Until the 19th century it was generally accepted that the layers of rocks had been laid down by the Deluge. In 1815 a British canal engineer noted that certain rock strata always contained certain fossils. A system began of classifying rocks by their fossils. So far, creationists had no objection; but soon the classification was linked to an evolutionary time scale. The layers of rocks were supposed to represent divisions of time, great ages of time, indexed by their particular fossils. Thus, evolutionists themselves vested their theory of evolution in the fossil evidence. Evolution must stand or fall on the fossil record.
If life began with simple forms and steadily progressed upwards into more and more complex creatures to culminate in man, the fossils should record the progress step by step. If creatures evolved, there would have lived and died and been fossilized innumerable intermediate creatures, steadily bridging the transitions between one kind and the next kind. In fact, there would have been so many intermediates, in successive stages of transition, that we should now have difficulty finding fossils of the perfected kinds amid the overwhelming profusion of transitional fossils. Evolution demands that sort of fossil record; and the Darwinists expected to find it. They have been digging for a century and a half. Innumerable fossils have been unearthed, but not one fossil of an intermediate creature. There is not a single transitional fossil to bridge the gaps between perfected kinds.
Then we note another remarkable thing. We find that every kind alive today, which appears in the fossil record, appears in fossil form similar to its present living form, unchanged, un-evolved.
The fossil record has proved hostile to the very theory it was expected to prove. What the fossil record does show is this: perfected kinds separated by unbridgeable gaps. It is striking evidence for the Genesis revelation that creatures were created according to their kind.
According to the fossils in the rocks, life began suddenly in the Cambrian period, supposedly about 600 million years ago. The rocks older than the Cambrian show practically no signs of life, nothing except a few traces of what may be single cells and algae. There should be an immense fossil record of earlier, evolving life for a billion years or more, leading up to the explosion of life in the Cambrian period. Evolution depends on a great pre-Cambrian fossil record and it just cannot be found, except for those few traces of protozoa and algae. Except for these, pre-Cambrian rocks are barren and lifeless.
But in the Cambrian rocks the fossils appear suddenly. Suddenly there is teeming life. And these are highly specialized creatures, sharply divided into species, genera, families and the rest. The first fossils are quite disastrous for the theory of evolution, and Darwin admitted that this could be an objection to his theory.
After the Cambrian period, new kinds appear in the rocks from time to time. But every time a new kind appears, it appears suddenly, fully perfect, with no link to any previous kind. There are no fossils of transitional creatures.
Dinosaurs are the artists' symbols of evolution. But dinosaurs contradict evolution. The great dinosaurs appeared from nowhere. They flourished for a period. Then they abruptly disappeared; so abruptly that evolutionists are baffled. That is not evolution.
Most dinosaurs were colossal, and they left colossal fossils which could not be missed. But there are no semi-colossal fossils of anything evolving into these giants. And there is a worse problem: the pterosaurs. These were reptiles; but there is an infinite gulf separating them from any other reptiles. For these were flying reptiles with great, leathery wings. They came in various sizes; the smallest was no bigger than a sparrow. The largest, discovered in the early '70's in Texas, had an estimated wingspan of 51 feet – more than an F-15A fighter jet. The flying reptiles had no ancestors. The first specimen was a perfect pterosaur. Whence did they come and whither did they go? They are such a problem that one evolutionist (Barry Cox) admits: "All in all, we should have many fewer problems if the pterosaurs had never existed..."
Among the dead bones of the past, we find no
fossil links, no evolution. Then, if we look at the living world of the present, again we
find no intermediates between living kinds. Living creatures prove that kinds do not
change, no matter how long the time span. For example, using the evolutionists'
supposed ages, the Australian lung-fish has not changed in 220 million years; turtles have
not changed in 250 million years; spiders in 300 million; cockroaches in 350 million.
The hard fact is that every kind of creature living today which appears in the fossil record appears there in form similar to its present form. This was dramatically confirmed by the coelacanth fish. This fish, through one of its relatives, was credited as being the ancestor of amphibians. It was regarded as extinct for 70 million years. But in 1939, a fisherman hauled up a coelacanth very much alive. To an evolutionist, this was just as upsetting as if a dinosaur had walked up the street. Since then, several more living coelacanths have been caught, all of them exactly as they were when the last coelacanth fossil was laid down 70 million mythical years ago.
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