According to classical, uniformitarian evolutionary scenarios, fossils formed by regular processes of death, deposition, compaction and mineralization. Water, winds, volcanoes, and landslides laid down sediments upon the bodies, tracks, even the excrement of animals, upon plants, and even upon microscopic lifeforms. Those in turn were covered by other sediments, and ultimately, the column of sediments became rock with mineralized fossils embedded.
When things die, especially animal life, there is not much opportunity to preserve it in the fossil record. If a dead thing is not buried completely and relatively quickly, thousands of creatures, microscopic and large, begin a feeding frenzy. What they don’t destroy the elements do. The corpse doesn’t have thousands of days let alone thousands of years to mark its existence for posterity.
It is apparent that fossils only form if the burial process that covered the once living is rapid, as in floods, landslides, volcanism, or sandstorms. Such is demonstrated by those fossils which are like action snapshots-- creatures caught giving birth, eating, even devouring another creature. Suddenly, they were covered by sediment, eventually becoming a freeze frame in the fossil record.
But these rapid mechanisms produce not only fossils, but also sharply delineated, localized fields of sedimentary rock. The fossil bearing sedimentary rocks, however, stretch square mile after square mile in vast fields across the entire planet. About 75% of the land surface of the earth is covered by them to an average depth of over 5400 feet. The scope of these layers is the basis for the geologic column and its ability to be applied to formations across the globe.
Generally, sediments are laid out flat, kind a like a college student during holiday breaks. If you examine an outcropping in the Appalachians it may not appear that way, but the curvy strata there were caused by folding after sedimentation. In other places where sedimentary rock is present but not horizontal other geotectonic mechanisms can be forwarded to explain its tilt.
The rule is that sediments are laid horizontally: the physics of particles precipitating out of solution or suspension demand it. Even if the floor they are settling on is serpentine, sediments settle in the low spots to a greater degree than the high spots until things are more or less evened out. When sediment fields stretch square mile after square mile in relatively uniform strata, a single body of murky water over the entire sediment field must have been responsible.
How that occurred simultaneously with all manner of flora and fauna being rapidly covered by those precipitates presents some serious problems to the uniformitarian geologist, and most certainly to the evolutionist. It seems to me they don't actually have a plausible mechanism for the ubiquity of fossils.
There is, however, a biblical answer:
For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet. Every living thing that moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark. The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.In my mind, it's a better answer.Genesis 7:17-24 (NIV)
