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The oldest fossils, microbial mats in Greenland , are 3. The majority of fossils come from creatures with hard body parts like teeth and bone, but there are many other kinds of fossils, too. A mammoth frozen in ice can be preserved with remarkably little degradation for tens of thousands to millions of years.
Scientists have found pristine, individual leaves pressed in ancient lakebeds, sometimes with the original pigment intact until exposed to air. Scientists have even discovered soft tissue preserved inside fossilized dinosaur bones! The processes by which these different types of fossils form, called taphonomy , is an exciting area of study within paleontology.
Fossils are most often found in sedimentary rocks, rarely found in igneous rocks those formed from magma , and almost never found in metamorphic rocks those altered by heat and pressure. Sedimentary rock forms when mineral and organic material is laid down and eventually cemented in layers called strata. Sometimes this can occur rapidly, but it typically takes millions of years for appreciable layers to form.
Geologists call this the principle of superposition. Over time, beds of rock may be tilted, folded, broken, or otherwise disturbed. Yet scientists can often determine the likely sequence of events that led to these results.
The fossils in each layer of rock are thus a sampling of the kinds of organisms that lived in those environments when the layers formed. Fossil distribution is strikingly ordered in several ways. That is, some kinds of creatures were found with each other and not with others.
Trilobites are found in lower, older layers; giant insects and ferns higher up in younger layers; dinosaurs higher still in even younger layers; and so on. The order of fossil groups in different layers is highly consistent from place to place—even across continents. This pattern of one group of fossils seemingly being replaced by another is so consistent that it became known as the principle of faunal succession.
While both ideas were surprising in the s, they are widely accepted today, even among those who contest the theory of evolution. If this were the case, we would expect fossils of all types to be mixed together.
But never do we find trilobites and flowering plants in the same layer, nor a single dinosaur in the Grand Canyon though they are found, as expected by the age of the rocks, in higher layers in the adjacent Grand Staircase formation.
The fossil record clearly testifies along with other geological evidence that there has never been a catastrophic, global flood event. Yet that does not mean there is no historical basis for the Flood story. The biblical account may be called theological history : that is, it describes real events perhaps a regional flood event in highly figurative language for a theological purpose.
Many Bible scholars and scientists who are committed to the inerrancy of Scripture reject Flood geology for both biblical and scientific reasons. Fossils also display order in other ways. Not only are certain layers of rock identifiable the world over by the fossils they contain, but moving up a column of rock, one can see a trend toward larger organisms within lineages. The size trend only works within lineages, not between them: mammals get larger as you move up, but are not larger than dinosaurs.
Furthermore, small organisms are present in every layer, but no large animals are found at the bottom. These trends are difficult to square with Young-Earth Flood geology but are exactly what one would expect if rock layers took millions of years to form and if life forms are related by common ancestry. In one sense they are right: for a number of reasons, it is rare to find a fossil that can be definitively assigned to the lineage between two other known species. An analogy helps to show why: If you picked a grave at random from a family cemetery, it is unlikely that you would find the burial place of your great-grandfather your direct ancestor , but very likely that you would find one of a distant cousin your family, but not your direct ancestor.
True transitional forms are thus expected to be extremely rare. Archaeopteryx is a classic example—it represents the transition from non-avian dinosaurs to birds, but is not the direct ancestor of any birds alive today.
Scientists have found many, many possible transitional fossils. Sometimes entire sequences of transitional fossils are known. These major transitions include one of many lineages of fish adapting to land, a lineage of early theropod dinosaurs evolving flight, land mammals adapting to a marine habitat, and one lineage of primates into humans.
For all those to have evolved from common ancestors, we should be able to find millions, if not hundreds of millions, of intermediate forms gradually evolving into other species. It was not only fossils of transitional species between apes and human beings that would have to be discovered to prove Darwin's theory. The gaps were enormous. Science writer Richard Milton notes that the missing links "included every part of the animal kingdom: from whelks to whales and from bacteria to bactrian camels.
Darwin and his successors envisaged a process that would begin with simple marine organisms living in ancient seas, progressing through fishes, to amphibians—living partly in the sea and partly on land—and hence on to reptiles, mammals, and eventually the primates, including humans" Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, , p.
However, even Darwin himself struggled with the fact that the fossil record failed to support his conclusions. Why do we not find them imbedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory" Darwin, pp. Darwin acknowledged that the fossil record failed to support his conclusions.
But, since he thought his theory obviously was the correct explanation for the earth's many and varied forms of life, he and others thought it only a matter of time before fossilized missing links would be found to fill in the many gaps.
His answer for the lack of fossil evidence to support his theory was that scientists hadn't looked long enough and hadn't looked in the right places. Eventually they would find the predicted fossil remains that would prove his view. He was convinced that later explorations and discoveries would fill in the abundant gaps where the transitional species on which his theory was based were missing.
But now, a century and a half later, after literally hundreds of thousands of fossil plants and animals have been discovered and cataloged and with few corners of the globe unexplored, what does the fossil record show? David Raup is a firm believer in evolution and a respected paleontologist a scientist who studies fossils at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum.
However, he admits that the fossil record has been misinterpreted if not outright mischaracterized, stating: "A large number of well-trained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is.
This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: low-level textbooks, semi-popular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been found— yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks" Science, Vol. Niles Eldredge, curator in the department of invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History and adjunct professor at the City University of New York, is another vigorous supporter of evolution.
But he finds himself forced to admit that the fossil record fails to support the traditional evolutionary view. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of change—over millions of years, at a rate too slow to really account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history.
Evolution cannot forever be going on someplace else. Yet that's how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution" Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory, , p.
After an immense worldwide search by geologists and paleontologists, the "missing links" Darwin predicted would be found to bolster his theory are still missing.
The late Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould is perhaps today's best-known popular writer on evolution. An ardent evolutionist, he collaborated with Professor Eldredge in proposing alternatives to the traditional view of Darwinism.
Like Eldredge, he recognized that the fossil record fundamentally conflicted with Darwin's idea of gradualism. Most species exhibit no directional [evolutionary] change during their tenure on earth.
They appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappear; morphological [anatomical or structural] change is usually limited and directionless. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors: it appears all at once and 'fully formed'" "Evolution's Erratic Pace," Natural History, May , pp. Francis Hitching, member of the Prehistoric Society and the Society for Physical Research, also sees problems in using the fossil record to support Darwinism.
Given the known rates of evolutionary turnover, it has been estimated that at least times more fossil species have lived than have been discovered. But the curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps: the fossils go missing in all the important places. Either they don't exist at all, or they are so rare that endless argument goes on about whether a particular fossil is, or isn't, or might be, transitional between this group and that.
But this isn't the case. Instead, groups of well-defined, easily classifiable fish jump into the fossil record seemingly from nowhere: mysteriously, suddenly, full-formed, and in a most un-Darwinian way. And before them are maddening, illogical gaps where their ancestors should be" The Neck of the Giraffe: Darwin, Evolution and the New Biology, , pp. Acknowledging that the fossil record contradicts rather than supports Darwinism, professors Eldredge and Gould have proposed a radically different theory they call "punctuated equilibrium," maintaining that bursts of evolution occurred in small, isolated populations that then became dominant and showed no change over millions and millions of years.
This, they say, is the only way to explain the lack of evidence for evolution in the fossil record. As Newsweek explains: "In Gould and Niles Eldredge collaborated on a paper intended at the time merely to resolve a professional embarrassment for paleontologists: their inability to find the fossils of transitional forms between species, the so-called 'missing links. But a century of digging since then has only made their absence more glaring. It was Eldredge and Gould's notion to call off the search and accept the evidence of the fossil record on its own terms" "Enigmas of Evolution," March 29, , p.
As some observers point out, this is an inherently unprovable theory for which the primary evidence to support it is lack of evidence in the fossil record to support transitional forms between species. The fossil record has been thoroughly explored and documented. Darwin's excuse of "extreme imperfection of the geological record" is no longer credible.
How complete is the fossil record? Michael Denton, a medical doctor and biological researcher, writes that "when estimates are made of the percentage of [now-] living forms found as fossils, the percentage turns out to be surprisingly high, suggesting that the fossil record may not be as bad as is often maintained" Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, , p.
He explains that "of the living families of terrestrial vertebrates [mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians] or In other words, almost 88 percent of the varieties of mammals, reptiles and amphibians populating earth have been found in the fossil record.
How many transitional forms, then, have been found? Although each of these classes [fishes, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and primates] is well represented in the fossil record, as of yet no one has discovered a fossil creature that is indisputably transitional between one species and another species. Not a single undisputed 'missing link' has been found in all the exposed rocks of the Earth's crust despite the most careful and extensive searches" Milton, pp.
If Darwin's theory were true, transitional creatures such as invertebrates with partially developed backbones, fish with rudimentary legs, reptiles with primitive wings and innumerable creatures with semievolved anatomical features should be the rule, scattered throughout the fossil strata. But they are nonexistent.
At times various fossil species have been presented as firm proof of evolution at work. Perhaps the most famous is the supposed evolution of the horse as presented in many biology textbooks. But is this portrayal really what it is claimed to be?
Notice what Professor Eldredge has to say about this classic "proof" of evolution: "George Gaylord Simpson spent a considerable segment of his career on horse evolution. His overall conclusion: Horse evolution was by no means the simple, linear and straightforward affair it was made out to be. Marcus Ross does an excellent job pulling many of the pieces together to reveal what the fossil record shows us about the history of the earth.
Check out the complete set today. Follow Dr. Del Tackett and over a dozen scientists as they explain how the world intersects with the history recorded in Genesis. Our perspective is that, although there still remain many mysteries in the fossil record, there are some big items that support a massive world-wide deluge in the past: The sudden appearance of complex marine life in the lowest levels of fossil-bearing rocks.
The progressive movement from sea to land animals. The presence of billions of marine fossils throughout all the layers that are thought to be laid down by the flood. The rapid burial in unique circumstances required for fossilization of enormous numbers of creatures. The sudden appearance of modern mammal fossils near the top of the rock record.
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