Biogeography Challenges and Land Bridges

Biogeography poses challenges for both uniformitarian and biblical creation scientists. Someone has an idea of how various plants, animals, and even people reached different parts of the world, but then new discoveries prompt a grand rethink.

One word of caution to some creationists: It is ridiculous to assume that secular scientists are always wrong about everything. Thankfully, those creationists are in the minority, and the rest of us do not want to be like them. Creationists and secularists do agree on many things, but disagree on timing.

Annotated ISS photo of Strait of Dover / NASA (usage does not imply endorsement of site contents)

We disagree with secular scientists who think animals were on a supercontinent, then carried along when it broke up. In fact, many of those scientists are abandoning that concept. Hippos were in the British Isles long ago, and there were strange associations that seemingly should not have occurred. Explanations, please.

Creation science post-Flood Ice Age scenarios explain many things, but creationists must also provide robust explanations. A strong candidate for explaining animal dispersal is land bridges after the Genesis Flood. This, too, is receiving some adjustment from creation scientists.

Biogeography is a difficult subject. Uniformitarian scientists once thought they had the answers with the vicariance hypothesis, but they recently encountered numerous contradictions. Many now support vegetation rafting as a more plausible theory. In the Creation-Flood model, thick log mats left over from the Flood would aid animal dispersal in some cases, but most animals likely made use of land bridges. Two land bridges are discussed in this paper. First, there was a land bridge across the Dover Strait connecting the English Channel, which allowed hippos to migrate into the United Kingdom. Second, the Bering Land Bridge between Russia and Alaska that likely was tectonically raised early in the Ice Age.

While this article has some technical material, there is quite a bit for the rest of us. To finish reading, see "Land bridges after the Flood." You may also be interested in "The Ice Age, Land Bridges, and Migration."