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 fossils we find today. It’s hard to know for certain, but if these fossils were made during Noah’s flood, they might represent the kinds of things that were on Earth when the Garden of Eden was around.1
For starters, the animals seem to have been a lot bigger.2
There are fossils of dragonflies, called meganeura, with a wingspan greater than two feet.3
There are fossils of a giant beaver from North America that was over seven feet long (less if they were hunched over).4
The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History has a sea turtle that measured about 11 feet long.5
And even though elephants are large today, averaging around ten feet tall, there’s evidence they used to be more like fifteen feet at the shoulder.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. I mentioned some of these details and more in Memories of Eden, part 1.
2. 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.
3. Details about Meganeura can be found here.
4. There are giant beaver details here. For the size of a modern beaver, see here and here.
5. For giant sea turtle details, see here. For the average size of the leatherback sea turtle, the largest turtle today, see here. 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.
6. For the height of elephants in the past, see reference to 480 cm on pg. 562 of the paper found here, and for the height of a large elephant today, see the measurement of Jumbo at the end of pg. 545. which is almost identical to the 10.6 foot average height from here, though it is not clear if the average is measured from the head or the shoulder. In any case, I used the 10.6 foot shoulder height 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.