Fossil Brachiopod Shows Soft Part Details
American and British paleontologists described in Nature1 the discovery of nearly complete brachiopods with calcified soft parts intact. They exhibited intricate details never before seen in fossils of these organisms, sometimes called lamp shells. Brachiopods, a type of marine animal that attached itself to the sea floor with a pedicle or stalk, were very abundant in the Cambrian, but are rare now.
By carving off the concretion encasing the fossil a layer at a time, and photographing each layer, Sutton et al. were able to produce a computerized 3-D model of the entire organism. The two specimens differ from extant brachiopods in some respects. The fossils were found buried in a Herefordshire (UK) volcanic ash bed estimated to be 425 million years old.
See also the reports in EurekAlert #1 and #2. The latter is entitled, “Still shellfish after 425 million years: Clam-like creature preserved perfectly in ancient fossil.”
1Sutton et al., “Silurian brachiopods with soft-tissue preservation,” Nature 436, 1013-1015 (18 August 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature03846.
Except for the shells, brachiopods are extremely delicate. That is why, even though they were abundant in the past, no complete fossil with the soft parts intact has been found until now. That these ones could be preserved so completely, with such fine detail, is remarkable enough, but to be told that these fossils lay undisturbed for 425 million years stretches credibility.
Even according to the evolutionists’ own fictional timeline, major changes to the earth were supposed to have taken place since the Cambrian: continents broke apart, supervolcanos erupted, meteors struck and caused mass extinctions, the climate warmed and cooled, mountains rose and fell, and seas and glaciers advanced and retreated. The continents could have eroded to sea level multiple times in the interval we are being asked to believe these brachiopod fossils just sat their waiting for a paleontologist to find them. How come there has been so little evolution to this group in such a long time? Why does no one in the secular literature ever ponder such questions? Why are the dates of the rocks never put into doubt? How could anyone possibly know that such specimens could remain intact for that long? Why do reporters just regurgitate everything they are told?
Since no one in those groups ever asks such questions, you can exercise a little free thought. Play a little visualization game in your head. Start by imagining all of recorded history: all the wars, kingdoms, migrations, and natural disasters man has witnessed. Then imagine a prehistory of evolutionary and geological change stretching back a hundred thousand times as long, without any human observers. During all this time, the earth veritably remade its surface multiple times. Now think about the crudely preserved bodies buried at Pompeii in the 1st century AD for comparison. Is it reasonable to you, dear reader, to believe that these fossil brachiopods were really buried 425 million years ago? If not, why do you think they are telling us this story?