No Evolution in 58 Million Years
“Plant fossils give first real picture of earliest Neotropical rainforests,” announced a press release from University of Florida. The fossils from Colombia show that “many of the dominant plant families existing in today’s Neotropical rainforests – including legumes, palms, avocado and banana – have maintained their ecological dominance despite major changes in South America’s climate and geological structure.”
The team found 2,000 megafossil specimens from the Paleocene, said to be 58 million years old. This is only 5 to 8 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs according to conventional dating. “The new study provides evidence Neotropical rainforests were warmer and wetter in the late Paleocene than today but were composed of the same plant families that now thrive in rainforests.” The press release says that the fossil record from neotropical rain forests has been “almost nonexistent” – but now, it is evident that modern plant families existed then. “We have the fossils to prove this,” one said. “The foundations of the Neotropical rainforests were there 58 million years ago.”
The only difference between modern rainforests and the fossil record is more diversity now. But since identification of species can only be made to the genus level, there may be some subjectivity in that judgment. An earlier team also found the skeleton of a giant snake at the open coal pit mine – Titanoboa. “Like Titanoboa, which is clearly related to living boas and anacondas, the ancient forest of northern Colombia had similar families of plants as we see today in that ecosystem.”
In a related story, Live Science pushed the “oldest known spider web” back another 4 million years (cf. 06/23/2006). The web material, encased in amber, not only proves that spiders had the web-making equipment as far back as the fossil record shows, but that it has continued with little change for 140 million years according to the consensus dating scheme.
All right, Darwinists: you say evolution is a fact, and fossils are the evidence. Where is the evolution? 58 million years have gone by in your scheme, and we have the exact same families of plants today. There isn’t enough difference to concern the most fervent young-earth creationists (notice that ICR celebrated this find as confirming of a young earth and global flood). Surely if natural selection was acting for such a huge amount of time, we should expect to see some evolution. Remember, you believe that a cow turned into a whale in less than half that time. We love fossils and evidence, but give us a reason other than your own bluff to take your storytelling scheme seriously.