After analyzing fossils and sediment, Baoyu Jiang of China’s Nanjing University and his team concluded that lethal, sudden pyroclastic volcanic eruptions marked by air blasts, hot gas, and ground-hogging clouds of fine ash likely smothered, charred, and then carried forward everything in their path to create these bone beds, according to the study published in Nature Communications.
The finding explains why so many creatures would come to be buried on lake floors, and how they remained well preserved enough to retain signs of soft tissue features, such as feathers, tens of millions of years later.
Well... it would seem that we have a recent ‘test-bed’ to use to support this theory.
Mt. St. Helens. Volcano blew up. Bunch of creatures ‘preserved’ under all that ash. Some human.