The Fossilized Hats

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How long does it take to make a fossil? Most people think that it takes a long time and that’s partly because we have been repeatedly told that fossils are millions of years old.

But experience - which is, after all, what science is all about - shows that it is not unusual for things to become stone very quickly under the proper conditions. The process of fossilization, where minerals replace the original material, is illustrated very nicely by a miner's hat. A miner lost his hat in a mine in Australia, it was found 50 years later, completely turned to limestone. The hat is now in a mining museum in Tasmania. Even more dramatic is the bowler hat that was buried in a volcanic eruption in 1886 in New Zealand. When it was excavated - only 20 years later - it had been completely turned to stone. Just think for a moment, if these were not modern artifacts but say a fish, they might have been declared to be millions of years old!

Many if not most, fossils were produced during the great flood of Noah's time when plants and animals were quickly covered by sediment and water. They bear witness to God’s judgment of sin. And those fossil hats put into question the idea that we are the product of millions of years of evolution!