I’ve blogged before about the myth of sea-to-land evolution. This fundamental tenet of evolution was built on the flimsiest of evidence. I could almost hear a collective sigh of relief when Tiktaalik was found; at last a fossil was found onto which scientists could pin the label, “transitional” in the sea-to-land mythos. It seems now they were wrong again.
Here’s what has happened. Scientists have long believed that life began in the sea and later evolved to become terrestrial. They identified certain lobbed-finned fishes (known as elpistostegids) as being the ancestors of tetrapods. The oldest elpistostegid fossils are those of Tiktaalik and Panderichthys dated by evolutionists to be some 386 million years old. OK, here’s the funny part: researchers recently discovered tracks of a 4-legged animal which they believe are 395 million years old! You can read about the find here. According to the article, this find is “upending accepted thinking about when and where land animals first emerged.”
Excuse me a moment while I have a chortle.
You can see the problem. It’s difficult to identify a 386 million year old fish as the ancestor of 4-legged creatures when you have clear, fossilized tracks of a 4-legged creature walking around 10 millions before its supposed ancestor.
The find has certainly put more than a wrinkle in the sea-to-land scenario which under girds the entire theory. From the article, we read this amazing admission: “"We thought we'd pinned down the origin of limbed tetrapods," says Jennifer Clack of the
Wow! They have to “rethink the whole thing.” Do you think anyone might rethink the theory of evolution itself? Might it occur to anyone that maybe fish DIDN’T evolve to become tetrapods? Such a realization would require critical thinking and open-mindedness. I’m not holding my breath.
I believe I may have found what you considered to be one of your trace fossil posts. I am actually talking about the trace fossil record as a whole and more particularly common traces such as burrows. The sort mentioned in this blog post are not what I have been mentioning as these are predictably rarer.
ReplyDeleteTiktaalik is not the only fossil which fits the transition from water to land, fish to tetrapod. There was no "sigh of relief" and if you are interested, the work of Jenny Clack, both pre and post Tiktaalik, should be most illuminating.
Your whole post is a bit bizarre. Naturally on limited data there are different plausible scenarios for how such an event could have taken place, but if one of these is shown to be wrong, it does nothing to the theory as a whole. What you are saying is the equivalent of someone claiming that Christianity can only be true if Jesus was born right in the centre of Bethlehem; if he was born anywhere else then it was not true, even if on the outskirts.
The tracks should be expected to be in older rocks than the body fossils. This is a well known occurrence with trace fossils - they appear shortly before the body fossils which look likely to have made them. This is because an organism can make hundreds of thousands of traces during its lifetime, but only has one body (or a few more fossils if ecdysis is involved). For smaller populations, body fossils are expected to be rare, but trace fossils can occur.
Perhaps some research into palaeoichnology would serve you well.