... which was once covered by an ancient sea.

I was reading an article in National Geographic when I came across this curious quote:

Today the fossil site "is about as urban as you can get," said paleontologist Derek Main of the University of Texas in Arlington. "It's surrounded by several highways, and there's a Starbucks down the street. You can get coffee if you want."

But the remains hark back to a time when much of Texas was underwater, covered by an enormous inland sea that bisected North America and joined the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic Ocean.

It occurred to me that I’ve heard that before. In fact, I’ve heard it a lot. Fossils are found all over the world in or near areas that are said to have once been covered by “an ancient inland sea.” Just for fun, I did a Google search to see a few other times where such a sea is invoked with a fossil find. Below are a few of the results (bold added for emphasis):

The Western Interior Seaway, also called the Cretaceous Seaway, the Niobraran Sea, and the North American Inland Sea, was a huge inland sea that split the continent of North America into two halves during most of the mid and late Cretaceous Period. (source)

In some areas, such as portions of what-is-now the eastern United States, coal was formed from swamps covered by sea water. (source)

This record of ancient life is preserved in the form of fossils whose ages date back 425 million years when all of Western and Central New York State was covered by an inland sea. (source)

Most of the recognizable fossils in the Whitewater Formation are from skeletons of animals that lived about 435 million years ago on the bottom of a warm shallow sea that covered this area [Whitewater Gorge Indiana]. (source)

Dinosaurs might have ruled the land 100 million years ago, but enormous reptiles, toothy fish, and sharks owned the oceans in a vast inland sea that covered what is now Kansas. (source)

Baculite Mesa near Pueblo, Colorado is just the place for easy finding of the remains of ancient sea life. (source)

Scientists have unearthed evidence of a Jurassic killing field in a sea that once covered a wide area of middle England. (source)

Trilobites were prolific! They lived at a time when our continents were connected and much of the Earth was covered by ancient seas filled with trilobites. Trilobites can be found all around the globe today. (source)

There were many others, of course, but this gives you an idea of how many different places in the US (and around the world) are identified as having once been underwater. If you look at just the places mentioned in the US, you can see nearly the entire continent of North America is included. For every US state I Googled, I could find some reference to an ancient sea once covering it.

Now, I’m not a rocket scientist or anything but doesn’t that say something? Is it a terrible leap of faith to suggest that all of these places were once under water at the same time? I say that common sense demands we consider that as a possibility.

The Bible describes the Flood of Noah which covered the entire earth. We look around and see evidence that the entire earth was once covered with water. Is it so hard to put 2 and 2 together? The evidence is there for whoever wants to see it. Or, as Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”