when water flows rapidly across a wide area at an equal depth. This is believed to have happened as enormous tsunamis set off by “the fountains of the great deep” breaking open pushed the ocean onto land. Erosional forces today, such as rivers, leave uneven surfaces with valleys and gulleys (Morris 2011).
Below Blackburn Park are old sandstone mines. This is because the St. Peter Sandstone is 99.44% silica, making it suitable for glass manufacturing, which has been a local industry since the late 19th century. The sandstone crumbles easily when freshly exposed, but weathering hardens it, making it tough and durable. The hardened surface is called a patina, and it can protect the softer rock underneath. Another feature of the St. Peter Sandstone is that it contains almost no fossils. It is also quite uniform, with no bedding (Abeln 2009), and is described as massive with some localized cross-bedding (Davis 2014), which was explained earlier as evidence that it was deposited quickly during the Flood.
The field trip was a fast run through some interesting geological areas. I wish I had planned on staying a couple of extra days so I could go back and hike the trails at Mastodon State Historic Site and Blackburn Park.
References
Abeln, Mark Scott. 2009. “St. Peter’s Sandstone.” Rome of the West, February 14. http://www.romeofthewest.com/2009/02/st-peters-sandstone.html.
Davis, J.G. 2014. “St. Peter Sandstone Mineral Resource Evaluation, Missouri, USA.” In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Forum on the Geology of Industrial Minerals. Arizona Geological Survey Special Paper 9. https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/629315.
Hebert, Jake. 2021. The Ice Age and Climate Change: A Creation Perspective. Institute for Creation Research.
jennifer.sieg. 2011. “Historic Site HIstory.” Text. February 6. https://mostateparks.com/page/54983/historic-site-history.
Klein, Zachary. 2023. “Orthocone Cephalopods as Paleocurrent Indicators in the Ordovician Kimmswick Formation of Northeastern Missouri.” Article Section. The Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9: 680–81. https://doi.org/10.15385/jpicc.2023.9.1.74.
Lotzof, Kerry. n.d. “Missouri Leviathan: The Making of an American Mastodon | Natural History Museum.” Accessed October 10, 2025. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-making-of-an-american-mastodon.html.
Morris, John D. 2011. “The St. Peter Sandstone.” ICR.Org, December 29. https://www.icr.org/article/st-peter-sandstone.
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