Fossil evidence that falsifies Darwinism...part one...Jellyfish and Octopi!

Allow me a couple of minutes for a commercial broadcast.  My wife and I work with teenagers.  Two of our fellow youth staffers, a married couple, and one former student from the teen group are leaving for eleven months to go to third world countries bringing medicine and food and water and hard work and good old fashioned compassion with them.  They call it the World Race.   Jeremy and Sara have all their money to pay for the trip.  Yes, when we go on missions a missionary board does not pay your way.   Jeremy and Sara had to raise many thousands of dollars.

But my friend Kaity, who I have known since she was a freshman in high school, still needs more support.  I have watched Kaity go from a giggly little goofball with big eyes and great optimism to a teenager struggling with the process of understanding her own personal faith with God and wanting a little help with some schoolwork, to a young woman who is doing a great job in college and has probably met the love of her life there, a guy named Matt.  Kaity is a kind, loving, smart, funny, adorable, energetic young woman who has lots of personal charisma and charm.  But being away at college rather than back home it was harder for her to raise money and she needs more to sustain her eleven month trip.

Please consider sending Kaity some support so she can go where people are dirty and hungry and there are no comfy beds or climate-controlled environments.   Kaity wants to give almost an entire year of her life going to the poor and needy and helping to make their lives better.   You can help her do this by going here:

The World Race Kaity Grace

 

www.kaityanczer.theworldrace.org

 

Blog for Kaity Grace 

The World Race

~~~~~~~

Lies?

I remember that back in the days before high school we used to think it was cool to have slumber parties.  Girls did it, of course, but guys did as well.   We'd listen to the latest music, play long games of Risk and  play ping-pong or pool and sometimes sneak out to TP another friend's house or try to raid the house where the girls were having a slumber party.  This record reminded me of the party we had at John H____b's house because it was the first party I remember where the girls raided US!   We were all for it but John's parents figured that out pretty quick and chased the girls back to Dianne G____u's house where they were supposed to be staying.   This Knickerbockers song was just out and I had the .45.   We were listening records when we heard a tap at the window and Dianne and Kathy S____r and some of the other girls appeared at the window and we were just letting them in when along came the parents...Anyway, The Knickerbockers really had only one big hit song and that was it.  They could sound like the Beatles, Four Seasons, Zombies, etc.   Don't think they ever really found their own sound but, hey, how many little bands ever make even ONE hit song?

TP'd house

Truth

Real Christianity is not talking about it or going to church, it is LIVING it out.  I assure my readers that I do not lie to them when making posts, so when commenters say I am lying it is likely because they have no arguments to make.  Lying will not please God and will not advance the cause of either Truth or Christ.  I promise I will not lie to you and if I discover that I have been mistaken I will try to correct it.   Thus I have made it clear that I do not use the Dr. Dino site nor will I post anything from his site ever again (I did a couple of times in my earliest posts before I realized what was going on with him). 

Thus I have absolutely tossed aside any water canopy scenarios for the prediluvian world.  

Thus I also cast aside John Hartnett, so references to him are kind of dumb or very desperate.  If a commenter says anything about Hartnett you know he is reaching for anything he can think of to avoid the topic of the post. 

Due to so many commenters who repeat standard Darwinist propaganda and the sad fact that many of them are too indoctrinated to even understand that they are repeating and believing lies, I am now going to make a few simple posts that address the fossil record and other concerns and thereby address various falsehoods repeated by some who comment.   I will take one issue on at a time, so references to other issues in the comments thread of this post are a waste of time.

The fossil record doesn't support Darwinism, it refutes it.  Fully formed organisms suddenly "appear" and are miraculously preserved...unless you account for the worldwide flood and then the fossil record makes sense.   I will try to keep things simple and address one or two portions of the subject at a time.   Feel free to search the blog for past posts on the subject.   Today?  Only rapid burial explained by the Noahic Flood can explain this:

Fast octopus fossils reveal no evolution

by Garry Graham

Photo: stockxpert

Five octopus fossils, supposedly 95 million years old, were recently discovered in Lebanon, catching scientists by surprise.¹
 
First, they were surprised that the octopuses were even fossilized. Unlike animals with hard shells or bony skeletons, cephalopods, like the octopus and squid, have no hard parts (other than the mouth²). One report said that fossilizing an octopus was as unlikely as capturing a “fossil sneeze”.

The fossils were exquisitely preserved. All eight arms were visible for each animal, as well as traces of muscle and rows of suckers. Remarkably, a few of the fossils even showed internal gills and remnants of ink.

Scientists try to explain the past by looking at what they see happening today. When an octopus dies today, it decomposes into a slimy blob and disappears within a few days. For an octopus to be fossilized it would need to sink to the ocean floor without being eaten, and remain there without decomposing or being consumed by bacteria while being buried by sediment. How could such a process be possible for an octopus at all?

Lead author of the report, Dr Dirk Fuchs of the Freie University, Berlin, said, “The luck was that the corpse landed untouched on the sea floor. The sea floor was free of oxygen and therefore free of scavengers.” But lack of oxygen is no preservative—experiments with fish carcasses show that even in the absence of oxygen they still disintegrate on the ocean bottom.³ Other scientists have published research showing that the ocean floor is actually teeming with bacterial life.⁴ So these scientists have not explained the remarkably preserved fossils at all.

Fossil photo and diagram from D. Fuchs, G. Bracchi and R. Weis, ref. 1.

Fossil octopus remarkably preserved in Lebanon reveals details of the eight arms, suckers, ink, gills, mouth, eye capsule and more.

The second surprise was that the specimens look very much like modern species of octopus:

“These things are 95 million years old, yet one of the fossils is almost indistinguishable from living species.”

Evolutionary thinking predicts that an octopus as old as these should look much more “primitive”, since evolution requires increasing complexity over time.⁵ Evolutionists had always assumed that the ancient octopus would show “primitive” features,⁶ but this discovery, “pushes back the origins of the modern octopus by tens of millions of years …”.

However, the biblical creation model easily explains this amazing octopus discovery.

First, it explains the special conditions needed for soft-bodied animals like the octopus to fossilize.⁷

Specifically, the animal must be buried rapidly (while still alive or soon after death) under metres of sediment in order to exclude oxygen and prevent any further scavenging or decay.

Such conditions would certainly have been present in the ocean during the global Flood recorded in the Bible.

No miraculous stroke of luck is called for. In fact, creationists would expect the existence of such well-preserved fossil octopuses. And of course, there are many examples of soft-bodied organisms in the fossil record.^6,7,8,9,10
 
What’s more, this particular fossil octopus is enclosed in limestone. Long-age geologists have thought that limestone takes long periods of time to form—hence this octopus fossil, being entombed in limestone, presents an additional challenge to evolutionary thinking. But for biblical creationists there is no mystery, as conditions during the global Flood would have been suitable for rapid limestone formation.¹¹
 
What about the similarity of the fossil octopus to modern species? Once again, the biblical creation model predicts that species similar to modern varieties would exist in the fossil record. After all, the fossils were formed only a few thousand years ago, and all the species alive today are descended from animals that were alive before the Flood.¹²
 
Evolutionary scientists scratch their heads in surprise at their own discoveries because they don’t expect such evidence within their evolutionary philosophy. They are continually forced to invent new stories to account for their surprises.

On the other hand, creationists can enjoy these discoveries and marvel at the wonderful confirmation scientific evidence provides for the biblical record of Earth history. This fossil gives us reason to praise our mighty God who created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1), who revealed Himself through his Son Jesus (2 Timothy 1:8–10; Hebrews 1:2ff) and who will judge the world in righteousness (2 Peter 3:3–7).

References and notes

1. Fuchs, D., Bracchi, G. and Weis, R., New octopods (Cephalopoda: Coleoidea) from the Late Cretaceous (Upper Cenomanian) of Hâkel and Hâdjoula, Lebanon, Palaeontology 52(1):65–81, 2009. See also: Rare fossil octopuses found, , 18 March 2009. 
2. The mouth resembles a parrot’s beak. See: The beak of the colossal squid, , 26 March 2009.
3. Garner, P., Green River blues, Creation 19(3):18–19, 1997.
4. ‘Barren’ seafloor teeming with microbial life, , 29 May 2008. 
5. Progressive complexity, , 26 March 2009. 
6. Eyden, P., Fossil octopuses, , November 2004. 
7. Catchpoole, D., Hundreds of jellyfish fossils! Creation 25(4):32–33, 2003. 
8. Thompson, A., Rocks reveal oldest known jellyfish, , 30 October 2007. 
9. What are those big jellyfish fossils doing in Wisconsin? , 24 January 2002. 
10. Strange creatures—a Burgess Shale fossil sampler, , 26 March 2009. 

Jelly

Jellies

Hundreds of jellyfish fossils!

by David Catchpoole

What a storm it must have been! News reports said that hundreds of giant jellyfish once lived about 500 million years ago, but were ‘stranded by a freakish tide or storm’ on an ancient beach. Sand later buried them, forming fossils.^1,2 With many specimens measuring over 50 cm (20 in) across, these are the biggest fossil jellyfish known.

Found in a Wisconsin sandstone quarry, it must have been an extraordinary set of circumstances that preserved them, geologists say, for fossilized impressions of jellyfish, which have no skeleton or other hard parts, are extremely uncommon.³
 
‘Preservation of a soft-bodied organism is incredibly rare, but a whole deposit of them is like finding your own vein of gold’, said James Hagadorn, one of the paleontologists who reported the find.^1,4 Also remarkable is that the rock was sandstone (i.e. the jellyfish were buried in sand which later ‘cemented’ into rock), rather than fine-grained rock like mudstone. In sand, buried jellyfish quickly break down because oxygen readily filters through interconnected air spaces between sand grains, allowing rapid decay. But in fine-grained settings, Dr Hagadorn and his colleagues explain that ‘catastrophic burial and stagnation’ inhibit decay; therefore, jellyfish are more readily preserved. ‘You never get soft bodied preservation in that kind of coarse grain size’, Hagadorn says excitedly.⁵ ‘When people find a T-rex, that doesn’t excite me that much, because a T-rex has bones and teeth—really easy to fossilize. But to preserve a jellyfish, that’s hard, because it has no hard parts. Something is there we don’t understand.’

The ‘storm tide’ scenario proposed by James Hagadorn and his colleagues seems at first to explain some of the puzzle. They point out that when jellyfish are stranded on beaches today, they quickly fall prey to scavenging predators such as birds and beach-dwelling crustaceans. So why didn’t scavengers rip into these stranded jellyfish? The answer, say the paleontologists, is that these fossils are over half a billion years old, i.e. they lived before land animals and birds had evolved. New Scientist explained, ‘Because there were not any birds back then, the carcasses remained stranded until they were buried by subsequent storms.’⁶ So their preservation is attributed to the absence of scavengers and that the jellyfish were buried soon after they were stranded. But note that this ‘explanation’ for the absence of scavengers assumes that evolution is demonstrated fact—which it most certainly isn’t. And these jellyfish fossils certainly don’t support the idea of burial over millions of years either.

The evidence doesn’t fit

A scanned copy of Hagadorn et al.’s Figure 3 on page 149 of Geology journal, February 2002,^4,7 [which cannot be reproduced here (see note), but is available in the printed copy] gives us a closer look at the evidence and we can determine how well their interpretation fits. The figures reveal a number of puzzles which the ‘multiple storm tide’ scenario does not satisfactorily explain:

• The presence of beautifully-preserved ripples, so obviously evident in photographs A–F, is a major difficulty for the jellyfish-stranded-by-ebbing-tide story. Sand ripples are formed by flowing water, but when the tide recedes, the swash and backwash of waves on the beach completely obliterates any sand ripples formed earlier. Yet the Hagadorn et al. theory proposes that there were (a) multiple tidal cycles (vertical range approx. 1–2 m (3–6 ft)) before the jellyfish were buried under layers of sediment deposited each time the tide returned, and (b) waves (generated by wind). Clearly, the story doesn’t fit the evidence.
  
  
• The paleontologists conclude that the ‘multiple generations of ripples’ (photo C) in the first few layers of sediment in and around jellyfish impressions, together with the absence of ripples within the central area of each impression (B–G), indicates that jellyfish carcasses remained intact through multiple tidal cycles. But today, whenever an ebbing tide leaves stranded jellyfish exposed to drying air and sun, the carcasses shrink and the stomach cavity collapses—i.e. today’s jellyfish carcasses do not remain ‘intact’ as the fossil jellyfish did. To try to explain this puzzle, the paleontologists suggest that perhaps the fossil jellyfish carcasses reabsorbed water (thus expanding back to their original size) each time the tide returned. But this is really stretching the ‘multiple tides’ story to try to make it fit the evidence. Instead, the evidence rather seems to show that the fossilized jellyfish were under water continuously as they were being buried under layers of sediment.
  
  
• A major problem for the paleontologists’ scenario is that, today, when masses of jellyfish are stranded by a storm etc., they commonly pump their bells to try to escape. But the tell-tale ‘concave rings’ of sediment resulting from the bell contractions of dying jellyfish, as seen on beaches today, are absent in nearly all these fossil impressions. It would seem that the paleontologists are correct to surmise that most of the jellyfish were dead or didn’t pulse, but their ‘beach stranding’ scenario does not explain why.
  
  
• In the quarry, the paleontologists found that ‘at least seven flat-lying planar bed surfaces contain hundreds of medusae [jellyfish] impressions’ (our emphasis). And the depth of these fossil-bearing bands of sediment from the lowest jellyfish fossil layer to the highest was several metres (about 12 ft). What a storm that must have been! Actually, Hagadorn et al. invoke ‘severe tropical storms’ (implying more than one storm) as the cause of jellyfish stranding, but their paper avoids any mention of a time period. (In newspaper reports though, Hagadorn is reported to have said that the fossilized jellyfish were ‘encased in about 12 vertical feet of rock representing a span of time up to 1 million years’.²) Was it one storm every hundred thousand years or so, for a million years? If the storm tide scenario cannot satisfactorily explain the jellyfish fossils in one of the sediment beds, how much more difficult would it be to explain seven? And in each case, the fossils have been beautifully preserved.
  

A better alternative: smothered in the Flood!

The evidence makes much more sense from a biblical Flood perspective:

• The preservation of the sand ripples is easily explained. Being at depth rather than in a tidal zone, waves did not erode the sand ripples. Also, ripples can only be preserved when covered by a different type of sediment—in this case, the ripples in coarse sand were overlain by a finer silty sand and red oxidized mud.
  
  Such a starkly different type of sediment is much more likely to have been carried and deposited by swirling floodwaters than by a returning tide in a beach environment.
  
• The multiple layers of ripples (and the variation in their alignment/orientation between layers) reflect their having been laid down by sediment-laden currents of varying strength (thus the variation in particle sizes between layers).
  
  This is much easier to imagine with swirling, surging floodwaters flowing over the continents than within the confines of a beach environment over millions of years.
  
• The likely reason why ‘The majority of jellyfish were dead or did not pulse, …’ is that they were overcome quickly by sediment-laden water, smothered under layer-upon-layer of sand and silt. So most had no chance to exhibit the usual beach-stranding ‘escape behaviour’ (hence the absence of concave sediment rings). Interestingly, Hagadorn et al. suggest that the asymmetrical steepened edges of the convex ring in photo G ‘perhaps reflect’ an effort to escape stranding. But might this actually reflect the jellyfish’s attempt to escape from being buried (by an underwater avalanche of silt) rather than from being stranded on a beach?
  
• The evidence indicating that the jellyfish did not dry out fits better with their being buried while continuously under water.
  
• The absence of any evidence of scavenging was not due to beach-dwelling scavengers having not yet evolved, but to the jellyfish having been covered by sediment quickly.
  
• The lack of any evidence of burrowing by worms etc. in the sediment shows that these layers were buried quickly underneath the overlying layers of sediment—consistent with the global Flood.
  
• The seven sediment bands of jellyfish fossils, across several metres (about 12 ft) of layers, are readily explained by the biblical Flood. (And remember that seven beds are all that we can see—probably many more jellyfish impressions remain concealed within the quarry rocks.)
  
  Jellyfish are essentially floaters, at the mercy of strong currents, and perhaps in the fast-moving, sediment-carrying waters of the Flood (Genesis 7:11), the bell-pumping action of jellyfish would have pumped silt/sand/mud into their stomachs and internal cavities, and as their sediment load increased, they would have progressively sunk to the sea bed, being quickly buried as layers of sediment built up. This also seems to fit with the carcasses all facing the same direction when they were buried, much better than does the Hagadorn et al. ‘storm tide’ scenario.

So, the evidence fits with the biblical Flood, not with Dr Hagadorn’s storm tide.⁸ As one science commentator said of stranded jellyfish:

‘Waves and sand destroy their bodies before they can be covered in sediment—essential for the slow process of fossilization.’⁹

But the long-age uniformitarian idea that the fossils are formed by sediments slowly covering up dead animals does not describe how these jellyfish fossils could have been preserved.

No wonder Charles Darwin, with his uniformitarian thinking, wrote, ‘No organism wholly soft can be preserved.’¹⁰
 
With all these hundreds of jellyfish fossils in a Wisconsin quarry, I wonder what Darwin would say now?

Related Magazine Articles

Jellyfish
Creation 25:4 (September 2003)

Skeptics challenge: a ‘God of love’ created a killer jellyfish?
Creation 25:4 (September 2003)

References and notes

1. Jellyfish horde uncovered after half a billion years, , 5 February 2003.
   
2. Bridges, A., Rare trove of fossilized jellyfish found in Wisconsin, The Salina Journal, , 5 February 2003. 
3. Past findings of fossilized jellyfish have also been very confronting for evolutionists. See, for example, Fossil jellyfish in Australia, (originally published in Creation 4(2):31, 1981); also Fact Sheet: Ediacara Fauna Fossils, , 24 June 2003. 
4. Hagadorn, J.W., Dott, R.H. and Damrow, D., Stranded on a Late Cambrian shoreline: Medusae from central Wisconsin, Geology 30(2):147–150, 2002. 
5. Impressions of Ancient Jellyfish, Geotimes, , 12 February 2003. 
6. NewScientist.com, Jellyfish jackpot found on fossil beach, , 24 Jan. 2003.
7. Scientific journals require researchers to present not just their interpretations of the evidence but also their evidence (observations / experimental results) from which they have drawn their conclusions. This allows the reader to check that the researcher’s interpretations of the evidence fit with the actual evidence itself. (In contrast, newspapers usually only publish paleontologists’ conclusions, rather than what they actually observed.) 
8. There is also another difficulty for evolutionists. These are the biggest-ever fossil jellyfish found, yet they are in Cambrian (‘dated’ at 510 million years) strata—which doesn’t support the ‘big-evolved-from-little’ idea. 
9. Clarke, T., Jellies roll back time, Nature Science Update, , 15 February 2002.
10. Darwin, C., The Origin of Species, first published 1859, quote taken from p. 422 of the 6^th Edition, 1872 (reprinted 1902). 

[Note: Due to copyright restraints, the pictures and figures referenced in this article are only available in Creation magazine.

1. Grand Canyon limestone fast or slow deposits? Creation 17(3):50–51, 1995. Return to text.