Evolution Impossible (14 page)

When we look for transitional fossils leading to the development of fish, they also are missing. Writing about the class of fish
Osteichthyes
that have bony skeletons and are supposed to be the ancestors of the amphibians, Dr. Reeve M. Bailey, professor of zoology at the University of Michigan, points out that they suddenly appear fully formed in the Middle Devonian strata. He goes on to write, “It seems clear then that the history [evolutionary ancestry] of the group extends further back than the fossil record thus far reveals.”
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The sudden appearance of fully formed species in the fossil record without apparent evolutionary ancestors and mutant intermediate species is a major problem for evolutionists. For example, Dr. David M. Raup, curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and past president of the Paleontological Society, observes that present-day geologists do not actually find the gradual unfolding of life in the geological record. Instead they find species appearing in the geological sequences very suddenly, showing little or no change during their existence in the geological record, and then they are no longer found.
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What Dr. Raup is reporting is that geologists find fossils preserved in the rocks of the past, which do not change in form across the successive rock strata. They do not show signs of evolution up the rock layers. In fact, as I discuss later in this chapter, we find fossils of organisms that are identical to present-day organisms, yet are supposedly many millions of years old. That is, we observe from the fossil record that organisms do not evolve into new species — they stay the same.

I have already explained in chapter 4 that in the examples commonly given in textbooks as observed examples of evolution, such as moths, guppies, and so on, the organisms are still moths or guppies. There is no observation of the formation of any new type of animal or new mutation involving a new genetic code. Yet the fossil record shows new organisms containing massive amounts of new genetic code just suddenly appearing in the geological strata without any apparent gradually changing ancestors. Then these fully formed creatures stay the same in the fossil record until they disappear from the record and are either extinct, like the dinosaurs, or still surviving today, like crocodiles. This important observation directly challenges the claims of the textbooks that the fossil record provides direct evidence of evolution.

Dr. Raup’s observations are also noted by other scientists. For example, flying organisms fall into four main groups: insects, flying reptiles (pterosaurs — now extinct), birds, and bats. Flying is a highly specialized function requiring many features besides wings, so we would expect the gradual evolution of flight to leave some evidence in the fossil record. However, insect authority Dr. Robin Wootton, from the University of Exeter, notes that when fossil insects first appear in the geological column, flying is fully developed.
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This requires huge amounts of new purposeful genetic code to somehow suddenly arise as a result of random mutations. It involves thousands and thousands of new information-encoding nucleotide bases to somehow be added to the DNA of the embryo of an organism via mutations to produce a new organism — an insect — that can fly. Not only is this impossible from a probability basis, but there is no evidence of any gradual development in the fossil record.

University of Michigan–trained zoologist Dr. Ariel Roth, who served as the editor of the journal
Origins
for more than 20 years, points out that flying pterosaurs, birds, and bats also suddenly appear as fully developed flying creatures in the fossil strata.
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A large number of major anatomical changes are needed to develop flight. For example, in birds we have hollow bones reinforced with cross members to reduce weight yet retain sufficient strength. They have a specialized respiratory system that enables air to be fed directly into air sacs connected to the heart, lungs, and stomach. These changes would have all required huge amounts of new information in the genetic code to somehow arise from random mutations. But again, there is no evidence in the fossil record of the transitional mutants that should have formed. That is, there is no fossil evidence of the gradual evolution of the anatomical changes required to produce birds.

Feathers, which characterize all birds, further illustrate this point. The feathers of birds are supposed to have evolved from the scale of some ancestral reptile.
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Yet feathers have very different complex structures compared to known scales. The feather is very wind resistant because of an ingenious system of barbs and barbules forming ridges and hooks that act like Velcro but go one stage further and allow sliding as well. However, there is more to the feather system. This delicate lattice structure would soon become frayed unless there was also oil to lubricate the sliding joint made by the hooked and ridged barbules. In birds, this oil is supplied by the preening gland and also serves to waterproof the feathers so the bird can fly in the rain or when wet. For the feather system to work, a huge amount of new genetic information has to somehow arise in the DNA of the organism to encode new types of cells. These must then produce all the intricate structures of the feathers and the preening gland so that they become fully operational for flight. There is no evidence in the fossil record of creatures with mutant scales developing into feathers.
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Instead, we only find fossils of creatures with feathers fully developed, such as the much-discussed reptile-bird
Archaeopteryx
.
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Another clear example of the missing intermediates in the fossil record is turtles. Dr. Roth points out that in the evolution of the turtle many intermediate stages should be found in the fossil record, but none are found — only fully formed turtles.
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Another example involves the horned dinosaurs. We find thousands of fossils of dinosaurs but no fossils showing the transitional or mutant development of horns.
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There is an even more pronounced lack of fossil evidence for evolution in the plant kingdom. The flowering plants appear suddenly, fully formed and in abundance in the fossil record.
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Another approach is to examine the appearance of fossils in the rock strata. In the lowest strata, known as the Precambrian, fossils are fairly rare and are mainly of algae, bacteria, and some small odd marine organisms. But then we come to the next layers of rock known as the Cambrian where we find huge numbers of fossils of developed organisms. For example, by the 1990s researchers had collected more than 73,000 specimens from the Cambrian Burgess Shale of the Canadian Rockies, which is famous for the excellent preservation of soft-bodied organisms.
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These fossils have preserved much
of the fine structures of the organism so we can learn a lot about their anatomical details.

In the lower Cambrian rock we also find fossils of fully developed trilobites that have hard shells, as well as legs and eyes.
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These animals had quite complex eyes comprised of tubes pointing in many different directions. These tubes had lenses that focused light from any distance.
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Trilobites would require an enormous amount of new genetic code to program their cells to produce the complex structures of this organism, yet despite the abundance of trilobite fossils we find no fossil evidence of their evolution. Other organisms found in the lower Cambrian rocks include sponges, jellyfish, corals and anemones, worms, horseshoe crabs, snails, lamp shells (brachiopods), and sea urchins, to name some of the more commonly known species.
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Even possible vertebrate fossils (that is, animals with a developed backbone system) have also been reported in lower Cambrian rocks, which shows these advanced animals were living at the time these rocks were deposited.
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This sudden appearance and abundance of such a diversity of organisms is referred to by paleontologists as the Cambrian explosion. These fossils are a major problem for evolutionists to explain, as there is no fossil evidence of their evolutionary ancestors. Yet according to evolutionary theory, these creatures should have taken a very long time to evolve and there should be an abundance of fossils of the intermediate mutations.

The absence of missing fossils cannot be explained by missing strata. This is because there are plenty of examples where hundreds of feet of unfossiliferous Precambrian strata conformably (that is, without evidence of erosion or geological disruption between layers) underlie trilobite fossil-rich Cambrian rocks.
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Cambrian strata even contain fossils of fully developed shrimp-like animals such as
Waptia fieldenis,
and multi-segmented and multi-legged creatures such as
Marrella splendens
. Small vertebrates in the form of cartilaginous fish have also been found, and there is an abundance of squid-like cephalopods called nautiloids.
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These latter creatures were very similar to present-day nautiluses, which are known to be intelligent, aggressive hunters with sophisticated jet propulsion systems.
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The thousands of different types of organisms that are found in these Cambrian rocks each have their own unique DNA — the genetic code that programs the cells that make up that organism. The gamete cells of an organism contain the same basic code so that the same species is reproduced. Chicken eggs only hatch out chickens, and platypus eggs only hatch out platypuses.

The theory of evolution requires that chance mutations in the genetic codes of some algae or similar organism produced offspring with mutations. After an unknown number of subsequent mutations occurred in sufficient propinquity to produce offspring, followed by a further unknown number of mutations and reproduction cycles, the thousands of different types of worms, sponges, jellyfish, trilobites, and nautiloids that we find as the fossils in the Cambrian rocks are supposed to have developed. As I have already discussed in the previous chapters, mutations are rarely beneficial, are usually infertile,
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and are not known to produce new genetic information. So there is no known explanation of how such huge amounts of complex genetic code could form. There is also no evidence of the required mutations in the fossil record.
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On the other hand, there is very strong evidence from the fossil record that species do not mutate and that they reproduce after their kind within the limits of normal genetic variation. For example, the live coelacanth fish caught off South Africa in 1938 looked exactly like the coelacanths in the fossil record.
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University of Missouri–educated biologist and physician Dr. Carl Werner and his science graduate wife, Debbie, have completed a huge project of photographing fossil specimens in museums and comparing them with photographs of modern-day animals. Their work has been published as two 260-page illustrated works complete with high-quality color photographs under the titles
Evolution: The Grand Experiment,
Volume 1, and
Living Fossils — Evolution: The Grand Experiment,
Volume 2.
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The latter work provides prima-facie photographic evidence that, like the coelacanths, the fossil specimens of organisms that have survived through to the present time are essentially unchanged — hence the title
Living Fossils
. Their examples, photographs of fossils and museum displays of creatures and plants found in the same strata as the dinosaurs, are presented alongside photographs of their currently living counterparts and include brittle stars, sea urchins, sea biscuits, starfish, sea cucumbers, crinoids, feather stars, shrimp, lobsters, crayfish, crabs, horseshoe crabs, termite nests, dragonflies, katydids, water skaters, waterbugs, woodwasps, beetles, scorpionflies, mayflies, crickets, cockroaches, scallops, clams, mussels, cockscomb oysters, snails, nautiloids, elephant tusk shells, lamp shells, sea cradles, earthworms, tube worms, sponges, corals, sturgeon fish, coelacanths, lungfish, garfish, bowfin fish, eels, herring, orange roughy, angel sharks, rays, hagfish, salamanders, alligators, crocodiles, boa constrictor snakes, lizards, turtles, avocet (a modern-day type bird found fossilized with a
Tyrannosaurus rex
and a Triceratops dinosaur at Hell Creek, Montana), various mammals, Sequoia seed cones, Cook pine cones, redwood branches, cycads, maidenhair tree (ginkgo), ferns, horsetails, mosses, rhododendrons, lilies, sassafras, poplars, and other trees and plants.

The examples that Carl and Debbie Werner have collected are not exhaustive but rather serve to show that there are many examples of animals and plants that we know lived at the same time as the dinosaurs existed, where the surviving species look the same as the fossils. That is, they show no evolution. Dr. Werner also reports that between 100 million and 200 million fossils have been collected and are in museums worldwide.
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During the course of his research and filming of the
Evolution: The Great Experiment
video series, he has met with and interviewed many museum curators and discussed the fossil evidence, much of which is not on display but in museum storerooms. For example, many readers may not be aware of the large number of mammal species found with dinosaurs. Paleontologists have found more than 430 mammal species in the dinosaur fossil layers, which show that these animals coexisted with the dinosaurs.
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However, Dr. Werner reports that he did not see a single complete mammal skeleton from the dinosaur layers on display in any of the 60 museums he visited. He also reports that the dinosaur rock layers provided representative fossil examples of all the major animal phyla living today, including birds, which are supposed to have evolved from the dinosaurs. They also provide fossils from every major plant division living today. From his comprehensive study of the fossils in museums, compared with living plants and animals, he concludes that the fossil record does not provide the evidence that evolution has occurred.
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