Precambrian Rabbit or Evolutionary Transition?

Some evolutionists have defended their theory by proposing a falsification test: the discovery of a Precambrian rabbit.  No such fossil has ever been found, partly because any stratum containing a rabbit fossil would never have been labeled Precambrian in the first place.  But evolutionists would be surprised at finding complex non-marine multicellular eukaryotes in Precambrian strata, and this has just been announced in Nature.
    A team led by Paul Strother of Boston College with help from Oxford University and University of Sheffield has announced “Earth’s earliest non-marine eukaryotes.”¹  “Direct evidence of fossils within rocks of non-marine origin in the Precambrian is exceedingly rare,” they said.  In Arizona, they found not only ambiguous traces, but oodles of clear evidence for freshwater eukaryotes:

Here we report the recovery of large populations of diverse organic-walled microfossils extracted by acid maceration, complemented by studies using thin sections of phosphatic nodules that yield exceptionally detailed three-dimensional preservation.  These assemblages contain multicellular structures, complex-walled cysts, asymmetric organic structures, and dorsiventral, compressed organic thalli, some approaching one millimetre in diameter.  They offer direct evidence of eukaryotes living in freshwater aquatic and subaerially exposed habitats during the Proterozoic era.  The apparent dominance of eukaryotes in non-marine settings by 1?Gyr ago indicates that eukaryotic evolution on land may have commenced far earlier than previously thought.

The date of one billion years is nearly twice as long ago as the Cambrian explosion.  The paper shows over a dozen specimens of different shapes and levels of organization, from spherical clumps of cells to others with differentiated structures.  “The Torridonian assemblages contain some striking examples of microfossils that show complexity that goes considerably beyond that of simple leiospheres” [i.e., nondescript clusters].  Some have vesicles, outer walls and armlike projections (thalli).  They figured these organisms were “approaching a tissue-level grade of organization.”
    Where would these fit into evolutionary theory?  Some evolutionists posit the origin of life at 3 billion years ago.  These organisms, at 1 billion years, would represent early experiments into multicellular organisms.  The small sizes, they said, argue against them being blastulae (early developmental stages of metazoans).  “The simplicity of these balls of cells precludes their systematic assignment within the Eukarya,” they said; “However, their morphology, in combination with larger, probably multicellular thalli (Fig. 3 b), indicates that evolutionary processes that preceded tissue-grade multicellularity in marine settings, such as cell-to-cell adhesion, were also evident in non-marine settings by 1?Gyr ago.”
    This means that “Early eukaryotes were clearly capable of diversifying within non-marine habitats, not just in marine settings as has been generally assumed.”  Because terrestrial environments offer more variety, “Such habitat heterogeneity translates directly into increased speciation potential,” they claimed.
    Another interesting fossil was reported in the same issue of Nature.¹  A giant version of anomalocaris, the terror of Cambrian seas (as pictured in the opening of the film Darwin’s Dilemma; see trailer) has been found in Ordovician deposits in Morocco.  Science Daily has an artist rendition of the creature that measured up to three feet long – a foot longer than earlier records, and 30 million years younger than other specimens famous from the Burgess Shale.
    The “extraordinarily well-preserved fossils” also show a series of “segments across the animal’s back, which scientists think might have functioned as gills.”  So not only was this creature more complex, it “existed for much longer and grew to much larger sizes than previously thought,” the article said.  How were they fossilized?  “The animals found in Morocco inhabited a muddy sea floor in fairly deep water, and were trapped by sediment clouds that buried them and preserved their soft bodies.”

1.  Strother, Battison, Brasier and Wellman, “Earth’s earliest non-marine eukaryotes,” Nature 473 (26 May 2011), pages 505-509, doi:10.1038/nature09943.
2.  Peter Van Roy and Derek E. G. Briggs, “A giant Ordovician anomalocaridid,” Nature 473 (26 May 2011), pages 510-513, doi:10.1038/nature09920.

These fossils will not cure the evolutionists of their storytelling.  Evolution has been falsified in so many ways already, another anomaly or two won’t cure them.  The evolutionist brain has evolved extraordinary plasticity above the average brain, allowing it to stretch and twist beyond comprehension.  What they should be noticing is the trend that complex life keeps appearing abruptly earlier and earlier, even in their own twisted dating scheme.  The anomalocaridid fossil is typical of the fossil record: abrupt appearance, fully formed, lives for a time, and disappears.  That’s not evolution.
    Their self-contained web of belief is immune to challenge, because it is already accepted by faith and enforced by consensus.  Those not already snared by the web can see what they are doing.  The catch-phrase “than previously thought” is a tip-off that another fact has impacted the web.  When you see it, you are about to watch the Darwin spider come running to repair it with a new twist on the plot.
Exercise:  Describe how evolutionists would repair their web of belief if a Precambrian rabbit were to be found.