Fossil Evidence

Most people have been led to believe that the fossil record is the most compelling evidence for universal common descent, i.e. Darwinism.

For over one hundred years, Darwinian paleontologists have lined-up similar looking fossils in attempts to create the illusion that lower forms of life evolved into higher forms of life (common descent). But, when geneticists acquired the ability to compare genetic sequences of similar looking organisms, it was clear that creating lineages and family trees (phylogeny) based on similar features (homology) is “wrong and misleading”:

• “Dr Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, said: “For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life. We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality.” …
  Dr Rose said: “The tree of life is being politely buried – we all know that. What’s less accepted is our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change.””
  Telegraph UK Online, “Charles Darwin’s tree of life is ‘wrong and misleading’, claim scientists”, January 22, 2009,
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/4312355/Charles-Darwins-tree-of-life-is-wrong-and-misleading-claim-scientists.html
• “Today’s computational tools use sequence similarity, assuming that genes with similar sequences indicate common ancestry … But Durand’s tests showed that this assumption often does not hold. Her team found disturbing results when they compared sequence similarity to their Neighborhood Correlation method in evaluating the 20 gene families with established histories. The sequence similarity method actually yielded false ancestral associations and missed true ancestral relationships.”
  Carnegie Mellon University, “New Tool To Understand Evolution Of Multi-Domain Genes Developed”, May 18, 2008, ScienceDaily website.
  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080515205640.htm

What is a transitional or intermediate fossil?

Here is the typical evolutionary definition:
“What a transitional fossil is, in keeping with what the theory of evolution predicts, is a fossil that shows a mosaic of features from an older and more recent organism.”
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC200.html

So, where do they draw the line when connecting all the millions of fossils to each other? Is one shared feature enough? How about two, or three, or four, five, six? Does it also pertain to internal organs?

The only criteria used is seeing a gap in the record and attempting to fill it with some sort of fossil. It’s as simple (and pathetic) as that. But the real question of fossil evidence remains to be answered:

Does the fossil record provide ANY evidence for evolution creating new features to appear in existing organisms?

Refer to the first two diagrams from “Fins to Limbs”:
http://www.devoniantimes.org/opportunity/tetrapodsAnswer.html

The author lines up a fanciful progression of fossils and adds new bones as needed, attributing the evolution of them to nothing other than “refinements and variations of the adaptations and features.”
Notice how new bones instantly appear in the drawings and how the author conveniently forgets to mention how the necessary muscles, tendons, nerves, etc. also evolve simultaneously with them.

Do you see any fossils in the diagrams that have a partial bone mass displaying an initial development of a humerus, mesomeres, radius, ulna, or ulnar? Why not?

What causes new features to instantly appear and be fully assembled, fully formed, and immediately functional?
Go to: http://www.whoisyourcreator.com/how_does_evolution_occur.html

Why are there NO examples of any partially formed feature found in an existing population or in the fossil record?

• “It is not necessarily easy to “see” macroevolutionary history; there are no firsthand accounts to be read.”
  http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/_0_0/evoscales_05
• “In each of these pivotal nexuses in life’s history, the principal “types” seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate “grades” or intermediate forms between different types are detectable.”
  http://www.biology-direct.com/content/2/1/21

Below are even more problems with the fossil record

Evolution predicts that life began as simple organisms, but complexity has been rule, not exception, in the earliest known fossils:

• “Our earliest animal ancestors, it appears, were sponges — multicellular animals that feed by passing seawater though a complex system of internal channels. And these earliest sponges may predate the Ediacarian period by as much as 80 million years, this new evidence shows …
  And, after painstaking chemical analysis, they found sponge-derived steroids in abundance — and with them, strong new evidence that sponges, among the simplest forms of multicellular life, were indeed the first such organisms on Earth.”
  http://www.physorg.com/news152976776.html
• “Part of the intrigue with the Cambrian explosion is that numerous animal phyla with very distinct body plans arrive on the scene in a geological blink of the eye, with little or no warning of what is to come in rocks that predate this interval of time.”
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19472371
• “Until now, the dominant paradigm in the field of paleobiology has been that the earliest multicellular animals were simple, and that strategies organisms use today to survive, reproduce and grow in numbers have arisen over time due to several factors …
  ‘How Funisia appears in the fossils clearly shows that ecosystems were complex very early in the history of animals on Earth – ‘”
  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080320150025.htm

Evolution predicts that fossils can be accurately dated using radiocarbon dating techniques. But, recent research shows fundamental problems with these techniques.

• “The principle of radiocarbon dating is that plants and animals absorb trace amounts of radioactive carbon-14 from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere while they are alive but stop doing so when they die. The carbon-14 decays from archaeological and geological samples so the amount left in the sample gives an indication of how old the sample is.
  As the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is not constant, but varies with the strength of the earth’s magnetic field, solar activity and ocean radiocarbon ages must be corrected with a calibration curve.”
  Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, “Scientists produce archaeological ‘time machine’”, February 11, 2010, Physorg website.
  http://www.physorg.com/news185112176.html
• “The precise timing of the origin of life on Earth and the changes in life during the past 4.5 billion years has been a subject of great controversy for the past century. The principal indicator of the amount of organic carbon produced by biological activity traditionally used is the ratio of the less abundant isotope of carbon, 13C, to the more abundant isotope, 12C.
  It appears that records related to carbonate platforms which are often used throughout the early history of the Earth are not good recorders of the 13C/12C ratio in the open oceans. Hence, the work presented suggests that assumptions made previously about changes in the 13C/12C ratios of carbonate sediments in the geological record are incorrect.”
  http://www.physorg.com/news140266859.html

Evolution predicts that the earth is old and was formed by a gradual layering of different types of sediment. But, the layers lack uniformity when comparisons are made throughout the earth, and it is now known that the technique of dating fossils by their position within geological layers (strata) in NOT supported by empirical evidence:

• “Relative dating places fossils in a temporal sequence by noting their positions in layers of rocks, known as strata … Sometimes this method doesn’t work, either because the layers weren’t deposited horizontally to begin with, or because they have been overturned.”
  University of California Museum of Paleontology and the National Center for Science Education website, “Chronology” page.
  http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/lines_10
• “A great deal has changed, however, and contemporary geologists and paleontologists now generally accept catastrophe as a ‘way of life’ although they may avoid the word catastrophe.”
  David, M. Raup, Paleontologist, University of Chicago, quoted while curator and Dean of Science at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
• “I hope I have convinced you that the sedimentary record is largely a record of episodic events rather than being uniformly continuous. My message is that episodicity is the rule, not the exception…. We need to shed those lingering subconscious constraints of old uniformitarian thinking.”
  (Emeritus) Professor Robert Dott, Sedimentary Geology, UW Madison, “The Rule” Presidential Address To Society of Economic Paleontologists & Mineralogists, Geotimes, Nov. 1982, p.16 Dott is a co-author of a leading textbook of earth history, Evolution of the Earth (McGraw-Hill), which is now in its 7th edition. In 1995, he received the Geological Society of America’s History of Geology Division Award.

For more information, go to the ‘Age of the Earth and Universe’ page

If evolution is true, why is it that evolutionists focus on the fossil record? Shouldn’t we be able to observe it occurring in real time?

“It is not necessarily easy to “see” macroevolutionary history; there are no firsthand accounts to be read. Instead, we reconstruct the history of life using multiple lines of evidence, including geology, fossils, and living organisms.”
University of California Museum of Paleontology and the National Center for Science Education
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/_0_0/evoscales_05

This is most incriminating evidence against all the tenets of evolution!

	“The implication, the researchers said, is that birds almost certainly did not descend from theropod dinosaurs, such as tyrannosaurus or allosaurus. The findings add to a growing body of evidence in the past two decades that challenge some of the most widely-held beliefs about animal evolution. ‘For one thing, birds are found earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs they are supposed to have descended from,’ Ruben said.” Oregon State University, “Discovery raises new doubts about dinosaur-bird links,” June 9th, 2009, Physorg.com. http://www.physorg.com/news163760732.html “In each of these pivotal nexuses in life’s history, the principal “types” seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate “grades” or intermediate forms between different types are detectable.” —Eugene V. Koonin