The Fossils that Didn’t Evolve

Here’s an assortment of newly-discovered fossils that challenge Darwinian evolution.

Bad Boy beetle: “He’s Australian, around half a centimetre long, fairly nondescript, 300 million years old, and he’s currently causing astonishment among both entomologists and palaeontologists,” says Science Daily. Why the astonishment?

…[T]he species that has now been discovered, assigned to the newly introduced family Ponomarenkiidae, can be identified as a modern beetle, in spite of its remarkable age. Modern characteristics are the antennae resembling a string of beads, antennal grooves, and the unusually narrow abdomen, tapering to a point. What is more, unlike previously known Permian beetles, the wing cases are completely hardened, the body’s surface is largely smooth, and the thoracic segments responsible for locomotion show modern features, notes insect palaeontologist Yan. In addition, it appears that this little beetle had stopped living under tree bark, the habitat favoured by its contemporaries, and had adopted a much more exposed lifestyle on plants. A significant fact is that, due to its unorthodox combination of ancestral and modern characteristics, this genus does not fit in any of the four suborders of beetles that still exist, which is why Yan and Beutel have given it the nickname Bad Boy.

Think about that phrase, “ancestral and modern characteristics.” Does it not make sense that ‘modern’ trumps ‘ancestral’? If you found an Oldsmobile Cutlass with a Sirius XM radio and GPS navigation system in its dashboard, when would you say it was made? Wouldn’t the modern parts answer the question? Would you believe someone claiming that the entire car (modern parts and all) was manufactured in 1961? Humans might install modern parts in classic cars, but evolution cannot. The only way to claim “modern” traits existed is to force the abrupt appearance of those traits earlier in Darwin Years than expected, like claiming Sirius XM radio evolved in 1961, 28 years before XM radio was even introduced.

Trippy elephant: Last November in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a nine-year-old boy stumbled on a rock that turned out to be a fossil, National Geographic says. The family gathered and noticed it looked like a jaw with teeth. Thinking it was a big fat rotten cow, they decided to call New Mexico State University Professor Peter Houde, who identified it as a stegomastodon, an extinct relative of elephants Houde claims is a million years old. Reporter Joseph Kolb at Fox News Science must have noticed “stegomastodon” and thought “stegosaur” because he wrongly calls it a dinosaur! Kolb did record this interesting admission by Houde about the creature: “Ours would look pretty much just like modern elephants if they were alive today although the Cuvieronius had spiral tusks.” Historical note: Georges Cuvier, after whom the creature is named, was a staunch anti-evolutionist.

Desert jellyfish: Death Valley—the hottest place on earth—is a long way today from the nearest California beach. But in a remote part of this desert national park, a mass kill of jellyfish has been found embedded in the rocks. New Scientist reports the discovery of 13 jellyfish by UC Riverside scientists. “The discovery suggests the marine animals behaved in a comparable way to their modern counterparts,” the article states. But here’s the kicker: they date from the Cambrian Explosion, 540 million Darwin Years ago!

The jellyfish in the Cambrian seas seemed to have looked and behaved a lot like they do today. Sappenfield and his colleagues believe that the ancient jellyfish also lived near the shore, until tides or waves pushed them closer to the beach. When the tide receded the animals got stranded, just as modern jellyfish do.

But jellyfish washing up on today’s beaches have a poor chance of becoming fossils. Most are quickly torn to pieces by scavengers or curious children.

The rest of the article quickly turns to rescue devices to save the millions of years. But it’s difficult; “Because sand on today’s beaches shifts about so much, any evidence of something as delicate as a jellyfish would be destroyed very quickly.”

Instant Ediacarans: Another fossil story from Science Daily talks about “Big, shape-shifting animals from the dawn of time.” What are they? Well, nobody is sure they are even animals. They are fern-shaped multicellular organisms called Rangeomorphs from the Ediacaran period, some 50 million Darwin Years before the Cambrian explosion. But they exploded onto the scene themselves. After some preliminary Darwin fluff in the opening paragraphs comes this admission: “They show up in the fossil record with a bang, at very large size.” Attributing this to changes in ocean chemistry is like attributing dogs to the appearance of fire hydrants. David Klinghoffer debunks the ocean-chemistry theory on Evolution News & Science Today.

Convergent reptiles: An extinct diapsid reptile known as Eusaurosphargis [“true-lizard-turtle”] has been found in Switzerland, reports Science Daily. Previously known only from badly-scattered bones, Eusaurosphargis is now better understood from this “excellently preserved” specimen, allowing paleontologists to infer its environment. Since it was found in marine sediments despite being a scaly reptile, the discoverers assume “that it was washed off a nearby island into the sea basin and became embedded in the finely layered marine sediments after death.” Storytellers took their cue:

Grisons [Switzerland], 241 million years ago — Instead of amidst high mountains, a small reptile suns itself on an island beach in a warm shallow sea, where many fish and marine reptiles frolic. This is the story told by an excellently preserved new discovery of the reptile Eusaurosphargis dalsassoi studied by paleontologists from the University of Zurich.”

Further down, though, evolutionary problems set in, rescued by “convergent evolution” —

In the process, they discovered something astonishing: Externally, Eusaurosphargis dalsassoi looks very similar to girdled lizards (Cordylidae), a group of small, scaled reptiles (Lepidosauria) that usually live in the dry regions of southern Africa. Some of the more strongly armored girdled lizard species could have served as the basis of mythical dragon legends due to their appearance. “This is a case of convergent development as the extinct species is not closely related to today’s African lizards”, Scheyer explains.

Evolutionists are trying to fit this fossil in with marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs, but they have a problem: “The skeleton of Eusaurosphargis, however, shows neither a streamlined body structure, nor arms and legs that have transformed into flippers, as well as no tail fin, which would indicate a life at sea.”

Did you catch how many times the evolutionists were “astonished” at these fossils? Creationists are not astonished to find modern-looking animals appearing abruptly and failing to evolve. They are not surprised by mosaics of traits in fully-functioning, well-designed animals. They are not astonished to find land animals in marine sediments.

Readers, please notice three no-no’s in scientific explanations. (1) You can’t use circular reasoning, embedding your assumptions in your explanation. This is like the bad syllogism, “I believe everything evolved without God. I found a fossil. Therefore, it evolved without a Creator.” (2) You can’t mask a bad explanation with jargon. Terms like convergent evolution, ancestral, ancient, primitive, etc. embed Darwinism into the answers, sidestepping the issues that need explanation. (3) You can’t exclude alternative explanations by arbitrary rules. To say in advance that ‘We will only accept materialistic answers’ doesn’t help understanding; it prevents it. Darwin himself said that “A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” Let the evidence drive the explanation, not the ideology.

Darwinists are frequently guilty of all three no-no’s, as shown above. So say No! No! to Darwin and his storytelling disciples.