Evolution Impossible (12 page)

Scientists holding to long ages for the geological column continue to try to work out what sort of geological or environment mechanisms were responsible for the mass extinction of animals in the past.
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But recent fossil finds of more than 3,000 dinosaur footprints ranging in length from 4 to 32 inches (10 to 80 cm), including those of tyrannosaurs, coelurosaurs, and hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs), all facing the same way, strongly suggest these animals were fleeing some catastrophe.
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Other fossils on display in museums, such as that of an ichthyosaur (an extinct marine reptile) giving birth (Stuttgart Museum fur Naturkunde) or a perch fish swallowing a herring (Princeton Museum of Natural History), are clear indicators of very rapid burial and fossilization.
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In 2005, Dr. Mary Schweitzer, associate professor of marine, earth, and atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University and also at the N.C. Museum of Natural History, and coworkers reported finding exceptionally well-preserved sauropod dinosaur eggshells at a site in Argentina. The researchers suggest that since the soft tissue of embryos in an egg breaks down very quickly after death, the rate of mineralization must have been “virtually instantaneous” to preserve and fossilize the soft tissues.
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In other words, what the fossil record tells us is that all over the surface of the earth we have layers of rock that were laid down very rapidly under massive water flows, trapping and burying untold numbers of plants and animals, which ultimately resulted in the extinction of 98 to 99 percent of the different types of species. Simple organisms to large creatures were fossilized. Because very rapid conditions are required to produce these enormous fossil beds, these formations must be very, very much younger than the geologic column ages — probably only thousands of years old.

This interpretation of a relatively recent age for fossils is further supported by the finding of proteins, DNA, and soft tissue such as cartilage, surviving in dinosaur fossils. These biomolecules break down naturally fairly rapidly in the environment and cannot survive for millions of years. For example, based on current research observations, if the average rock temperature was 10ºC, DNA would not be detectable after 20,000 years. If the average temperature was 20ºC, the DNA would have completely broken down and not be detectable after about 2,500 years, and collagen would not be detectable after 20,000 years.
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Yet, in 1990, scientists from the University of California reported extracting DNA from fossil leaf samples found in rocks from the Clarkia fossil beds of Idaho. According to the geologic column, these beds are from the Miocene period and dated as being 17–20 million years old!
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Since this first discovery, other scientists have confirmed the existence of recoverable DNA sequences in leaf fossils from the Clarkia beds.
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However, because DNA fragments could be recovered, the rocks of the fossil beds can only be thousands of years old!

In 1991, scientists at the life sciences division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico extracted proteins from the fossil backbone of a sauropod dinosaur (Seismosaurus). It had just been excavated from the Morrison Formation in New Mexico, which, according to the geological column dating is 150 million years old.
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In 1997, Dr. Mary Schweitzer and coworkers from Montana State University reported finding a piece of
Tyrannosaurus rex
bone containing red blood cells with hemoglobin.
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Following this controversial find, Schweitzer and coworkers began looking for more examples of soft tissue in dinosaur specimens and found elastic flexible tissues within the hind limb of another
Tyrannosaurus rex
skeleton. Their discovery included flexible bone matrix, hollow and pliable blood vessels, and material like blood and bone cells. The researchers concluded that unfossilized soft tissue remains were definitely present in the dinosaur limb.
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Meanwhile, other researchers also began looking for evidence of surviving soft tissue in remains of dinosaurs. Protein-like material was subsequently found in the bones of an Iguanodon dinosaur, conventionally dated as 120 million years old, that is, around twice the supposed age of the
Tyranosaurus rex
remains. The recovered organic material was still able to induce an antibody response to the protein.
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The discovery of these examples of preserved soft tissues throws serious doubt on the supposed tens of millions of years for the age of these fossils. This is because the current experimental knowledge that we have about the stability of biological material indicates that it could not possibly survive for millions of years without breaking down. In fact, realizing this, some scientists have attempted to dispute the findings. However, in 2009 very strong evidence that the millions of years ages for the geological column are wrong was published in the May 1 issue of the prestigious American journal
Science
. Scientists from North Carolina State University had gone looking for a sample of dinosaur fossil that had been preserved rapidly by burial deep under sandstone. They found such a fossil under 23 feet (7 meters) of rock in the Judith River Formation in eastern Montana, and recovered the femur from a duck-billed dinosaur,
Brachylophosaurus canadensis
. Analysis of the leg bone revealed soft tissues and soft bone matter from which collagen proteins and bone cells were isolated, and parts of DNA sequences were identified. Because previously published papers reporting soft tissues in
Tyrannosaurus rex
fossils had been controversial, all results in this recent study were independently verified by researchers at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard University, and Montana State University.
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This finding of soft tissue in a dinosaur fossil from rocks dated at 80 million years old in terms of the geologic time scale is first-class evidence that the rocks and fossils of the geological column cannot be millions of years old. It is also evidence that evolution has not occurred.

More evidence that evolution has not occurred comes from the sudden appearance of new types of animals in the fossil record, without evidence of evolutionary intermediate species. For example, in Precambrian rocks, which are assigned as being more than 540 million years old, we find very few types of organisms — just fossils believed to be of bacteria and algae. But when we come to the rocks of the late Precambrian assigned around 600 m.y., we suddenly find fossils of jellyfish, corals, and anemones — similar to species that survive today. These animals have very different genetic information to algae, yet there is no evidence of intermediate species in the rocks lower down, showing there is no evidence of their evolution. Even more outstanding is the sudden appearance of fossils of a little segmented animal about three inches (seven centimeters) long, with a head and legs, called spriggina, which are found in late Precambrian dated rocks in Australia, Africa, and Russia.
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The amount of new genetic information to encode for a head and tail and multiple body segments is enormous. There is no fossil evidence of intermediate organisms with partly developed bodies, and no known explanation for how such massive amounts of new genetic information could arise in such a relatively short period of geologic time.

Then bordering right on the late Precambrian are the Cambrian rocks, which contain fossils of fully formed highly genetically diverse animals, yet without any fossils of the evolutionary intermediates. For example, in the Cambrian rocks we find fossils of segmented worms, snails, shellfish, sea urchins, conodonts, nautiluses, and trilobites. Trilobites, for example, have eyes and segmented legs. The amount of new genetic information to produce eyes with all the details, components, and focusing mechanisms, as well as legs with all their mechanical and nerve parts, is enormous. Yet there is no fossil evidence of animals with partly developed eyes or legs. The fully formed animals just suddenly appear, and fossils of trilobites in particular are quite common in Cambrian rocks.
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According to the theory of evolution, highly complex animals such as trilobites and nautiloids must have evolved over very long periods of time. Yet there is no evidence of their evolution. In Norway, under the lower Cambrian trilobites, there is 4,000 feet of strata that contain no fossils. In Morocco, under the lower Cambrian trilobites, there are 3,000 feet of strata containing archaeocyathid (reef-building organisms) fossils, and under this strata there is as much as 10,000 feet of limestone that contain only stromatolites, that is, fossils of algae. In the Inyo Mountains of California there are strata more than 14,000 feet thick that contain fossils of trilobites and archaeocyathids. Then under this formation is 7,000 feet of unfossiliferous strata. Professor W. Charles Bell, former professor of geology at the University of Texas, points out that similar patterns of thousands of feet of non-fossil-containing strata immediately underlying Cambrian-trilobite-containing strata also occur in Australia and Eastern Asia.
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In other words, in thousands of meters of conformable strata we find no evidence of evolution — just the sudden appearance of fully formed complex animals. Professor Bell further points out that the Cambrian fossil record contains representatives of every important invertebrate animal phylum suddenly appearing with no fossil evidence of evolution.
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This fossil record shows a sudden huge increase in the diversity and complexity of genetic information. Consider the Cambrian nautiloids, for example. These animals belong to the Cephalopoda group of intelligent predator mollusks, which include squids, octopus, and cuttlefish. Paleontologists from the Swedish Museum of Natural History have found nautiloids in Cambrian rocks that had a better and more sophisticated design of jet propulsion system than nautiloids found in rocks deemed to be millions of years later in the evolutionary time scale.
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Thus, what the fossil record reveals is highly sophisticated fully developed life forms, even in the deepest fossil-containing rocks.

It is also significant that nautilus species still exist today, as do many other animal groups found in the fossil record. This highlights the point that while we observe organisms becoming extinct at the present time, and that the fossil record shows extinctions in the past, we also observe that organisms reproduce the same organism. In other words, the organisms that don’t become extinct continue on the same. The fossil record tells the same story. Fossil sea pens found in Precambrian rocks replicate the sea pens found living today on the ocean floor. The fossil coelacanth fish found in the cretaceous strata are the same as the coelacanth fish found living in the Indian Ocean today. In fact, many of the fossils of starfish, shrimp and lobsters, horseshoe crabs, dragonflies, water bugs, fish, rays, many different types of sharks, salamanders, frogs, alligators, crocodiles, lizards, turtles, birds, and mammals found in the same rock strata in which we find the dinosaur fossils look virtually the same as their modern counterparts living today.
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In other words, the fossil record shows that all these animals continued to produce the same type of offspring and the species have continued on unchanged to the present time. From this, it is evident that evolution has not occurred.

Further fossil evidence that evolution has not happened comes from studies of ancient DNA that show that diversity in DNA was much greater in the past. This means there is fossil evidence that we are losing genetic information, not evolving it. For example, Professor Alan Cooper at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA found from the study of bones of ancient horse species that the extinct giant Cape zebra was simply a large variant of the modern Plains zebra. In a recent press release, Professor Cooper commented, “Ancient DNA studies have revealed that the loss of genetic diversity in many surviving species appears to have been extremely severe.” He also said, “Overall, the new genetic results suggest that we have underestimated how much a single species can vary over time and space, and mistakenly assumed more diversity among extinct species of megafauna.”
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In other words, some of the so-called evolution reported in the literature has simply been the result of the loss of preexisting genetic information — not new genetic information arising somehow by chance.

Thus, the fossil record provides no direct evidence for evolution. Rather, fossils and the sedimentary layers that contain them provide evidence for a catastrophic global flood that wiped out preexisting life.

The evolutionary model relies heavily on long ages with gradual slow changes over long periods of time. These long time periods are supported by radiometric dating results. However, the finding of rapidly deteriorating soft tissues and DNA in dinosaur and other fossils seriously questions the validity of the millions of years of the radiometric dates assigned to these organisms. Furthermore, in a following chapter I will point out that these dating methods have very serious interpretation problems and cannot be relied upon to give the actual age of a rock.

The evolutionary model also assumes that genetic information gradually built up over long periods of time. However, the fossil record shows that massive amounts of complex genetic information suddenly appears in the fossil record with no evidence of incremental developmental genetic information. Furthermore, much larger amounts of genetic information existed in the past than exists today, and the fossil record shows the catastrophic destruction of huge amounts of this genetic information as a result of massive scale water movements and subsequent rapid burial under water-borne sediments.