Fossil Record
The fossil record is the total, chronological collection of preserved, prehistoric organic remains, providing critical evidence for life over the lat 3.5-billion-year on Earth. It includes: Bones, body fossils (bones, teeth, skin..., that over time turned into rock), and trace fossils (footprints, burrows). The record shows increasing complexity over time, but is not perfectly complete.
1) Oldest Fossil: Microfossils of bacteria, Cyanobacteria, dating back roughly 3.5 to 3.7 billion years, are considered the oldest. Cyanobacteria are highly complex and can photosynthesize. Cyanobacteria possess a complex, large repertoire of proteins. It is not the "simple first life form" promised by the naturalistic model. The Cyanobacteria fossil shows the rapidity of life’s origin, that is, as soon as the Earth cooled, life was on Earth, with no billion years of inorganic soup. Cyanobacteria have extreme biomolecular complexity for the first life. (See life page)
2) In the fossil record, mass extinction events have been found in Earth's history, such as the Permian-Triassic event, where over 90% of species vanished.
3) In the fossil record are found mass speciation events: Avalon explosion (575 million years ago) and Cambrian explosion (541 million years ago). Also the "Big Five" events, rapid recovery from mass extinctions: Ordovician (~444 Ma), Devonian (372 Ma), Permian (252 Ma), Triassic (201 Ma), and Cretaceous (66 Ma). The frequency and extent of mass extinctions help mitigate the effects of changes in the Sun. These events do not fit the naturalistic model's predictions, due to the rapid recovery of new species and new ecosystems. The many years of life on Earth has made huge biodeposits. The Cambrian explosion refers to the sudden appearance of animals with digestive tracts, circulatory systems, skeletons, eyes, and internal and external organs. There are no “transitional forms" to these very complex organ systems. These animals require a minimum atmospheric oxygen level of 10%, and they appear in the fossil record at the very moment that level is reached. The Cambrian phyla do not appear in a time-separated sequence. The most advanced phylum, chordata, the phylum to which all humans and all vertebrates belong, appears at the same time as the most primitive Cambrian phyla. It’s at the beginning, not the middle or the end of the Cambrian period. Furthermore, it is not just the nonvertebrate chordates that appear at the beginning of the Cambrian. Vertebrate fish also appeared at that time. While naturalistic models cannot explain the proliferation of phyla before classes, of classes before orders, and of families before orders, a biblical creation model can. Pliocene-Pleistocene mass extinction event (2.6 Ma) especially impacted animal species with high energy requirements. Animal species that lived in coastal and continental shelf marine habitats were also especially impacted. See Creation Model page
3) Jurassic Dinosaurs appeared within 10,000 years or less after the a mass extinction. Large theropod dinosaurs appeared 5 million years ago, and within 100,000 years, dinosaur species diversity reached a stable maximum. Especially astounding is not just the body size and complexity of the new species, but also that they appeared amid hostile environmental conditions.
4) Placement and frequency of “transitional forms” in the fossil record do not fit the naturalistic model predications.
4) Fossil record reversal: reversals in evolutionary direction in the fossil record are found. Transitional forms come after the fully formed animal.
5) Living fossils are species that have remained remarkably unchanged over long time span, exhibiting few physical differences from their ancestors found in the fossil record. These organisms, such as nautiluses and coelacanths survived major extinction events. Examples include the 500-million-year-old nautilus (like an octopus in shell), 400-million-year-old coelacanth fish, and 150-million-year-old gars fish. Also, the horseshoe crab has been on Earth for 450 million years.
6) Missing horizontal branches in the fossil record are a lack of transitional fossils representing intermediate forms (nodes or branches) in the evolutionary tree between major, distinct groups of organisms. These gaps, sometimes called "ghost lineages" when they represent an unrecorded period of existence, they are common.
7) The duration of time windows for species in the fossil record is a major, ongoing problem in palaeontology. The fossil record and molecular phylogenies of living species can provide independent estimates of speciation and extinction rates, but often produce strikingly divergent results. The frequency, extent, and repetition of symbiosis (interaction between two (or more) different organisms living in close association, that is, an advantage for both) cannot be explained in the naturalistic model.
8) Some ancient Birds (called Avian Dinosaurs) had longer tails. The length of a tail is not a key factor in classifying species. Some cats have tails, some do not.
A bird with teeth, wing claws, and tail are called “Ancient Wing”, Archaeopteryx - Transitional fossil debate from 150 million years ago. This warm-blooded bird was found in 1861. There are 12 fossils of this Raven-sized large brian bird with complex feathers. The claim is that it is a transitional form from dinosaurs to modern birds. But the problem is modern birds lived at the same time and before this transitional form, modern bird go back to 210 million years. The "Holy One” Bird Confuciusornithids" a type of crow, lived at the same time as the Transitional fossil bird.
Ancient Birds with Beak (no teeth) called “Holy One” Bird Confuciusornithids - 6 found in 1994, ~145 million years ago (210 footprints), Crow with wing claws and two tail feathers (no tail). The footprint had a distinctive attribute to Birds, four toes, three forward and one back, just like modern birds. “Holy One” Bird had Feathers, High Metabolism, warm-blooded, and a large brain. See Birds page
7) Recent Origin of humanity in the record. Does not fit in the naturalistic model predications for model humans. (see Human Origin)
8) Genesis’s perfect fit with the fossil record, see the creation models page
9) Humanity’s advent, Earth contained the maximum carrying capacity of different species of life. Our planet’s diversity of life is mind-boggling. It has steadily increased throughout life’s history. There are now 2,400 families, comprising 6.5 million land species and 2.2 million marine species. These 8.7 million species include only the eukaryotic life-forms (life based on cells with nuclei), a number equal to the maximum theoretical carrying capacity of Earth.
“How many are your works, O Lord: In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures (Psalm 104:24).”
Psalm 104 implies that the God of the Bible is “on a mission” to pack Earth with as much life as possible, as diverse as possible, and for as long as possible. Such a mission ensures that when God finally creates Adam and Eve they and all their offspring will possess all the biodeposits they need to launch and sustain civilization at a level that makes the redemption of untold humans possible. See New Creation page.
Four mechanisms with natural selection and mutations playing the dominant role in the change in life forms. Gene exchange and epigenetics play minor roles, with gene exchange playing a bigger role for microbial species. Evolutionary biologists and geneticists have searched in vain for a fifth naturalistic mechanism. If one exists, it must play a very minor role. The four known naturalistic mechanisms for generating changes in life-forms all make relatively small step changes. Mutations are capable of generating the biggest changes but the vast majority of mutations are neutral. That is, the changes they generate are neither harmful nor beneficial. Of those that are nonneutral, harmful mutations outnumber beneficial mutations by at least 10,000 to 1 and sometimes by 10,000,000 to 1. The high ratio of harmful (or deleterious) to beneficial mutations explains why ecologists observe far more extinction events than speciation events in their field studies. Biologists use over a dozen different definitions of a species. The naturalistic biological evolution model based on phylogenetics predicts that introduction of new species has exceeded extinctions, but the fossil record shows that the reverse is true. As environmentalists point out, we are witnessing an extinction rate of multiple species per year. Even if the human activity factors are removed, we are still left with an extinction rate of at least one species every year. Without rapidly appearing new species, scientists remain unable to derive mathematical models that produce valid extinction rates for species.
Large-body-sized species manifest a high probability for rapid extinction and a very low probability for speciation and, thus, are not candidates for natural evolution. Large-bodied mammals (average adult mass = 369.5 kilograms) accumulate “slightly deleterious mutations in mitochondrial protein-coding genes” at a much higher rate than small-bodied mammals. See the Evolution page and Life Page
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