I haven’t read Steve Donovan’s books. This author suggests that Donovan’s view is that fossils are created over long periods of time. However, it’s totally reasonable that a horse in muck at the bottom of a lake would disintegrate by scavenging & microbes.
If you’ve got a crazy mix of animals & plants very well preserved together it’s also reasonable to consider that they died and were preserved by a rapid accumulation of sediment during a major disaster. You’ve got to agree that this is possible.
Then you call Thomas “arrogant” for daring to question Donovan and then say he’s “simply out of his intellectual and academic league”. Just because there’s LOTS of documentation out there to support your view doesn’t mean it’s correct. It seems to me that the wrong person has been called arrogant.
Again, rather than sending me off to someone’s “countless other publications”, what is YOUR guess as to how these fossils were made?
GOD PUT FOSSILS THERE TO CONFUSE EVERYONE!
In an anoxic environment there may be little or no scavenging or decomposition. I’ve already provided evidence of the preservation of soft tissue, what makes you thing the fossilization or petrification of bone is so mysterious? And Thomas doesn’t question Donovan; he uses Donovan’s findings to support one aspect of his view, while completely ignoring the fundamentals and overriding realities of fossilization that Donovan explains. It’s the typical intellectual dishonesty and cherry picking that is the hallmark of “creation science”.
Not all muck is equal. The Green River Shale is pretty interesting muck. All indications are that, at least along the lake bottom, there wasn't a lot of oxygen, which would limit both scavengers and microbes. Most anaerobic organisms require sulfur to respire, and the absence of pyrite in the shale indicates there wasn't much of that about, either.
I have collected fossilized insects from it in Colorado, and even a feather that was preserved, along with a few twigs and leaves. All of those were preserved as carbon.
BTW, the Green River is an oil shale; some of it (the Mahogany Beds) will burn in a campfire as the oil is cooked out of it. A lot of money has been spent trying to find a practical (read: profitable) way to extract that oil.
There are a lot of unoxidized organic compounds in there.