Fossil Reptiles on the Russian Platform

by on

Originally published in Journal of Creation 15, no 1 (April 2001): 5-6.




Annual spring floods wash out fossils at the Kotelnich tetrapod locality

Photo by Kotelnich Paleontological Museum

Figure 1. The Kotelnich tetrapod locality. The steep western bank of the Vyatka River is primarily composed of continental redbeds consisting of clays, marls and sandstones. The annual spring floods wash out the bony remains.


The Kotelnich paleontological museum tries to explain the unusual burial position in terms of the pareiasaurs being ‘bogged in soft sediment after heavy rainfall, when the water level was higher and boggy substratum became silty swamp’.2 The sedimentary conditions of the region are also interpreted in terms of uniformitarian geology. Coffa, from Monash University, Australia, described the strata in detail.3,4 He determined five horizons when deposition ceased and erosion surfaces developed in the sedimentary sequence (up to 50 m thick). According to their timescale, uniformitarians say the strata are 260 million years old.

To me these conclusions are very questionable:5

  1. Pareiasaurs were herbivorous reptiles that lived in similar conditions to the modern giant aquatic turtle. I am not a reptile expert, but I have never heard of turtles being drowned in a swamp. It is more likely that the environmental conditions changed catastrophically and caught them unaware.



  4. Position of the pareiasaur in the sediments
    Figure 2. Position of the pareiasaur in the sediments.

    The Upper Permian strata were deposited during the final marine transgression for the region. Since that time (allegedly 260 million years in the uniformitarian timescale) not more than 10­20m of the land surface has been eroded. Based on average erosion rates for some of the major rivers of the world (0.2–1.4 mm per year6), the timing of the transgression fits better with the date of the Biblical Flood, about 4,500 years ago.




  1. The Kotelnich Palaeontological Museum, 8 December 2000. See ‘Kotelnich district of the Kirov Region’ and ‘Kotelnich locality’ pages. Return to text.
  2. Ref. 1, see ‘Fossils’ page. Return to text.
  3. Coffa, A.A., Stratigraphy and correlation of the continental redbed sequence at the Kotelnich Upper Permian fossil tetrapod locality, Russia, Geological Society of Australia, Abstracts 46, pp. 15­17, 1997. Return to text.
  6. Walker, T., Eroding ages: if our continents were old, they would no longer be here, Creation 22(2):18­21, 2000. Return to text.




Learn more

  • Customer Service 800.778.3390