Unusual Fossils Twisted to Support Darwinism
A fossil is a standalone reality. Darwinism is a story that force-fits these standalone realities into a predetermined narrative. Watch how it is done.
Oldest Plesiosaur Is Still a Plesiosaur
At New Scientist, Michael LePage is astonished at a Triassic plesiosaur. Even though it is clearly a plesiousaur, it’s ‘older’ than the plesiosaurs that dominated in the Jurassic and Cretaceous parts of the evolutionary timeline, he says. The rocks, and the labels applied to them, however, do not tell time. The labels like “Triassic” are man-made, and only describe what fossils are found in rocks with that label. (Remember that radiometric dating is not done on sedimentary rock.) Darwinians take the rocks and the fossils and construct evolutionary stories of common ancestry and millions of years. Taking out his Darwin magic wand and using the moyboy incantation book, LePage chants “it evolved” as his abracadabra to relate his oracle:
The fossil shows that, as predicted, plesiosaurs evolved in the late Triassic and survived the mass extinction that ushered in the Jurassic era 200 million years ago. All other marine reptiles, apart from the dolphin-like ichthyosaurs, died out….
At the beginning of the Triassic, a wide range of reptiles colonised the seas. Some evolved long, flexible necks with up to 70 vertebrae – more than any other vertebrates. These “snake-necked” marine reptiles gave rise to plesiosaurs late in the Triassic, the new find confirms….
Plesiosaurs thrived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. Some evolved into the short-necked, large-headed pliosaurs, such as the enormous Predator X. They died out 66 million years ago, along with the dinosaurs.
Science Daily, too, ignores the requirements to build a successful animal in its rush to Darwinian storytelling. Any creature that is ‘successful’ is considered a masterpiece of evolution.
Instead of laboriously pushing the water out of the way with their paddles, plesiosaurs were gliding elegantly along with limbs modified to underwater wings. Their small head was placed on a long, streamlined neck. The stout body contained strong muscles keeping those wings in motion. Compared to the other marine reptiles, the tail was short because it was only used for steering. This evolutionary design was very successful, but curiously it did not evolve again after the extinction of the plesiosaurs” says paleontologist Prof. Martin Sander from the Steinmann Institute of Geology, Mineralogy, and Paleontology of the University of Bonn.
The long extinct paddle saurians easily could have held their own against today’s water animals….
The phrase “evolutionary design” is a case of sophoxymoronia. Darwinism has no designer. In Darwin’s theory, stuff just happens. Some stuff lasts longer than other stuff; that’s all.
The paper in Nature‘s open-access journal Science Advances is full of Darwinese. The authors speak of an evolutionary line, and evolutionary trend, and “the evolution of a unique body plan.” From the headline to the abstract, we are told that “In the aftermath of the end-Permian extinction, diverse marine reptiles evolved early in the Triassic.” But since they cannot trace the specific mutations that occurred to be naturally selected, nor identify any transitional forms, all they have left is the power of suggestion emanating from the incense of Darwin’s vision: “Histology suggests the concurrent evolution of fast growth and an elevated metabolic rate as an adaptation to cruising and efficient foraging in the open sea.” Normally, sensible people would attribute “efficient foraging” to engineering design.
Today’s Tortoises Have Devolved from Fossil Specimens
What do you say when animals were bigger and better in the past? If you are a Darwinian, you still ascribe it to evolution. For example, Colin Barras at New Scientist surprises his readers by stating that “Giant tortoises are rare today but once roamed four continents.” So how does this anomaly fit Darwin’s theory? Barras offers proof by assertion:
Tortoises evolved into giants on at least seven occasions and on four continents. The finding undermines the long-standing idea that tortoises become enormous only if they are stranded on remote islands.
Because giant tortoises only survive on the Galapagos Islands today, evolutionists came up with an ‘island rule’ that “states that, on islands, small animals tend to evolve larger bodies.” Even though evolutionists were caught wrong by the fossil record, Darwinism can’t lose. “Tortoises evolved.”
Penguins Have Also Devolved from Fossil Specimens
A penguin as tall as a man? Really? That’s what Live Science reports about a “refrigerator-sized” penguin fossil found in New Zealand. Ironically, the discoverers at first thought they had found a giant turtle. This specimen only gets the silver medal, though; “The ancient behemoth is now considered the second-largest penguin on record” after one found in Antarctica. That’s the evidence. Now, stay tuned for the evolutionary confab:
The bird’s gigantism indicates that “a very large size seems to have developed early on in penguin evolution, soon after these birds lost their flight capabilities,” said study co-lead researcher Gerald Mayr, a curator of ornithology at the Senckenberg Research Institute, in Germany….
Given that the Antarctic penguin was larger than K. biceae, it’s likely that “giant size evolved more than once in penguin evolution,” Mayr said.
Let’s get this straight. Penguins got smaller, so they evolved. Penguins lost their flight capabilities, so they evolved. Darwin is never going to get humans from bacteria at this rate. Rushing to the rescue, the Darwinians surmise that New Zealand was surrounded by tasty fish, allowing the earlier penguins to grow larger (a Lamarckian explanation). Plus, there were “no predators to bother the penguins when they came ashore to molt their feathers and lay eggs.” If that were a law of nature, though, then Tahitians should be giants and dinosaurs should be midgets. And if the biggest penguin was in Antarctica, that’s not exactly a small island or a fish paradise. In summary, animals evolve to get larger except when they don’t.
Ben Garrod joins the story fest on The Conversation, speculating that
It is possible that the animals that survived the extinction were able to thrive and develop because their competitors and predators had disappeared. Many of these species evolved to become much larger, a tendency known as “Cope’s Rule”. Bigger animals are usually better at hunting, attracting a mate, retaining heat and can even be more intelligent.
As shown in 3/26/15, “Why such large animals in the fossil record?”, Cope’s Rule is a corollary of the Stuff Happens Law, because there are many exceptions. Garrod has another problem: “We previously thought that giant penguins took much longer to evolve” [Who’s “we,” paleface?] Now, he will have to shove this evolutionary change into a shorter time period. A little Darwin Flubber solves that problem. The story goes on.
Stop the Presses! Transitional Form Found!
It’s right there in the Johns Hopkins press release, with a picture: “Evolutionary Biologists Say Recently Discovered Fossil Shows Transition of a Reptile From Life on Land to Life in the Sea: Modern New Zealand reptile [tuatara] may be a close relative.” Wait a minute; didn’t animals start in the sea and evolve to the land? Of course, but some of them went back: you know, sea turtles, plesiosaurs, sea snakes, ichthyosaurs, that sort of thing (and much later, whales and dolphins in the evolutionary scenario). Some live on both land in in water, like alligators and crocodiles. The Darwinists at Johns Hopkins salivated at the chance to be “unlocking its evolutionary secrets” of this exceptionally-preserved fossil that resembles the tuatara in some respects. But how much can you tell from the shape of the skull, a long tail, and large limbs? Not much; but that doesn’t keep a Darwinian storyteller from trying anyway. Does this fossil really show a transitional form? Caution: futureware coming. Get out your perhapsimaybecouldness index meter:
Bever notes that a complete evolutionary history of Vadasaurus will require more data and fossil finds.
“We don’t know exactly how much time Vadasaurus was spending on land versus in the water. It may be that the animal developed its aquatic adaptations for some other reason, and that these changes just happened to be advantageous for life in the water,” says Bever.
Did the creature “develop its aquatic adaptations” by design for a purpose? If not, what specific mutations were selected by the unguided Darwinian mechanism that “just happened to be advantageous” here? Darwinians don’t care, because the Stuff Happens Law takes care of all inconvenient details that would otherwise require thinking.
Cambrian Jellyfish Embryos Didn’t Evolve for Half a Billion Years
Someone in the press office at University of Bristol tried to be cute with a seasonal story about orphans reunited with their parents in time for Christmas, but the whitewash doesn’t wash on this Darwinian defense wall. This is not a story of evolution, but of stasis—exceptional stasis. Philip Donoghue, working with evolutionists in China, used X-ray imaging to determine that a mysterious microfossil called Pseudooides (false egg) is really the embryo of a jellyfish. The tiny fossils, smaller than sand grains, have the same internal patterns as embryos of jellyfish. This means they are not ancestors of segmented animals as previously believed. Donoghue blushed, “It seems that, in trying to classify these fossils, we’ve previously been barking up the wrong branch of the animals family tree” [Who’s “we,” paleface?] So will Darwin take a hit for this mistake? Never. The Darwin web of belief is impregnable, at least by fiat. Every evidence must be forced into the evolutionary story, even if it looks like devolution:
Luis Porras, who helped make the discovery while still a student at the University of Bristol, said: “Pseudooides fossils may not tell us about how complex animals evolved, but they provide insights into the how embryology of animals itself has evolved.”
“Pseudooides did things differently and more efficiently, developing directly from embryo to adult. Perhaps living jellyfish are a poor guide to ancestral animals.”
Donoghue added, “It’s amazing that these organisms were fossilized at all,” because they are extremely delicate creatures. What this means is that ancestors of the animals that exploded onto the fossil record in the Cambrian Explosion could have been preserved in Precambrian strata, had they existed. Everyone knows that the Cambrian Explosion is one of the biggest evidential problems for the Darwinian story (see Stephen Meyer’s books Darwin’s Doubt and Debating Darwin’s Doubt), but evolutionists are in the habit of tip-toeing around this issue when the public is watching. In fact, they pretend that the abrupt appearance of some 20 new animal body plans with complex systems actually provides evidence for Darwinism. Watch how Donoghue performs this trick without blinking an eye, as quoted by his willing enabler and facilitator, Live Science:
“They’re little more than aggregations of cells, and you wouldn’t have thought they could be fossilized at all,” Donoghue said. It’s lucky they have, he said, because the micro-fossils provide insights that paleontologists could get no other way.
“The fossil embryos provide us with a direct insight into embryology of Cambrian animals and, in comparison to the embryology of living animals, we can deduce how embryology has evolved to create the body plans of living animals,” he said.
Cambrian explosion? No problem. It actually gives Donoghue greater understanding of evolution. Evolutionists like being wrong to a point. It provides job security for storytellers (6/25/14).
Tick Talk on Dinosaur Blood and Feathers
A piece of amber shows a feather and a tick nearby. While that’s interesting, some evolutionists are making this into a showpiece of evolution, a “once-in-a-lifetime discovery” that may mean that this tick gorged on the blood of “feathered dinosaurs” (cue soundtrack of Jurassic Park). You can just look at the picture of the amber at CNN.com and you may not be convinced that the sparrow-sized creature, small enough to dance in your hand, was related to Velociraptor as claimed. Darwin skeptics may be more interested in finding out if melanosomes or DNA could be extracted from the fossil, since Science Daily says, “all attempts to extract DNA from amber specimens have proven unsuccessful due to the short life of this complex molecule.” If DNA is found, even in decayed form, it would argue that the amber is not 99 million years old.
The article admits that the feather looks like one from modern birds, but that cannot be. The Darwin timescale forbids it. And to the “official” spin is given: “Cretaceous amber provides a window into the world of the feathered dinosaurs, some of which evolved into modern-day birds.”
“So although we can’t be sure what kind of dinosaur the tick was feeding on, the mid-Cretaceous age of the Burmese amber confirms that the feather certainly did not belong to a modern bird, as these appeared much later in theropod evolution according to current fossil and molecular evidence.“
So who are you going to believe? The Darwin storyteller or your own eyes? Another thing: the Darwinians seem excited to find that ticks (a) didn’t evolve, (b) fed on dinosaurs, and (c) survived a global extinction as if nothing happened.
Together, these findings provide direct and indirect evidence that ticks have been parasitising and sucking blood from dinosaurs within the evolutionary lineage leading to modern birds for almost 100 million years. While the birds were the only lineage of theropod dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago, the ticks did not just cling on for survival, they continued to thrive.
By not evolving or going extinct, this could mean that ticks are evolutionary cling-ons.
Fluffy Dinosaurs and Bluffy Evolutionists
One of the biggest memes in the last three decades of Darwin storytelling is the quip that birds are dinosaurs. Live Science shows that evolutionists are flapping this meme for all it’s worth: “Feathered Jurassic Dinosaurs Were Fierce and … Fluffy?” Science Daily echoes this meme, “Feathered dinosaurs were even fluffier than we thought” [Who’s “we,” paleface?]. The first strategy is to establish who’s boss in the scientific explanation game. The evolutionist makes a BAD assertion:
Birds are the direct descendants of a group of feathered, carnivorous dinosaurs that, along with true birds, are referred to as paravians — examples of which include the infamous Velociraptor.
Buried in the text, though, are problems. The articles are talking about fossils of Anchiornis huxleyii,* a crow-sized bird said to be 160 million Darwin Years old. The fact that it had feathers on its hind limbs as well as its wings says little about how it operated in the air or on the ground (some chickens have feathers on their legs). But with a little imagination, a willing artist and Darwin futureware, anything is possible:
The finding [the claim of “fluffy” feathers] shows that the feathers of Anchiornis, and another feathered dinosaur known as Sinosauropteryx, were simpler — and fluffier — than previously thought. Moreover, the dinosaur fossils in the study indicate that modern wings and feathers likely developed later along the evolutionary timeline than researchers had assumed.
Saitta and his colleagues plan to keep searching for more feathered dinosaurs, which might provide evidence that will help them study how primitive wings and feathers fit into the evolutionary timeline that eventually gave rise to birds.
“Working out these relationships will help determine the timing and patterns of feather evolution,” he said. “I cannot give you any precise geologic dates for these, though. There are a lot more fossils to be found.”
Science Daily quotes Evan Saitta saying that seeing fluff in feathers provides some insight into “the evolution of feathers, birds, and powered flight.” The Illustra film Flight: The Genius of Birds (see sample clips here) gives evidence, on the contrary, that powered flight is an all-or-nothing proposition unreachable by a blind process like Darwinian evolution.
*Incidentally, the original fossil of Archaeopteryx is being re-classified as an anchiornithid, according to German scientists at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. This shows that evolutionary taxonomists can change their opinions after 156 years of textbook science. Instead of admitting they were wrong, they take the moral high ground, saying, “Its taxonomic reassignment therefore provides new insights into the evolution of the bird-like dinosaurs in the Middle to Late Jurassic.”
Believers in Littlefoot
Evolutionists may not believe in Bigfoot, but they believe in Little Foot. Little Foot is the sacred name give to a fossil ape that has now been enshrined in a holy sarcophagous in South Africa (see picture at the BBC News). It’s important to Darwinists to label this female ape a “human ancestor” so that they can put it in the human family tree, even though it was just as much an ape as Sister Lucy. They date this skeleton at 3.5 million Darwin Years, forgetting the recent announcement of a modern human skeleton, “almost indistinguishable from those of modern-day humans,” as far back as 3 million years (6/08/17). Since it had parents that had parents, that makes the Morocco skeleton almost contemporary with Little Foot, even if one accepts the evolutionary timeline. So where is the evolution? We have apes today contemporaneous with modern humans. Some apes in the fossil record have gone extinct, that’s all.
One of the keepers of the holy relic says, “It is through important discoveries like Little Foot that we obtain a glimpse into our past which helps us to better understand our common humanity.” Translation: we are all glorified apes. Remember Darwin’s “horrid doubt”? “The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” Logically, we can therefore disregard every propositional conviction of the materialistic Darwinians as untrustworthy and worthless. C. S. Lewis said,
But if naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. Therefore, all thoughts would be equally worthless. Therefore, naturalism is worthless. If it is true, then we can know no truths. It cuts its own throat. (C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper, Erdmans 1970, ch. 16, p. 144).
Darwinians have no shame. We need to teach these People of Fluff how to blush.
One solution is to rob them of their totalitarian power and create a level playing field, where they would have to defend their views in public debate with Darwin skeptics. As they try to muster all their fossils and finch beaks for the contest, cut to the chase: just read the C. S. Lewis quote (above) to them. When the public watches them become speechless and irrational, the priestly mask will come off, along with the imaginary royal robes on Emperor Charlie. That should create conditions for a Royal Blush.