Fossils: Where’s the Evolution?
Animals larger than today’s, appearing earlier than thought – how does that help Darwin’s narrative?
This may be the biggest turtle that ever lived (Live Science). A giant sea turtle named Stupendemys geographicus has been unearthed in Venezuela.
S. geographicus weighed an estimated 2,500 lbs. (1,145 kilograms), almost 100 times the size of its closest living relative, the Amazon river turtle (Peltocephalus dumerilianus), and twice the size of the largest living turtle, the marine leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea), the researchers wrote in the study.
Look at the photo of a man lying beside the 8-foot carapace of the beast in the BBC News article. The males had protrusions on the front of the carapace; evolutionists assume it was for fighting, but since it is a unique feature, and the first instance of sexual dimorphism found in a turtle, they cannot say they know anything about its function. Do they even know the ones with horns were males? They seem to be thinking of antlers on deer, but those are land mammals. They also found what appear to be bite marks, from which they assume a battle with a predator occurred. The artist conception shows the turtle looking active and violent.
A press release from the University of Zurich says that the fossil helps resolve the phylogeny of turtles. Reading between the lines, though, it is not so clear evolution had anything to do with this species, except for microevolution and distribution. They say the evolutionary relationships have been “thoroughly revised,” meaning that whatever evolutionists were saying before is wrong.
Since the scientists also discovered jaws and other skeleton parts of Stupendemys, they were able to thoroughly revise the evolutionary relationships of this species within the turtle tree of life. “Based on studies of the turtle anatomy, we now know that some living turtles from the Amazon region are the closest living relatives,” says Sánchez. Furthermore, the new discoveries and the investigation of existing fossils from Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela indicate a much wider geographic distribution of Stupendemys than previously assumed. The animal lived across the whole of the northern part of South America.
According to the original paper by Cardena et al. in Science Advances, crocodiles and rodents also grew to giant size at that time. The world seems impoverished today compared to the rich ecosystems of the past that included these huge turtles. So where is the evolution?
‘Reaper of Death’ tyrannosaur found in Canada (BBC News). A fierce, mean-looking face glares from the artwork of a tyrannosaur found in Canada. They gave it a mean-sounding name, too: Thanatotheristes degrootorum, which translates to “Reaper of Death.” Behaviors can only be inferred from bones, however, and external features like expressions and colors are mostly unknown, since no dinosaurs can be observed today except in the movies. “Researchers say the new discovery has given them insights into the evolution of tyrannosaurs,” the article says. But when looking for the evidence for said insight, it seems to exist in futureware: “It is hoped that this new study will help palaeontologists fill gaps in their knowledge.” And with an admittedly patchy fossil record, those gaps are real.
Great white sharks older than previously thought, study says (Fox News Science). Someone could do an amusing story by counting how many times CEH has reported fossils showing this or that creature appearing “earlier than thought” in the fossil record. Thought by whom? By evolutionists, or course. Every time they say this, they decrease the time for lucky mutations to be selected by the Stuff Happens Law. In this case, great whites just appear without any clear record of transitions:
“White sharks have a complex evolutionary history, they are unusual,” the study’s lead author, Agostino Leone, said in a statement. “They evolved into sedentary populations scattered around the globe. Among these, there are the Mare Nostrum white sharks, which are really unique.“
Fossilized insect from 100 million years ago is oldest record of primitive bee with pollen (Oregon State University). A bee with pollen on its legs has been found in amber. They keep calling it “primitive,” but it had wings, it pollinated flowers, and it looks like a bee. What’s primitive about it?
The mid-Cretaceous fossil from Myanmar provides the first record of a primitive bee with pollen and also the first record of the beetle parasites, which continue to show up on modern bees today….
The fossilized bee shares traits with modern bees—including plumose hairs, a rounded pronotal lobe, and a pair of spurs on the hind tibia—and also those of apoid wasps, such as very low-placed antennal sockets and certain wing-vein features.
The only apparent reason to call it ‘primitive’ is that Darwinists have a deep psychological need to see progress between a bee that lived 100 million Darwin Years ago and a modern bee.
Kenyan fossil reveals chameleons may have ‘rafted’ from Africa to Madagascar (Phys.org). It’s hard to imagine chameleons rafting across open ocean, but perhaps they could make the 264 miles between Madagascar and the African mainland, or was it the other way around? These scientists are arguing the latter. The article uses the e-word evolution 6 times, but offers more speculation than evidence.
But little is known about how these lizards spread across the world and how they evolved. Their fossil record, the only form of direct evidence about their early evolution and history, is very scant.
A single fossil that fits the new scenario becomes the foundation for a grand evolutionary story about “rafting chameleons.”
Disease Found in Fossilized Dinosaur Tail Afflicts Humans To This Day (Tel Aviv University). A defect in vertebrae in a dinosaur tail afflicts humans today. That is stasis, not evolution.
“These kinds of studies, which are now possible thanks to innovative technology, make an important and interesting contribution to evolutionary medicine, a relatively new field of research that investigates the development and behavior of diseases over time,” notes Prof. Israel Hershkovitz of TAU’s Department of Anatomy and Anthropology and Dan David Center for Human Evolution and Biohistory Research. “We are trying to understand why certain diseases survive evolution with an eye to deciphering what causes them in order to develop new and effective ways of treating them.”
How many doctors have to go looking at dinosaurs to treat their patients? The idea seems absurd. The disease “survived evolution,” so there’s nothing to see. You can’t call up a dinosaur and ask it how its doctors treated it. What’s evolution got to do with it? Just figure out what the patient has now, and give the patient some help.
Filling in the blanks of evolution: Study examines when and how functional diversity happened in mammal spines (Harvard). This article uses the word “evolution” or “evolve” a whopping 24 times, but where is the evidence? It’s all like a snipe hunt, hoping to find the missing evidence if they can just keep looking. The two female scientists, Pierce and Jones, are shown staring wide-eyed at a fossil backbone, using it like a crystal ball for insights into evolution. “We’re trying to get at something that’s quite a fundamental evolutionary question, which is: How does a relatively simple structure evolve into a complex one that can do lots of different things?”
Using a novel combination of techniques including biomechanical experimentation on the cadavers of two modern animals, a cat and a lizard, and CT scans of synapsid fossils, the researchers were able to reject the traditional notion that the gradual development of different regions (or independent sections) of the spine alone accounted for its evolving complexity. Instead, their evidence suggests that regions (like the thorax and lower back) evolved long before new spinal functions (such as bending and twisting). The study points to the idea that the right selective pressures or animal behaviors combined with these already-existing regions played a significant role in the evolution of their unique functions.
The findings tap into the larger question of how mammals, including humans, evolved over millions of years.
The new story talks about “selective pressures” and “removing evolutionary constraints” so that mammals, just waiting to select the lucky mutations, will go forth and find them.
Pierce and Jones don’t yet know what those functions looked like in these extinct animals, but they plan to focus on that in future research.
“It’s definitely not the end of the story,” Jones said.
….emphasis on story. So did they find out how a relatively simple structure evolves into a complex one? No; but keep that funding flowing. (See How Darwinism Produces Job Security.)
Update 2/15/2020: Fossils of prehistoric human-sized rat that weighed nearly 200 pounds and had massive teeth discovered in South America (Fox News Science). Get this: a rat as big as a man! Where is the evolution here? Today’s rats are puny compared to these fossil specimens found in Brazil. Is this rat’s revenge? Would they do lab experiments on humans? The point Nature makes about the small brain (“Giant extinct rodent was all brawn and little brain) means little; it’s quality, not quantity that counts. A girl found with half the size of a normal brain has above-average reading skills, reported New Scientist.
Darwinism is the biggest con job in the history of science. A world of brainwashed researchers are wasting their time on a gigantic fairy tale. They are like parasites on science, sapping its energy and yanking it away into la-la Fantasyland. Look at Pierce and Jones hoping to see visions of the Bearded Buddha in fossil spines. If they didn’t get paid for this, maybe they would be motivated to get a real job. Better yet, go into biomimetics, and find a natural design to imitate for human flourishing.