Dinosaurs in Paradise - The Rocks Don't Lie - page 149

In 1929, Carnegie Museum curator of paleontology Innokenty Tolmachoff meticulously
described the circumstances and condition of every known mammoth carcass discovery
dating back to the seventeenth century. Three dozen sites pretty much accounted for them
all. Noting evidence that mammoths ate great volumes of tundra grass in the summer, Tol-
machoff lambasted claims that mammoths roamed a more temperate Siberia. Mammoths
were creatures of the ice age, not victims of it. They only went extinct at the end of the last
glaciation.
Tolmachoff also reported that stories of mammoth carcasses preserved well enough to
eat were greatly exaggerated. Dogs greedily devoured thawed mammoth, but people found
it inedible. As far as he could tell, there was no basis for tales of great feasts prepared from
their frozen carcasses. Firsthand accounts consistently reported putrid flesh in advanced
states of decay. And the circumstances surrounding their discovery suggested that mam-
moths became stuck in soft mud, were caught in collapsed thawing ground, or drowned
along big rivers. They died mundane, solitary deaths.
Such evidence did not dissuade the followers of George McCready Price, a prolific, self-
taught writer of geology topics, despite having no geological education or training. The
writings of Ellen Gould White, founding prophetess of Seventh-day Adventism, convinced
Price of the validity of flood geology. He rejected the popular day-age and gap theories
based on White's accounts of visions she'd had in which she saw God create the world
in six twenty-four-hour days and rest on the seventh. Her trancelike visions revealed that
fossils were buried when Noah's Flood reworked Earth's surface. Explaining how God
removed all the rotting carcasses after the Flood, she told of how a great wind carried
“away the tops of mountains like mighty avalanches, forming huge hills and high moun-
tains where there were none to be seen before, and burying the dead bodies with trees,
stones, and earth.” 1 All that buried vegetation turned into coal, which God occasionally ig-
nited when He wanted to fire up volcanoes. White's fantasylike explanations sound like the
wild ideas of seventeenth-century natural philosophers.
Born in rural New Brunswick in 1870, Price was a child when his father died and his
mother joined the apocalyptically inclined Adventists. Fresh out of high school, he married
an older Adventist woman, and together they made their living selling White's Advent-