18th-Century Naturalist Believed He’d Discovered an Eyewitness to the Biblical Flood.

To 17th-century scholars, it made perfect sense that fossils on mountain sides and deep in the ground had been left there in the wake of the biblical flood (above The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge by Thomas Cole, 1829). (SAAM, gift of Katie Dean)

18th-Century Naturalist Believed He’d Discovered an Eyewitness to the Biblical Flood. Only after his death was it successfully identified.