Fossil Fish Meat Pushes Idea of Early Complexity
An article in National Geographic News today has a title to catch the eye (or nose) of seafood lovers: “Fossil Meat Found in 380-Million-Year-Old Fish.” Knowing how quickly fish spoils if left out, this might strike a reader as surprising. Sure enough, fossilized muscle, with “bundles of muscle cells, blood vessels, and nerve cells” clearly visible, has been found in western Australia.1
This placoderm, an extinct kind of armored fish, was found in the same formation as Gogonasus, another placoderm reported last year in Nature and judged to be an ancestor of tetrapods (see 10/20/2006). Once again, a placoderm fossil from this vicinity is claimed to “shed light” on evolution. The article quickly left the soft-tissue evidence behind and concentrated on where placoderms fit into evolutionary story of fish and land animals.
Two things are surprising the researchers about this fossil: (1) the soft tissue preservation, and (2) its “many features resembling those found on modern land animals.” The article says that most of vertebrate evolution appeared early on, that we need to get over misconceptions of slow and gradual development. John Long, the lead who reported the Gogonasus fossil last October, explained:
Most people have the “Hollywood view of evolution,” in which a fish morphs into an amphibian, followed by a reptile, then a mammal, then a primate, and finally a human, he [John Long, Museum Victoria] said.
“But when we look at the Gogo fish, we see that so much of the human body plan is pushed back into the fishes. So that the origin of all our anatomical systems—90 percent of it—happened within fishes,” he said.
“After the fishes left the sea and invaded the land, the rest was really fine-tuning of an existing pattern.”
He left it to the reader’s imagination how all the complexity arose in the placoderm’s ancestors.
1The article did not make it clear if the material was entirely lithified: i.e., replaced by minerals. To see blood vessels and individual cells would seem to indicate otherwise.
We need to learn if the soft tissue really is still soft, original tissue. If mineralized, it is astonishing to have such detailed preservation in something so old in the evolutionary geological timetable. If unmineralized, it is super-astonishing. This makes the 70-mya soft tissue in the T. rex (11/11/2006, 03/24/2005) look positively recent by comparison.
The title and body of this article illustrate again the incorrigibility of evolutionists. (Despite Long’s rebuke, most evolutionists themselves have a Hollywood view of evolution.) Can they really expect reasonable people to accept their claim that this fossilized muscle is 380 million years old? You can’t keep fish meat in the frig for more than a couple of weeks, under ideal conditions, without it putrefying. Yet this sample has intact blood vessels and cells. This should be a bombshell.
Just when the Darwinist army is decimated and pounded to a pulp by a superior force of evidence, they rally around the Charlie standard and chant “Death to the creationist imbeciles!” No upset is great enough to make them leave the field and admit defeat. Valor is a good thing, but without discretion, it is lacking its better part.