Ichthyosaur Fossilized Giving Birth
Caught in the act: another fossil shows an extinct marine reptile giving birth to live young.
National Geographic published a photo and diagram of the fossil of the “oldest sea monster babies” found in China, “pre-dating the previous record by 10 million years.” Said to date from 248 million years ago, the mother ichthyosaur has one offspring stuck in the pelvis and another inside. PhysOrg and Live Science also reported the fossil. PhysOrg says,
The new specimen may contain the oldest fossil embryos of Mesozoic marine reptile, about 10 million years older than those indicated on previous records. The authors also suggest that live births in land reptiles may have appeared much earlier than previously thought.
Live Science added, “The team recovered more than 80 new ichthyosaur skeletons during a recent field expedition to a fossil quarry in south Majiashan, China.”
All three articles seem focused on these aspects: the early date, and the live birth on land. None of them are asking what circumstances would cause a creature to be instantly buried in an act that probably took mere minutes, maybe seconds. None of the articles contain the words rapid, sudden, or quick. None of them discuss the mechanism that buried them intact, with exquisite detail. Some suggest the mother died of complications during birth. Still, even with a little extra time, most creatures would not fossilize even if they died on a beach.
Creationists have used a previous example of a fossil ichthyosaur giving birth as evidence for rapid burial in a flood rather than evolution (see Creation.com for picture and discussion).
This is a good example of how scientists ask questions based on their world view. We would think most neutral observers would be curious to know how a creature was fossilized in such a snapshot of time. Instead, evolutionists are preoccupied with placing the fossil in their fictional timeline of millions of years, wondering when live birth “emerged” in their fictional tale. It’s analogous to the planetary scientists who are so preoccupied finding life elsewhere, they jump to the L-word life any time there is a possibility water exists or once existed on a planet or moon. It’s like the paleontologists who find blood vessels and soft tissue in dinosaur bone, whose immediate thought is to say, “Well, what do you know; soft tissue can last 70 million years!” They don’t question the millions of years; they work to fit the unexpected data to their prior belief.
This shows that scientists are not objective; they see what they want to see. They ask the questions they want to ask. Like Thomas Kuhn taught, scientists work within a paradigm. They are not trained to question the paradigm, but rather to confirm it. Anomalies are puzzles to solve, not threats to the paradigm. Darwin established the currently-popular paradigm of slow, gradual, natural processes over time, without aim or direction. That is what scientists are trained to care about, whether or not it is true, whether or not the evidence supports it. The attraction of Darwin’s paradigm that makes it so entrenched is (1) it does away with God, so one can live according to one’s own pleasures, and (2) it provides job security for storytellers.
Learn to ask the questions the evolutionists don’t ask. There’s wisdom outside the box, and new, more interesting questions to pursue.
Comments
From the NG article;
”Live birth in reptiles seems to have evolved more than a hundred times in history.”
– I take it this means a random chance process led to the independent transformation from eggs to live birth more than a hundred different times. Sounds like magic to me.
– As the editor alludes to; the sub title of the article is, “Ichthyosaur died while giving birth” i.e. not fossilized while giving birth.
Not mutually exclusive. Died because it was rapidly buried giving birth.
The NG article refers to a ”mother” Ichthyosaur and her two ”babies.” That’s kind of interesting, as many of our Left friends refuse to speak of an in-the-womb human foetus as a baby. In my view this kind of language is deliberate equivocation… and the author should have referred to a female and its young; not a mother and her babies. (This kind of thing isn’t an accidental, but is done purposively, to deny the boundary between animal and human.)
– In case you weren’t aware of it, some of our more radical professors now want to ban the word mother… but I guess not when it comes to extinct reptiles.
Hi,
We read here in the article:
“Creationists have used a previous example of a fossil ichthyosaur giving birth as evidence for rapid burial in a flood rather than evolution…”
I am just wondering how the water could carry so much mud on the dinosaurs so that it could bury these huge animals. Strong water would rather carry away the animal, which when drown after some time usually comes up and floats on the surface of the water as a dead body. Sometimes this is seen in Indian rivers.
Radha
What makes this confusing is that we have another fossil of an Ichthyosaur fossilized while giving birth… where “the the beak of the young reptile is still inside mother’s birth canal.” So we have one example of each.
“The scientists reached their conclusion because the fossil showed the offspring emerging head-first—a behavior found only in animals that give birth on land.”
– the Darwinists who wrote this article claim that Ichthyosaurs moved from land to sea several times… but this seems highly unlikely. (We know that in humans breech birth happens, so this [fossil] could just be a highly unusual case… A sample size of one can tell us nothing.)