More Fossils Contradict Evolutionary Tales

How many more anomalies will it take to overturn the Darwin empire
with its assumption of gradual evolutionary progress?

 

— As paleontology marches forward, Darwinism marches backward. —

Here are some of the latest fossil discoveries that challenge Darwin’s picture of a gradually-unfolding progression from simple to complex. Some fossils are found not to be fossils. Some modern creatures are found earlier than thought. And some cannot be as old as claimed.

Organic carbon generation in 3.5-billion-year-old basalt-hosted seafloor hydrothermal vent systems (Science Advances, 1 Feb 2023). Evolutionists have boasted of evidence of the earliest microbes from chert samples in the Pilbara region of Australia. Now, Rasmussen and Muhling from the University of Western Australia are popping that party balloon. The chert formed by geological processes at hydrothermal vents, they claim. The main conclusion is stated down in the paper: “We conclude that the lack of kerogenous source rocks in the volcanic-dominated stratigraphy points to a contribution from abiotic organic compounds.”

They seem melancholy to have to give up the old tale that the cherts documented the first microbes on the earth.

Carbon is the key element of life, and its origin in ancient sedimentary rocks is central to questions about the emergence and early evolution of life. The oldest well-preserved carbon occurs with fossil-like structures in 3.5-billion-year-old black chert. The carbonaceous matter, which is associated with hydrothermal chert-barite vent systems originating in underlying basaltic-komatiitic lavas, is thought to be derived from microbial life. Here, we show that 3.5-billion-year-old black chert vein systems from the Pilbara Craton, Australia contain abundant residues of migrated organic carbon. Using younger analogs, we argue that the black cherts formed during precipitation from silica-rich, carbon-bearing hydrothermal fluids in vein systems and vent-proximal seafloor sediments. Given the volcanic setting and lack of organic-rich sediments, we speculate that the vent-mound systems contain carbon derived from rock-powered organic synthesis in the underlying mafic-ultramafic lavas, providing a glimpse of a prebiotic world awash in terrestrial organic compounds.

How sad. Too bad. Organic, remember, does not necessarily mean life-derived, thus their phrase “abiotic [non-biological] organic compounds.”

Elephant seal remains show Antarctic sea was warmer in the mid-to-late Holocene (University of Maine via Phys.org, 17 Feb 2023). What are hundreds of mummified elephant seal remains doing in the Antarctic ice? This report is a double blow for the consensus: it creates difficulties for deep time and for climate change. First question: why did these seals find themselves in a habitat too cold for them? Didn’t their instincts protect them from such a mistake? Modern elephant seals don’t congregate in the Ross Sea or Victoria Land Coast. And how did they get buried together? It must have been sudden.

The results from the molted skin, bones and other remains showed that southern elephant seals not only once occupied the Ross Sea, but were present on the Victoria Land Coast from about 7,000 and 500 years ago. The presence of the seals at this time indicated that there was a reduced amount of ice covering the sea during this time of the Holocene, which coincides with other records of ocean temperatures and circulation in the Ross Sea.

Second question: How did the Ross Sea get so warm so recently, before the Industrial Revolution and coal mining?

“Our work shows that for much of the Holocene, the Ross Sea was less icy and presumably warmer than it is today and this warmth may have driven retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet from the Ross Sea during the last 8,000 years and future warming could continue to push ice retreat,” Hall says.

Dr Hall seems to be scrambling for a consensus-saving tale: “However, ocean temperature may not be the entire story,” he says, then the article escapes into futureware: “More research is needed….” But then, the elephant seals turn on them:

More research is needed, but the scientists also found a few elephant seals that dated to a much older period just before the last glacial maximum, which suggests that warm water may have existed during the buildup of the ice sheet in the Ross Sea.

Warm water before the glacial maximum? Now what? They try to scuttle the temperature drop in favor of lowered sea level that made the Ross Sea embayment attractive to the seals. The story gets curiouser and curiouser. Notice the key word “widespread” in the paper’s title: “Widespread southern elephant seal occupation of the Victoria land coast implies a warmer-than-present Ross Sea in the mid-to-late Holocene” by Hall et al., Quaternary Science Reviews (1 March 2023 issue).

Fossil discovery reveals complex ecosystems existed on Earth much earlier than previously thought (McGill University, 9 Feb 2023). Ah, the five mass extinctions. It’s one of the Darwinists’ favorite tales in their deep time diagrams of billions of Darwin Years of evolution. Why, then, did they find a “modern” ecosystem after the big one: the Permian extinction that they say wiped out most of the life on earth? The “Discovery challenges understanding of how quickly life recovered from the greatest mass extinction in Earth’s history,” the subtitle reads. A challenged understanding ceases to be understanding at all.

About 250 million [Darwin] years ago, the Permian-Triassic mass extinction killed over 80 per cent of the planet’s species. In the aftermath, scientists believe that life on earth was dominated by simple species for up to 10 million years before more complex ecosystems could evolve. Now this longstanding theory is being challenged by a team of international researchers – including scientists from McGill University and Université du Québec à Montréal.

The discovery is “challenging an age-old theory,” a bold subtitle trumpets, punning the old age of the fossils with the long time evolutionists believed their theory. Count the uses of the word “modern” in their paper:

> Xu Dai et al., “A Mesozoic fossil lagerstätte from 250.8 million years ago shows a modern-type marine ecosystem,” Science, 9 Feb 2023.

Answer: 16 times “modern” is mentioned, along with 21 references to “evolution” or related words. But how did evolution come up with modern ecosystems after a supposed massive wipe-out of species? Who is surprised by this, creationists or evolutionists? The summary at the top of the paper says,

The Triassic recovery of life from the devastating end-Permian mass extinction was an amazing period of evolution. Whether biodiversity had to rebuild from near annihilation or from refugia is a matter of conjecture but recovery heralded the development of recognizably modern ecosystems. Dai et al. present examples of diverse fishes, ammonoids, bivalves, protists, and malacostracan arthropods from a fossil site dated approximately 1 million [Darwin] years after the crisis. These fossil assemblages, particularly the presence of vertebrate predators, reveal a surprisingly early diversity of animals after the end-Permian mass extinction.

The authors begin, “Finely preserved fossil assemblages (lagerstätten) provide crucial insights into evolutionary innovations in deep time.” No they don’t! They wipe out evolutionary assumptions of deep time. There was a notorious Cambrian explosion defying evolutionary “innovations” in deep time. Now, here is a Triassic Explosion. This video says there were explosions all over the fossil record!

A fossil fruit from California shows ancestors of coffee and potatoes survived cataclysm that killed the dinosaurs (University of Kansas, 7 Feb 2023). Here is another chorus of the “earlier than thought” song:

This fossil shows this diverse group of plants, the lamiids, were older than previously thought, and Cretaceous ecosystems on the west coast of North America may have resembled structurally complex rainforests.”

The discoverer, Brian Atkinson, reveals how prolonged exposure to the mind virus of Darwinism perverts reasoning and makes the victim’s brain experience giddy emotional outbursts. He totally fails to see how this fossil defies his evolutionary beliefs:

“As I was opening this drawer, I noticed this fruit with really striking patterns on its surface,” the KU researcher said. “I immediately recognized it as belonging to this lamiid family called Icacinaceae, which is well-known in younger, post-Cretaceous deposits after the mass-extinction event. It’s all over the place. But before, there are no clear known fossils that belong to that family. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is it!’ You know, this family of plants have just these really striking fruits.”

Does Atkinson have a God? We wish he would elaborate on that. Darwin’s God is no help curing cognitive dissonance like the following:

“My research involves understanding deep time to better reconcile how modern biodiversity came to be — and potentially how it will fare in the future with climate change,” said Atkinson. “I’ve been trying to characterize these evolutionary events of flowering plants in the Cretaceous period, when the diversity of these plants just exploded….

Atkinson’s paper is published in Nature Plants (dated 14 Nov 2022), with him as the sole author.

He keeps thinking that more Darwin-based research will bring him toward the coveted understanding. One cannot get understanding from Darwinism any more than one can get healthy drinking water from a toxic waste dump.

Another wasted career. So sad. Too bad.