Hints of Eden
Genesis doesn’t offer a lot of details about what the Garden of Eden was like, but we might get a few clues from the remains of long lost animals we find buried in the ground. These animals probably adapted and changed some between the time when God created everything perfect in the beginning and the Flood or sometime after it when they died, but they still offer some idea of how things used to be different.1
For starters, the animals that died after the Flood seem to have been a lot bigger than what we have today.
From the skeletons of giant ground sloths that grew to be larger than a car2 to skeletons of giant beavers from North America that were over seven feet long (I’m estimating in the image since the beaver is hunched over).3
These animals may have grown larger after the Flood or to stay warm during the Ice Age, but that doesn’t mean animals weren’t already big before that.4
The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History has a sea turtle that measured about 11 feet long.6
Beyond the animals, there are the trees. The tallest trees today reach up to around 380 feet. 7
A lot of Redwoods were cut down during during commercial logging in the mid-1800s and we only have about 5% of the redwoods left, but even before logging, they only grew in a strip along the North American Pacific coast. Giant Sequoias are limited to an area of the Sierra Nevada mountains 250 miles long and 15 miles wide. The third species, the Eucalyptus Regnans, or Mountain Ash, grows in Victoria, in the far south of Australia, and across the Bass strait in parts of Tasmania.8
It’s hard to compare these modern trees with what trees used to be, since we don’t have very many examples, but from the petrified wood we do find, I wonder if big trees weren’t as rare as they are today. There’s a fossil tree in Utah that probably used to be twice the size of trees that grow there now. In Florissant, a national monument in Colorado, there are stumps 38 to 41 feet in circumference. Argentina and Thailand have the remains of fallen trees whose trunks used to reach 300 feet.9
We don’t know a lot about the world the Garden of Eden was a part of, but the clues we do find, make me want to know more.
1. For the scale of animals and plants we find buried in the ground, see further discussion in Memories of Eden, part 1.
2. For the size of giant ground sloths, see here. The definition here puts them as late as the Pleistocene which the creationist chart here suggests was part of the post-Flood part of geology. I use this same chart for to determine whether other animal remains, referenced below, are from during the Flood or afterward.
3. There are giant beaver details here which also lists the Pleistocene epoch which would be from the post-Flood time based on the same creationist chart referenced for the sloth, above. For the size of a modern beaver, see here and here. For all the diagrams, the outlines of modern and ancient animals are for scale, not for a good idea of what those animals actually looked like.
4. To be clear, we don’t know how the animals changed and adapted between the time God created them perfect and the Flood 1656 years later (see year of Flood in Ussher, J. Revised and updated by Pierce, L., Pierce, M. (2012) The Annals of the World (p. 19). Master Books.) or the extinctions that came with the changes to the world after the Flood. There is the argument that animals got larger after the Flood with discussion of size benefits and staying warm in the Ice Age as suggested here.
5. Details about Meganeura can be found here which gives their layer as “upper carboniferous” and thus in the period when flood waters were rising according to a creationist understanding of the geologic column given here
6. For giant sea turtle details, see here which references the Cretaceous and thus toward the peak of the Flood according to the chart here. For the average size of the leatherback sea turtle, the largest turtle today, see [here] (http://www.dnr.sc.gov/cwcs/pdf/Leatherbacktutle.pdf). The article here suggests a 5 foot shell length is somewhat rare, though some supposedly reach 8 feet long. I used average shell length of 5 feet for the diagram.
7. For the general heights of Redwoods, Sequoias, and Eucalyptus trees, see here. The current tallest Redwood is Hyperion, found in 2006 at 379 feet as mentioned here. Details on the Saturn V rocket can be found here and details on the Statue of Liberty, here and here.
8. For details on the historic logging of Redwoods, see here. For where Redwoods and Sequoias grow today, see here. For where Eucalyptus regnans grows, see here, here and here.
9. For the discovery of a large fossil tree in Utah, see here. For stumps at Florissant, see here. Details on tree trunks in Argentina can be found here. For details on petrified trunks in Thailand, see here.
Update: Text significantly updated on 4/3/25 including removal of reference to elephant, added giant sloth, updated images, and included comments in text and footnotes to mention that some animals died after the Flood and might not be representative of animals that lived before it.