Manipulating Fossils to Fit Evolution

No matter how unusual a fossil appears, evolutionists will find a way to fit it into their favorite Darwin narrative, or else will ignore the non-Darwinian implications.

Wait: those aren’t bird teeth! For 50 years, Live Science says, cryptic teeth in Alberta separated from the bodies have been interpreted as bird teeth. That’s a load of croc, Laura Geggel writes. They’re really crocodile teeth. Sydney Mohr says, “No one has ever taken a really good look at them.” She compared them to teeth of extinct bird groups and crocodilians, and found that they matched juvenile croc teeth the best.

It’s also possible that some of the teeth did, in fact, come from birds, Mohr said. But even if they didn’t, that doesn’t mean prehistoric birds didn’t fly over southern Alberta. It’s possible that toothless birds lived there, or that toothed-bird remains simply weren’t preserved, she said.

Speaking of toothless birds, PNAS built an evolutionary tale out of tooth loss. That’s right; loss of teeth in birds who evolved beaks. They say that their hypothesis “provides insight into the macroevolution of avian beaks.”

Shifts toward earlier cessation of postnatal tooth development can be identified in fish, amphibians, and mammals that are edentulous [toothless] as adults; therefore the identification of similar transitions in multiple Mesozoic theropod dinosaur lineages strongly implies that heterochronic truncation of odontogenesis played an important role in the macroevolution of beaks in modern birds.

Turning tooth development off in the embryo seems an easy thing for chance to do. Wouldn’t a better case of macroevolution be to evolve teeth from scratch?

The dinosaur-eating frog: Sounds like a horror movie for the Jurassic Park series: “Giant Frog Eats T. rex”. Actually, this frog, with a powerful bite, probably concentrated on smaller dinos. They didn’t find dinosaurs in its stomach, but Science Daily reports,

South American horned frog: credit, Kristopher Lappin

Scientists say that a large, now extinct, frog called Beelzebufo that lived about 68 million years ago in Madagascar would have been capable of eating small dinosaurs….

The study found that small horned frogs, with head width of about 4.5cm, can bite with a force of 30 newtons (N) or about 3 kg or 6.6 lbs. A scaling experiment, comparing bite force with head and body size, calculated that large horned frogs that are found in the tropical and subtropical moist lowland forests of South America, with a head width of up to 10 cm, would have a bite force of almost 500 N. This is comparable to reptiles and mammals with a similar head size.

“This would feel like having 50 litres of water balanced on your fingertip,” says Professor Kristopher Lappin, Professor of Biological Sciences at California State Polytechnic University — Pomona.

Based on their scaling relationship, the scientists estimated the bite force of the giant extinct frog Beelzebufo — which is in many ways similar to living horned frogs — may have had a bite up to 2200 N, comparable to formidable mammalian predators such as wolves and female tigers.

“At this bite force, Beelzebufo would have been capable of subduing the small and juvenile dinosaurs that shared its environment,” says Dr Jones.

Doesn’t this imply that extinct frogs were more fit than modern frogs? The scientists didn’t go into that.

Imagining ancestors. Fossils of small, agile predators: how could these be the ancestors of giant sauropods, the largest herbivores that ever walked the earth? Science Daily reports without criticism a remarkable thesis by evolutionists in Munich who connect these two unlikely relatives:

The best known sauropod dinosaurs were huge herbivorous creatures, whose brain structures were markedly different from those of their evolutionary predecessors, for the earliest representatives of the group were small, lithe carnivores….

However, the early representatives of the lineage that led to these lumbering giants were strikingly different in form and habits. For a start, they were carnivores — like Saturnalia tupiniquim, an early sauropod dinosaur that was about the same size as a modern wolf.

This hypothesis, based entirely on comparing dentition, reminds Darwin skeptics of the evolutionary story about a wolf-sized land animal becoming a gigantic whale. And what about the neck becoming longer? Remember what evolutionists admitted about the classic evolutionary story of the giraffe? (9/16/17). This story is even more implausible.

The upside-down ankylosaurs. Paleontologists from Alberta were curious why 70% of ankylosaurs are found belly up. Is that due to chance, or to some other reason? Did predators turn them over? Apparently not; most lack tooth marks. Live Science says ” the researchers tested what turned out to be the correct hypothesis — that the ankylosaurs had either drowned or been swept out to sea once they died.” The “bloat and float” hypothesis pictures them filling with gas after drowning and flipping over. Glyptodonts, which evolutionists date earlier, are also often found on their backs. But since armored dinosaurs are large and heavy, up to 26 feet long and weighing 8 tons, doesn’t that require rapid burial? Laura Geggel calmly asserts, “These Late Cretaceous armored beasts were swept out to sea after they died, where they flipped over, sunk down to the seabed and fossilized, the researchers found.” But if that hypothesis were correct, we should expect to observe that happening to large, heavy animals today. Typically, animals are quickly eaten at sea. What could sweep a huge, heavy animal like an ankylosaur out to sea? Doesn’t that require a rather large Flood?

Fossils do not interpret themselves. They are seen through the lens of a worldview. Evolutionists don’t just see fossils through Darwin-colored glasses. That would imply they could take the glasses off and think objectively. No; their Darwin worldview has been carved into their eyeballs like irreversible lasik surgery. Darwin Lasik distorts every bone it sees, like seeing fossils through a fun-house mirror that stre-e-e-t-t-t-ches things into millions of years.