a . Thousands of jellyfish, many bigger than a dinner plate, are found in at least seven different horizons of coarse-grained, abrasive sandstone in Wisconsin. [See James W. Hagadorn et al., “Stranded on a Late Cambrian Shoreline: Medusae from Central Wisconsin,” Geology, Vol. 30, February 2002, pp. 147–150.]
Coarse grains slowly covering a jellyfish would allow atmospheric oxygen to migrate in and produce rapid decay. Burial in clay or mud would better shield an organism from decay. If coarse-grain sand buried these jellyfish in a storm, turbulence and abrasion by the sand grains would tear and destroy the jellyfish. The liquefaction chapter (pages 194–204) explains how thousands of jellyfish were gently collected and preserved in coarse-grained sand.
Charles Darwin recognized the problem of finding fossilized soft-bodied organisms, such as jellyfish. He wrote:
No organism wholly soft can be preserved. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 330.
Again, a prediction of evolution is seen to be wrong.
u Preston Cloud and Martin F. Glaessner, “The Ediacarian Period and System: Metazoa Inherit the Earth,” Science, Vol. 217, 27 August 1982, pp. 783–792. [See also the cover of that issue.]
u Martin F. Glaessner, “Pre-Cambrian Animals,” Scientific American, Vol. 204, March 1961, pp. 72–78.
b . Donald G. Mikulic et al., “A Silurian Soft-Bodied Biota,” Science, Vol. 228, 10 May 1985, pp. 715–717.
u “... preconditions for the preservation of soft-bodied faunas: rapid burial of fossils in undisturbed sediment; deposition in an environment free from the usual agents of immediate destruction—primarily oxygen and other promoters of decay, and the full range of organisms, from bacteria to large scavengers, that quickly reduce most carcasses to oblivion in nearly all earthly environments; and minimal disruption by the later ravages of heat, pressure, fracturing, and erosion. ... But the very conditions that promote preservation also decree that few organisms, if any, make their natural homes in such places.” Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1989), pp. 61–62.
c . Presse Grayloise, “Very Like a Whale,” The Illustrated London News, 1856, p. 116.
u Sunderland, pp. 111–114.
u David Starr Jordan, “A Miocene Catastrophe,” Natural History, Vol. 20, January–February 1920, pp. 18–22.
u Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1858), pp. 221–225.
d . Harold G. Coffin, Origin By Design (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Publishing Assn., 1983), pp. 30 – 40.