The Sad Case of the Wolfville Mystery

The Wolfville Formation seems to be connected to the famous Chinle Formation, the vegetation, though undocumented in this formation, would be similar. While little is known about the ecology of this bygone habitat specifically, it would be similar to other Triassic-type habitats, like the Chinle. More importantly, the presence of many tracks and seeming absence of plants may tell a story about how the formation was formed. How these creatures met their doom. My guess, in line with a Biblical model of earth history, is as follows:

The Wolfville was a rich, Triassic-type habitat. The air would be humid and warm, typical of rainforest environments and, on this particular day, it rained like never before. bennettite conifers thrashed and flailed in the downpour. In the underbrush, bellow the otherworldly cycads and ferns, a menagerie of reptiles dwelt. There were dinosaurs. Small, beaked herbivores trotted through the brush and paused under the whiplike leaves of a Czekanowskia tree. The call of a coelophysoid dinosaur echoed through the fluvial valley, and the heterodontosaurids trotted on. Like everything in this environment, they were strange plant-eaters. As they moved, their front paws touched the ground leaving funny four-footed prints in the mud between the horsetails. They also had large fang-like teeth curving from their lower jaws. Usefull for splitting plant stems, yes, but also an efective line of defense if one happened to be cornered by the massive, long-legged rausuchian, which looked something like a tall crocodile with the deep jaws of a T. rex. Bat-like pterosaurs buzzed between the trees as dusk set, catching insects. From beneath the ferns, a small reptile called a procolophonid emerged. It looked like an overgrown horny-toad with spines sticking out from the back of its skull. It snuffed the air warily and then ducked back away as a pair of cynodonts, looking like crosses between dogs and lizards, trotted by on their search for tubers on the shore of the lake.

The bizarre Teraterpeton squats on the remaining piece of high ground and overlooks a wasteland of dinosaur corpses. This little hill will offer little protection, however, as the second tsunami-sized wave strips the landscape of life once more.

In the lake, there would be phytosaurs; crocodile-like archosaurs with their nostrils nearly between their eyes, like a whale. Deeper in the water, nestled in the muddy bottom, lay perhaps the only familiar shape to us. A freshwater mussel. And it can feel the rumbling an approaching storm.

Perhaps the strangest creature here is the Teraterpeton. Like many of the creatures in the Wolfville, its body was built like a lizard. However, its head was long like a crocodiles and it had only a few teeth near the back of its jaw. The end of its snout ended in a stork-like beak. A plant-eating crocodile lizard. All this strange biodiversity was soon to be ended.

The rumbling grew closer and louder, and then a crack of falling tree echoed in the distance. All ears turned and the heterodontosaurids wondered what mischief the rausuchian was recking over there. But now even the rausuchian had reason to fear. Another tree, closer than the first, split and it was quickly followed by another. Suddenly, the river swelled and pushed the lake up over its shores. Cynodonts dashed for higher ground, but that mattered little. A wave, crashing through the forest, tore up trees and stripped ferns from their roots. In a matter of minutes, the area was ravaged and stripped by a tsunami-sized wave from the global flood. Most of the plants were washed out and the remaining animals found themselves scrambling for higher ground. Perhaps some of them made it, leaving tracks in the mud, whilst others found themselves cowering under the shadow of the second wave, larger and more powerful than the first. This they could not resist and their bodies were crushed and broken and ground, tracks were freeze framed in an instant filling of overlying mud, and the ecosystem was lost forever. This seemingly plantless landscape of reptiles was preserved as the Wolfville Formation. Amazingly, there were still survivors after this mayhem. Or at least one. Only one set of tracks is found in the overlaying Blomidon Formation, indicating that one last theropod, a lonely coelophysoid, wandered over the mud flats. It glanced at the half-burried corps of the thorny procolophonid but it didn't stop. There was no time for scavenging. On the horizon an object foreign to the dinosaur loomed up off the normally flat horizon. It's a massive volcano, larger than Yellowstone's peak. The exhausted dinosaur squinted its eyes at the glowing mass of magma. Suddenly, the lake of fire burst into glowing shards of stone and a massive flow careened across the flats, with nothing now to stop its decent, and coated the landscape in a layer of basalt miles wide. No living thing would survive this disaster. Everything with the breath of life would die.

These three layers, the Wolfville Formation, the Blomidon Formation, and the overlying basalt layer, testify to these events. It opens one's eyes to the horror that was the global flood. It was no sudden or instant burial. It came on more slowly than you  might think and each animal (and man, for that matter) struggled for his own hold at survival. But it was to no avail. Fear God; He is a righteous judge. Water times two coated the Wolfville, then fire. The next judgement will be only fire and certainly not any more instant than the global flood.