Upsets Surprise Evolutionists

These announcements show that fossils have ways of contradicting evolutionary expectations.

Animals Don’t Always Evolve Big

56-million-year-old fossils complicate long-held theories about mammalian body size (Phys.org). It might have seemed intuitive to Darwinians that new animals should start small and evolve to get bigger over time, but a fossil mammal found in Alberta is shaking up expectations.

The discovery of a new species of mammal in Alberta’s fossil record has shaken up some long-held beliefs about other species in its lineage.

The ancient Catopsalis kakwa (C. kakwa) was only about the size of a squirrel, and weighed between 400 and 600 grams. What it lacks in size, however, it makes up for in terms of its implications for previous research proposing the evolution of larger body mass in multituberculates, rodent-like mammals named for their teeth that have many cusps, or tubercles, arranged in rows.

According to evolutionists, these mammals persisted for a long time in the moyboys’ fossil record. Since it came late in their timeline, shouldn’t it be bigger and badder? It isn’t. It’s one of the smallest ever found. Not only that, the ghost of Darwin is haunting the evolutionary story:

“Because the trend in these multituberculates seems to be getting bigger and bigger, this thing is so unexpected in that it’s quite small and temporally it’s quite late in the game,” Scott explains.

C. kakwa’s size—and the fact that it was alive in the late early Paleocene—complicates the evolutionary history of Taeniolabidoidea, and implies either a ghost lineage or an evolutionary reversal of characteristics, going from large to small body size. A ghost lineage is when there is an extensive part of the evolutionary record of an animal that is not currently recognized in the fossil record; in this case, the fossil history of the mysterious small-sized Catopsalis has not yet been found.

Early Bird Out of Place, Out of Time

Bird family tree shaken by discovery of feathered fossil (BBC News). A fossil turaco dated at 52 million Darwin Years old, has been found in the Americas. That’s astonishing, because modern turacos, known by their bright plumate, head crests and penchant for fruit, are found only in African savannahs and forests today.

A beautifully preserved fossil bird from 52 million years ago is shaking up the family tree of the exotic birds.

The fossil’s weird features suggests it is the earliest known living relative not just of the turacos, but of cuckoos and bustards (large long-legged birds).

And the fact the remains were unearthed in North America shows the distribution of different birds around the globe would have been very different in the past.

Red Tide in the Desert?

Red tide fossils point to Jurassic sea flood (Science Daily). When discovering marine life far inland, like seashells on the world’s highest mountains, evolutionists appeal to stories of long ages where continents rose and fell, and seas advanced and retreated over the land. This announcement about a red tide in Australia, though, is a little bizarre. Evolutionists found fossil dinoflagellates, the small organisms responsible for red tide, in Queensland near the town of Roma, 250 miles from the coast. They date the fossils as Jurassic. They didn’t think the sea inundated this area till the Cretaceous, 40 million years later. This means they have to adjust the evolution rate to repair their just-so story.

“However, this new microfossil evidence from the same region suggests there was a short-lived precursor to this sea 40 million years earlier.”

Dr Wainman believes these microfossils must have been brought inland by an incursion of sea water and then evolved quickly to adapt to the freshwater or brackish conditions as the sea waters slowly receded.

“There is no other feasible explanation for how they managed to reach the interior of the Australian continent when the ancient coastline was thousands of kilometres away,” Dr Wainman says.

Of course there is another feasible explanation: a global flood, as presented by creation geologists and paleontologists. That idea, though, is ruled out by fiat in the current Charlie & Charlie* dynasty (*Darwin, Lyell).

Monkey Shines onto Stone Age

Some monkeys in Panama may have just stumbled into the Stone Age (New Scientist). Colin Barras waves magic wand of chance to explain why certain monkeys use rocks to smash nuts:

Another non-human primate has entered the Stone Age – the fourth type known to have done so. A population of white-faced capuchins living on a Panamanian island routinely use stones to smash open nuts and shellfish. Other nearby populations don’t use stone tools, which might suggest that primates – perhaps including our ancestors – stumble into the Stone Age by chance.

This nutty explanation implies that human ancestors were too stupid for millions of years to figure out how to hold a rock in their hands to open a nut. The assumption of millions of years by moyboy evolutionists, though, applies to capuchin monkeys as well. Why now? If monkeys have been around longer than humans, why did some just figure out this simple behavior? Barras speculates that the lack of predators on the island makes it worthwhile for monkeys to experiment. No; that idea gets tossed immediately by Brendan Barrett of the Max Planck Institute, who immediately replaces it with another just-so story:

But that doesn’t explain why capuchins elsewhere on JicaroÓn, which also experience those conditions, don’t seem to use stone tools.

Perhaps it takes a single hyper-intelligent individual to make the leap and begin using stone tools, with others then copying the idea. “Good innovations are pretty rare, but if they are adaptive they can take off,” says Barrett.

According to neo-Darwinism theory, that lucky individual had to have had a mutation in its germ line that produced hyper-intelligence. One day, SuperBrain Capuchin realized that striking a nut with a rock made it easier to eat. Then, its stupid monkey-mates just copied its behavior. This explanation, though, is Lamarckian, because the stupid monkeys lacked the hyper-intelligence gene to be able to pass on the behavior, and should have reverted out of the Stone Age shortly thereafter.

The story is also implausible because monkeys move around. During the assumed millions of years capuchins lived on JicaroÓn island, is it credible that the others never saw or learned to the time-saving trick? Long ages work against this story, because surely millions of years is plenty of time for all monkeys everywhere to learn how to crack nuts with rocks. Without the required millions of years, the conundrum vanishes.

Darwin skeptics have no trouble believing that animals were endowed with intelligence necessary to learn, the migratory ability to explore new habitats, and the epigenetic programming to adapt within limits to shifting environments. Creationists add that God endowed them with these abilities not that long ago. Darwinians keep getting shook up by upsets because they deny intelligence as a cause, and insist on keeping their beloved millions of years.