Fossil Facts and Fantasies
The stories told about some fossils raise more questions than answers, even with top Darwin spin doctors in the operating room.
Aquatic sloths: Live Science has some comments about
the “aquatic sloths” that were found with those Chile whale fossils (2/26/14).
The interpretation that they lived in water relies on measurements of high
density of their bones. But since land-dwelling sloths and some other
mammals also had dense bones, the idea seems a stretch. The article
weaves a tale about how they swam to the bottom of the water to eat vegetation,
since the coast was becoming arid, then went extinct when the Isthmus of Panama
closed “4 million years ago.” Whatever happened, there used to be more
species of sloth, and bigger ones, than the two kinds that live in trees today
– and they didn’t evolve blowholes, flippers or sonar.
Tar pit tales: Paleontologists are rushing to document bones
in asphalt tar in west Los Angeles before a subway tunnel is completed, PhysOrg
reported. 70 feet below the surface, workers have found ice-age mammals,
birds, and insects in the same formation as the nearby La Brea Tar Pits.
“In one spectacular instance,” the article says, “a worker scraped his
bulldozer across what turned out to be a nearly intact skeleton of a
Columbian mammoth with 10-foot-long tusks, which researchers named
Zed.” The terrestrial fossils are supposed to be two million years old,
but this paragraph jumps out of the article:
Paleontologists
have recovered mollusks, asphalt-saturated sand dollars, pieces
of driftwood and Monterey cypress cones. For [Kim] Scott, the most
exciting finds have been a rock embedded with what appears to be part of a
sea lion’s mouth (perhaps 2 million years old) and a non-fossilized
10-foot limb from a digger pine tree that would look right at home today in
Central California woodlands.
The dating seems
convoluted. The article says that the deposit is supposed to be from
50,000 to 330,000 years old, so how did a 2-million year old seal get mixed
in? And an unfossilized digger pine? Those don’t usually grow near
sand dollars. Why are marine and land creatures in the same mix?
The explanation given is that this was a coastline community. “Even
though we’re finding fossils older than what’s found at La Brea, none
of the identified fossils found to date are extinct,” Scott said. “We
can still find all the plants and animals in California.” That
doesn’t help much; the “younger” La Brea fossils include mammoths, mastodons,
American lions, saber-tooth cats, dire wolves, huge bison and camels that are
extinct.
Fossilized fern cell division: A fossil fern said to
be 180 million years old shows “preserved cell walls and the nucleus
containing genetic material” so clearly that chromosomes undergoing cell
division are discernible, says New
Scientist. For such exquisite preservation, it must have been “almost
instantly fossilised,” perhaps by becoming engulfed in a lava flow. Why,
though, did it not burn up in the hot lava? The fossil was donated in the
1960s by a Swedish farmer, but was forgotten in a museum drawer till analyzed
recently. Despite being so “old” in the evolutionary timeline, no
evolution is visible: “The fern is very similar to a living species:
the cinnamon fern, Osmundastrum cinnamomeum,” the article says.
“The similarity of the cinnamon fern to the fossil supports the idea that is a
‘living fossil’ – an example of evolutionary stasis, when organisms appear not
to evolve for millions of years.” The fossil was also reported by Live
Science, where Tia Ghose presented a different theory: “The fossilized
plant was likely preserved when minerals in the superheated, salty
water oozing from a crack in the earth, called a hydrothermal brine seep,
rapidly crystallized, freezing the plant in time while it was still alive.”
The original paper in Science
calls this “180 million years of genomic stasis in royal ferns,” indeed
a “paramount example of evolutionary stasis.” Why, then, do they
claim it “can provide exceptional insights into the evolution of life over
geological time”? The paper shows stunning photographs of cells with
chromosomes in various stages of cell division. Prior to this fossil find
from Sweden, “evidence for evolutionary conservatism in fern genomes has been
exclusively based on studies of extant plants.” Now, fossils confirm that no
evolution is evident in 180 million Darwin years.
Conventional wisdom fails turtle race: Two halves of a
giant sea turtle fossil came together at last after being separated for 162
years, PhysOrg
reported. One half of the fossil had been brought to the attention of famed
paleontologist Louis Agassiz in 1849. When an amateur found the other
half on a grassy knoll in a New Jersey stream bed in 2012, scientists were
startled, not believing it could have survived so long at the surface – but the
fit was good. “Now, the scientists are revising their conventional
wisdom to say that, sometimes, exposed fossils can survive longer than
previously thought.” Paleontologists estimate the turtle was 10 feet
long, the largest known sea turtle. How did the turtle swim to New
Jersey? “The scientists believe that the entire unbroken bone was
originally embedded in sediment during the Cretaceous Period, 70 to 75
million years ago, when the turtle lived and died,” the article explains,
but then “those sediments eroded and the bone fractured millions of years
later during the Pleistocene or Holocene, before the bone pieces became
embedded in sediments and protected from further deterioration for
perhaps a few thousand more years until their discovery.”
Snakes alive, venomous snake evolution in Africa?
Fossils of a clade of venomous snakes have been found in Tanzania, Science
Daily reports, providing the “Oldest fossil evidence of modern
African venomous snakes” in that part of the continent. “Colubroid
fossils are documented as early as 50 million years ago,” the article explains.
“But they weren’t expected to constitute such a large part of the African
snake fauna 25 million years ago, as they became dominant in Europe and North
America much later.” Instead of the high ratio of venomous snakes “In the
Oligocene epoch, from about 34 to 23 million years ago, we would have
expected to see a fauna dominated by booid snakes, such as boas and
pythons,” experts said. Clearly they didn’t see what they expected.
Cambrian care: Ostracods babysat their young 450
million years ago, an article on Live
Science reveals. Ostracods are small crustaceans that lay eggs; it is
very rare to find fossilized animals of any kind with their eggs intact. This
is the earliest known example of brooding in an animal.
“This is
a very rare and exciting find from the fossil record,” David Siveter,
lead study author and a geologist at the University of Leicester, said in a
statement. “Only a handful of examples are known where eggs are fossilized and
associated with the parent. This discovery tells us that these ancient, tiny
marine crustaceans took particular care of their brood in exactly the same way
as their living relatives.
The
ostracod specimens are among the rare fossils that preserve body
tissues, such as limbs, embryos and other soft parts. These tissues have
been replaced by the mineral pyrite, or fool’s gold, but the
mineralization means the researchers could closely examine the tiny fossils by
X-ray and CT scanning.
The report on Science
Daily says that “like their modern relatives, the ostracods were
probably capable of swimming near the sea bed and obtained their food by
scavenging and hunting.” The “exceptionally well preserved” fossil
ostracods were found in Ordovician strata in New York along with trilobites.
Coal beast from Vietnam: A fossilized “coal beast” and
a rhinoceros, said to be 37 million years old, were found in a Vietnam coal
mine, according to Science
Daily. “The newly described mammals show a surprisingly close
relationship to prehistoric species known from fossil sites in Europe.”
The coal beast is a “pig-like ungulate, closely related to hippos,” the article
says. Their predators were found, too: “The mammals’ remains bear signs
of crocodile attacks. Indeed, the excavation site at Na Duong contains the fossilized
remains of crocodiles up to 6 meters in length.”
Fishapod on the air: Neil Shubin, discoverer of Tiktaalik
(the fossil that crawled onto land behind Neil Tyson in the first Cosmos
episode, 3/10/14)
is taking his fish to TV. In an interview for National
Geographic, he said his fossil garnered so much attention partially because
the Dover case on intelligent design was going on at the time (12/23/05, 12/30/05) and
Steven Colbert also featured it, “it ended up part of popular culture, which
is really wonderful.” Having achieved his “huge find in paleontology”
(1/14/14) he plans to
go back to Ellesmere Island, the site of his discovery, to push the envelope.
“I’m going back there this summer to look for something even older,
something from the ‘Cambrian Explosion,’ when you see all these different sorts
of creatures appear in the fossil record,” he says. “A fish with a
real skull, that’s what we hope to find. That would be terrific.”
There
are facts (the fossils as observed), and there are narratives into which they
are forced. Learn to keep them apart. There is nothing about any of
these “brute fact” fossils that serves the Darwin narrative; indeed, they
militate against it. Early complexity (e.g., the ostracod), extraordinary
stasis (the fern), and the strange mixtures of fossils (tar pits), are not what
Darwin would have predicted. The millions-of-years dates become increasingly
absurd when you think of organisms that Darwin claimed would be in a
continuously fluid state of evolution turn out to be identical to their living
counterparts for hundreds of millions of years. Add to that the
exceptional preservation of many of these fossils after tens or hundreds of
millions of years. How can you believe such things? If we had not
been indoctrinated into the moyboy
lingo for so long, such notions would appear incredible. Philosophically,
time becomes the evolutionists’ closet, as big as a warehouse, in which to hide
their skeletons.
Shubin still doesn’t
mention the tetrapod trackways that precede his fishapod. Let him find a
Cambrian-explosion fish with a skull. Bring it on. That will hurt
the Darwin narrative even more. There’s an inverse relationship going on,
you see: as the Cambrian explodes, Darwinism implodes.
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