Dinosaurs in Paradise - The Rocks Don't Lie - page 152

Convinced that a great flood remodeled the entire world, Price called on vast mammoth
graveyards as evidence of a sudden calamity, unaware that none had actually been found.
He repeated the apocryphal stories of frozen mammoth proving fresh enough for a feast,
apparently unaware that firsthand reports contradicted this popular misconception. He also
argued that coal deposits and fossil coral found at high latitudes indicated a warmer pre-
flood world. He considered this last point particularly persuasive because geologists could
not yet explain the fossilized remains of tropical organisms found near the poles.
Price published The New Geology in 1923, covering standard introductory subjects. Writ-
ten to look like a textbook, although aimed at the general reader, Price's topic attacked con-
ventional notions of geology. The uninformed reader would see nothing in it to indicate that
this did not lay out the essentials of modern geology. Until, that is, one discovered Price's
assertion that geological understanding of a progressive succession of organisms through
geologic time was not only flawed, but had been “disproved by a large number of recently
discovered facts” that he neglected to mention. 6 Instead, he simply asserted that all the an-
imals in the entire fossil record—trilobites, ammonites, dinosaurs, and mammoths—lived
together in harmony with people before the Flood.
Whether ignorant or simply dismissive of centuries of discovery and debate, Price at-
tributed the entire geologic record to Noah's Flood depositing enormous piles of sediment
chock full of fossils. Settling disrupted the pile where the basement strata were unable to
support the extra load. Arguing that the folding and tilting of rocks occurred while they
were still soft, Price accused mainstream geologists of raw prejudice as he himself never
bothered to learn any geology and ignored evidence accumulated by generations of geolo-
gists.
Isolated from contact with geological thinking, fundamentalists looking for arguments to
use in their attacks on evolution in the 1920s turned to Price's flood geology, trusting that
it was based on sound science. With no trained geologists among hard-core evangelicals,
Price was virtually unchallenged as the sole geological voice in fundamentalist ranks. Of-
fering a message right on target for the war on evolution, Price became a fundamentalist
darling. By the mid-1920s he was a regular contributor to conservative religious period-