Fossil assemblages through most of the Phanerozoic are evaluated for the presence or absence of in situ life communities. It is shown that most of the water-laid deposits of Palaeozoic age must have been formed during approximately the first five months of the Biblical Flood year. From the appearance of emergence surfaces and briefly inhabited sediments and hardgrounds after the Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian) it is deduced that the transition from Floodlaid to post-Flood rocks took place at the turn from the late Palaeozoic era to the Permian period of the conventional time scale
