Kangaroos and other Marsupials and Monotremes - Australian Animals only? What does this mean for Creation?
Kangaroos. Are they found outside of Australia?
But he did ask something I do not remember a commenter bring up before, the idea that kangaroos only can be found in Australian and therefore this supports Darwinism for some reason. So this post will cover that topic. Apparently the commenter wants to believe that kangaroos evolved only on Australia from primitive ancestors. However, kangaroos are NOT only in Australia and their ancestors were a food source for man. While Darwinists try to suppose that the similar kinds of organisms evolved to fit the same ecological niche, a Creationist would say that God made many kinds of organisms that would fulfill the same purpose. So both placental and marsupial wolves existed in the past, for instance. Any links to more primitive forms of life evolving into kangaroos are supposed rather than evidential as this link demonstrates. Convergent evolution is a supposition that has absolutely no support other than in the minds of Darwinists. Look to the end of the page to see that Darwinists are beginning to back away from the fossil record as it becomes more hostile to their hypothesis.
A full discussion of the kangaroo requires an overview of the formation of fossil rocks and how fossils fit into the Darwinist and Creation model. Both sides have the same evidence. I would assert that Creationists consider ALL the evidence, while Darwinists are beginning to abandon the fossil record and appeal to established mythology that has been propagandized to the point that the unwitting believe evolution is a fact rather than an unsupported, failed hypothesis.
A full discussion of the kangaroo requires an overview of the formation of fossil rocks and how fossils fit into the Darwinist and Creation model. Both sides have the same evidence. I would assert that Creationists consider ALL the evidence, while Darwinists are beginning to abandon the fossil record and appeal to established mythology that has been propagandized to the point that the unwitting believe evolution is a fact rather than an unsupported, failed hypothesis.
As it happens, no fossils of this creature are certain to have been found very far from Australia. There have been reports of kangaroo fossils being found in Africa, specifically Egypt, but this appears to be an unsubstantiated rumor. It is not unusual for organisms to live in an area where no fossils of their kind have been found, so not finding kangaroo fossils in North America does not mean there were never any there. It simply means that it is less likely. Fossils were formed in relatively large amounts during the inundatory portion of the Noahic Flood as bottom-dwelling sea life was buried and preserved in great abundance as massive amounts of sediments were poured over them. I have literally walked on long stretches of preserved shellfish and trilobites, almost all of them either closed (bivalves) or upright (trilobites) which indicates they were buried alive.
About the fossil record
The fossil record makes a lot of sense once you understand that the Flood was intended to wipe out the human civilization then in existence and also take the lives of all land-dwelling vertebrates and birds. God knew enough about the organisms He had made that it was certain other forms of life would survive a global flood. While some specific varieties of organisms (trilobites, for instance) that were quite common before the inundation did not seem to survive the Flood, similar organisms did survive to fit that niche in the ecosystem. All the lower layers of the fossil rocks have been shown to be formed by water with just a few extrusions of igneous rock through still-pliable layers. Only the upper layers seem to have been primarily formed by mudslides, loess storms, dike breaks and other hazards associated with the dynamic mud-rock face of the new Earth and the ice age that was caused by the enormous amount of heated water and the new continental masses that emerged from the waters. With rapid plate tectonic movement, the probable single continent that existed pre-Flood was buried and the new continents that appear to be puzzle pieces separated were indeed a result of crustal subduction and rifts expanding rapidly to convert one big land mass that was likely located with its center at the equator, thereby supporting land organisms comfortable in the tropical and sub-tropical climate associated with such a location.
The fossil record makes a lot of sense once you understand that the Flood was intended to wipe out the human civilization then in existence and also take the lives of all land-dwelling vertebrates and birds. God knew enough about the organisms He had made that it was certain other forms of life would survive a global flood. While some specific varieties of organisms (trilobites, for instance) that were quite common before the inundation did not seem to survive the Flood, similar organisms did survive to fit that niche in the ecosystem. All the lower layers of the fossil rocks have been shown to be formed by water with just a few extrusions of igneous rock through still-pliable layers. Only the upper layers seem to have been primarily formed by mudslides, loess storms, dike breaks and other hazards associated with the dynamic mud-rock face of the new Earth and the ice age that was caused by the enormous amount of heated water and the new continental masses that emerged from the waters. With rapid plate tectonic movement, the probable single continent that existed pre-Flood was buried and the new continents that appear to be puzzle pieces separated were indeed a result of crustal subduction and rifts expanding rapidly to convert one big land mass that was likely located with its center at the equator, thereby supporting land organisms comfortable in the tropical and sub-tropical climate associated with such a location.
That every continent (including Antarctica) has fossils of such organisms and fossils of bottom-dwelling sea life is evidence for the Noahic Flood. It is nonsensical to propose that the Antarctic was a tropical paradise at one time. It is also nonsensical to listen to the absurd explanations Darwinists give for fossils of bottom-dwelling sea life found high up in the tallest mountain chains. The desperate Darwinists even claim a carving of a Stegosaurus on an ancient Cambodian temple is a hippo!!
Tibet fossils force dramatic re-think
On Tibet’s desolate Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau, about 4,500 m (15,000 ft) above sea level, evolutionary geologists were surprised to find ‘thick layers of ancient lake sediment filled with plant, fish and animal fossils typical of far lower elevations and warmer, wetter climates’.
The find has forced a dramatic revision of the estimated age of the Plateau, down to a ‘very young’ 2–3 million years, ‘not millions of years earlier than that’, as evolutionary geologists have previously believed.
But they still haven’t got it right. Instead, when you start from the premise that the Bible is an accurate historical account, and therefore that the event of around 4,500 years ago described in Genesis 6–9 really occurred, the global spread of fossils (even in the world’s highest mountain ranges) makes a whole lot of sense.
- PHYSORG.com, www.physorg.com/news132414246.html, 11 June 2008.
But on this blog I have written extensively on the fossil rocks, why they cannot be explained by long ages and why they must be a testament to the Noahic Flood. The search engine will remind the readers of the details but the short version? Fossils with flesh and blood remains, layering with no signs of weathering or age between them, paraconfomities, missing layers, no true geological column as taught in schools, megabreccias, polystrate fossils, fossil footprints of both dinosaur and man and other organisms preserved along with water ripples and raindrops, soft-bodied organisms like jellies being preserved, and also the layering features found in real life easily reproduced by flumes in real-time tests....and there is much, much more.
Mammal fossils are found in lower layers along with dinosaurs and even some found with dinosaurs in their stomachs!!! So we know from the fossil record that mammals and dinosaurs were found together. Also, in addition to post-Flood accounts and depictions of dinosaurs we find man tracks and dinosaur tracks together in the same layers and even in a very few cases both man and dinosaur in the very same place (the Delk track is well-documented and thoroughly tested). However, mammals are rare finds in the lower layers while dinosaurs are more common. This is probably because the cities of mankind were targeted and therefore the domesticated animals most useful to man were destroyed along with most of mankind. We do find fossils of man occasionally in lower layers along with lots of tracks. Just as with dinosaur and amphibian tracks, the trackways of man tend to be running in one direction and the idea would be that the biggest and most intelligent of organisms survived for quite some time after the first 40 days of rain, fleeing tidal action and continually rising floodwaters, seeking higher ground and eventually being overcome.
But back to kangaroos.
Kangaroos are not actually limited to Australia. Varieties of kangaroo are found in Indonesia and New Guinea, for instance. Kangaroos are marsupials and some kinds of marsupials have been found in North and South America, Europe and Asia as well as Australia. Did you know that platypus teeth have been found in South America? From the article:
He says, ‘This should shatter our warm conviction that the platypus was uniquely Australian.’
Today’s platypuses, which have no teeth, are far inferior to earlier platypuses in other ways, too, Dr Archer notes. He is quoted as saying it has ‘changed from a highly robust animal with good sets of teeth’ into what is effectively ‘an extremely degenerate small mammal’.
The Weekend Australian, 23–24 January 1993 (p. 10).
The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 January 1993 (p. 5).
This is relevant to the problem raised by skeptics of the frail, timid platypus’ migrating to southern Australia from Ararat. It also helps answer the common belief that Australia’s unique fauna must have evolved here, because their fossils are found nowhere else. Marsupial fossils have now been found on every continent."
Kangaroos and other marsupials have been devolving and going extinct ever since the Flood. One reason many large animals found in the upper fossil layers are now extinct is due in part to human predation. This is certainly true of marsupials...from the article:
"Australia once had many marsupials much larger than those remaining today. The ‘giant wombat’ Diprotodon is probably the best-known of these. The giant kangaroo Procoptodon could stand three metres (ten feet) tall. They (and also a non-marsupial, the bird Genyornis, a larger version of the emu) are collectively called Australia’s extinct ‘megafauna.’ What happened to all of these? Many have ‘devolved’ down to smaller representatives. For instance, today’s red kangaroos and Tasmanian devils are much smaller than their fossil counterparts. A recent find at Cuddie Springs in New South Wales, of human tools together with the bones of some of these megafauna, raises the suspicion that people helped drive them to extinction, which of course is no surprise for creationists. Tests have confirmed that some blood is still present on the tools, which suggests that it was probably nowhere near as long ago as evolutionists say."
Monotremes and marsupials are far less common than live-bearing mammals. Why are they so numerous in Australia? With no history of the migration of animals after the landing of Noah's Ark, we cannot say for certain. We can see that there is evidence that dinosaurs of massive size are not found in the uppermost fossil layers BUT we have lots of historical evidence for dinosaurs interacting with mankind all over the world. Dragons were the term our ancestors used for them. There are carvings of them all found around the world and accounts of fighting them documented throughout Europe and Asia and stories and carvings and figurines in North and South America. Yet as far as we know there are no dinosaurs alive today (although there are so many sightings of the Mokele-mbembe in the Congo river basin regions reported even in the 21st Century that a "Lazarus" specimen of a dinosaur may yet be captured).
Marsupials of larger sizes are found in the post-flood rocks, also in the regions they now inhabit. When the ice age formed after the Flood, the sea levels were lower as so much water came down in massive blizzards on the land masses near the poles. The glaciation formed was a result of continual snowstorms as the warm waters after the Flood evaporated into the atmosphere and in the far North and South formed the glaciers. Land bridges joined all continents for a period of time. The population of kangaroos and other marsupials found themselves spreading to the South from Mt. Ararat to the Indonesia-Australian land bridge and were isolated as the great glaciers melted and the resulting sea level rise covered the land bridges that did exist. It appears that marsupials did not compete with mammals and other organisms particularly well in the world at large, but Australia was an exception. It may be in part because animals spread out and away from mankind after the Flood while mankind stayed in one place for the most part, until God separated men by languages at Babel and caused them to spread out and populate the Earth.
It does not appear that Australia was widely populated by mankind in the past, so this probability is also in the equation. Perhaps marsupials were more successful in that region because the people of Australia were most interested in hunting down and eating the largest of them rather than having any intent of causing their extinction. We know from the upper levels of fossil rocks that the larger mammals of the past have not survived to this day for the most part and predation is a good explanation, as is the fact that larger animals need to eat more food to exist. If you are a huge walking food source and also you need more food to exist, you have a harder time living through times of famine and will be more likely to be targeted by both animal and man predators. As the fossil rocks began to harden and the surface of the Earth stabilized after the end of the ice age, creatures that were common in an area did not necessarily leave fossils because the primary causes of fossilization were no longer active. No more flood, no more dike breaks, no more mudslides and far fewer loess storms.
When the European pioneers ventured West into North America, they found vast herds of bison, sometimes so huge they extended into the horizon. We know that untold millions of bison inhabited the Western plains of the USA and yet bison fossils are remarkably rare. However, they are found in places they were not seen when the Europeans came to North America in the 1600's and 1700's. Bison did not roam in Florida when settlers came, but some rare bison fossils have been found there. A few bison fossils are found from Florida to California and up into Canada. But compared to the massive amounts of bison that thrived in the West the fossil finds are negligible. Therefore it is fair to say that post-Flood fossils are more accidental and therefore random that the fossils produced by the Flood itself.
The flood rocks have certain characteristic types of fossils - organisms buried in situ, organisms sorted by flow, and mixed burials of land and sea creatures that would not have lived together normally. The general overview of the fossil rocks is based more on the layers the organisms were likely found, especially in the lowest rocks.
credit
Furthermore, much confusion comes from the naming of fossils found in the fossil rocks. Often the same organism is given a different name because it is found in a different layer. The presuppositions of paleontologists, most of whom are Darwinists, leads to not only mislabeled fossils, but also deliberate obfuscation and hiding of evidence. It is now commonplace for fossils from every layer having actual flesh and blood detected within them, but it was not until Mary Schweitzer's T. Rex drew national attention for such remains that other fossil finds were also publicized as containing actual flesh and/or blood remains. Then the stories of living organisms discovered in supposedly multiple-millions of year old rock or coal began to be told again, some of them incredibly well supported. This topic has been covered in detail on this blog.
With all of this in mind, finding fossil kangaroos is not likely even in places they were plentiful. A working hypothesis is that they were generally spreading to the South and after the Indonesian land bridge was overcome with water were cut off from the rest of the world and apparently to their benefit. There are only 13 varieties of the kangaroo kind found in New Guinea and so far just one found in Indonesia while the rest are found in Oz. Australia became a home to monotremes and marsupials, perhaps because the land bridge that led to Australia was overcome by water sooner than some, but more likely because few people traveled in that direction.
What does man have to do with it?
The sons of Japheth went primarily towards Europe and Asia, the sons of Ham went primarily South and the sons of Shem largely stayed in the Middle East. Descendants of both Ham and Shem made it to North and South America and even some from Japheth. DNA will eventually help identify this more carefully, but the Aborigines of Australia would seem to be a mixture of both Ham and Japheth by preliminary DNA and language and historical studies. We have genealogies of both Northern Europeans and people of the Far East who trace their ancestry to Japheth and of course Egypt is Cushite by way of Ham. Semites such as Jews and Phoenicians apparently also have ancestors in the New World. Even after the land bridges were submerged, sea travel in ancient times was far more common than once thought. We have found evidence of ancient maps that are fairly close to accurate depictions of the continents, maps copied from older maps that certainly far predated Christ.
If mankind did not populate Australia as extensively as they did the most of Asia and Europe and Africa, they were less likely to kill off the marsupials and monotremes that had migrated there. There may be some parts to the equation we cannot know for sure. We know that myriad organisms migrate from one area of the world to another. Some of the migrations are yearly. It is possible that the algorithms built into organisms did, to an extent, call them towards the area of the world closest to their habitat before the Flood. Perhaps marsupials and monotremes were most successful in the Southeast portion of the proposed original continent and were therefore drawn back towards the position on the globe closest to their previous location. However, as the Ark was located close enough to their habitat that a pair of each kind of marsupial and monotreme could be prodded by God to report to the Ark and enter in that is less likely. More likely is that these organisms migrated to the area before the land bridges were overcome by rising waters and that being separated from the majority of mankind and other mammals allowed them to thrive there while they were unsuccessful elsewhere.
By the way, about that fossil record?
Richard Dawkins Dumps the Fossil Record May 18th, 2013
(formatting changed by blogger)
The fossil record was no friend of Charles Darwin in 1859. Now, more than 150 years later, the fossil record is no longer a friend of Richard Dawkins, either.
“Why does not,” Darwin pointed out, “every collection of fossil remains afford plain evidence of the gradation and mutation of the forms of life?”
The question was unavoidable, the elephant in the room, yet troubling since Darwin recognized that the fossil record could eventually either make or break his theory:
“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ exists which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” “The distinctiveness of specific forms [fossil record],” Darwin acknowledged, “and their not being blended together in innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty.”
Evolutionary palaeontologist Stephen Gould in the book entitled The Panda’s Thumb reflecting on Darwin’s angst notes: “fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy.” In the face poor evidence, even contradictory evidence, Darwin excused the problem reasoning that “only a small portion of the surface of the earth has been geologically explored.” His reasoning kept hopes alive that further explorations would uncover the ever elusive “in innumerable transitional links.”
Things have not changed much in 150 years. “We need more fossils” Dawkins pleaded in his 2009 book entitled The Greatest Show on Earth. In turning from the fossil record Dawkins advances the concept of “comparative evidence” “Comparative evidence has always, as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, told even more compelling than fossil evidence” Regardless of what the “comparative evidence” actually is, Dawkins did not say what it is−dumping the fossil record as essential evidence for Darwin’s theory - “We don’t need fossils in order to demonstrate that evolution is a fact.”
As far as Dawkins is concerned the fossil record should just be moved out of the picture, even one of the most notorious icons in the history of evolution−the Archaeopteryx. “To put up a single famous fossil like Archaeopteryx panders to a fallacy,” Dawkins declared The Greatest Show on Earth.
When Darwin was disparate for evidence to “innumerable transitional links,” he had quickly turned to the newly discovered Archaeopteryx discovered in Germany. For Darwin, the Archaeopteryx emerged as a kingpin transitional link between birds and reptiles - “Even the wide interval between birds and reptiles has been shown by [Huxley] to be partially bridged over in the most unexpected manner, by the ostrich and extinct Archaeopteryx.”
The dumping of the Archaeopteryx as a missing link between birds and reptiles by palaeontologists during the late twentieth century, however, was gaining solid support. According to Larry Martin, an American vertebrate paleontologist and curator of the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center at the University of Kansas, the
“Archaeopteryx is not ancestral of any group of modern birds.”
Missing link status of the Archaeopteryx is only an illusion; a “once upon a time” story according to Henry Gee a British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist and senior editor of the prestigious journal Nature.
Abandoning the Archaeopteryx as a transitional link was actually only a tip-of-the-iceberg of the larger fossil record problem for evolution. Geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig of the Max-Planck Institute in Germany in the book entitled The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe, like Dawkins, candidly points to the fact that a “gradual series of intermediates in Darwin’s sense has never existed and hence will never exist.”
Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in crisis without a theory. Without fossil record evidence of missing links, in Darwin’s own words, “my theory would absolutely break down.” The dumping of the fossil record by one of Darwin’s last remaining hard core advocates, signals the end of the Darwinism era.
Biological evolution only exists as a fact in philosophy, not in science.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Which makes it simply a religion bereft of evidence. The evidence is on the side of Creation by God.
Evidence for kangaroos evolving in Australia is not there. Kangaroos appear suddenly in the fossil records (as do all organisms). They evidently were stranded by the rising waters of the post-ice age in Australia, New Guinea and Indonesia (large portions of New Guinea and Indonesia remain unexplored) and were able to survive while many other marsupials and monotremes could not compete with mammals in other parts of the post-Flood world.
Kangaroos are not actually limited to Australia. Varieties of kangaroo are found in Indonesia and New Guinea, for instance. Kangaroos are marsupials and some kinds of marsupials have been found in North and South America, Europe and Asia as well as Australia. Did you know that platypus teeth have been found in South America? From the article:
… and platypuses are devolving, too!
"Australian palaeontologist Michael Archer has found another definite fossil platypus tooth in South America, making three in all. The teeth are almost identical to fossil platypus teeth found in Australia.He says, ‘This should shatter our warm conviction that the platypus was uniquely Australian.’
Today’s platypuses, which have no teeth, are far inferior to earlier platypuses in other ways, too, Dr Archer notes. He is quoted as saying it has ‘changed from a highly robust animal with good sets of teeth’ into what is effectively ‘an extremely degenerate small mammal’.
The Weekend Australian, 23–24 January 1993 (p. 10).
The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 January 1993 (p. 5).
This is relevant to the problem raised by skeptics of the frail, timid platypus’ migrating to southern Australia from Ararat. It also helps answer the common belief that Australia’s unique fauna must have evolved here, because their fossils are found nowhere else. Marsupial fossils have now been found on every continent."
Kangaroos and other marsupials have been devolving and going extinct ever since the Flood. One reason many large animals found in the upper fossil layers are now extinct is due in part to human predation. This is certainly true of marsupials...from the article:
Australia’s extinct giants
"Australia once had many marsupials much larger than those remaining today. The ‘giant wombat’ Diprotodon is probably the best-known of these. The giant kangaroo Procoptodon could stand three metres (ten feet) tall. They (and also a non-marsupial, the bird Genyornis, a larger version of the emu) are collectively called Australia’s extinct ‘megafauna.’ What happened to all of these? Many have ‘devolved’ down to smaller representatives. For instance, today’s red kangaroos and Tasmanian devils are much smaller than their fossil counterparts. A recent find at Cuddie Springs in New South Wales, of human tools together with the bones of some of these megafauna, raises the suspicion that people helped drive them to extinction, which of course is no surprise for creationists. Tests have confirmed that some blood is still present on the tools, which suggests that it was probably nowhere near as long ago as evolutionists say."
Monotremes and marsupials are far less common than live-bearing mammals. Why are they so numerous in Australia? With no history of the migration of animals after the landing of Noah's Ark, we cannot say for certain. We can see that there is evidence that dinosaurs of massive size are not found in the uppermost fossil layers BUT we have lots of historical evidence for dinosaurs interacting with mankind all over the world. Dragons were the term our ancestors used for them. There are carvings of them all found around the world and accounts of fighting them documented throughout Europe and Asia and stories and carvings and figurines in North and South America. Yet as far as we know there are no dinosaurs alive today (although there are so many sightings of the Mokele-mbembe in the Congo river basin regions reported even in the 21st Century that a "Lazarus" specimen of a dinosaur may yet be captured).
Marsupials of larger sizes are found in the post-flood rocks, also in the regions they now inhabit. When the ice age formed after the Flood, the sea levels were lower as so much water came down in massive blizzards on the land masses near the poles. The glaciation formed was a result of continual snowstorms as the warm waters after the Flood evaporated into the atmosphere and in the far North and South formed the glaciers. Land bridges joined all continents for a period of time. The population of kangaroos and other marsupials found themselves spreading to the South from Mt. Ararat to the Indonesia-Australian land bridge and were isolated as the great glaciers melted and the resulting sea level rise covered the land bridges that did exist. It appears that marsupials did not compete with mammals and other organisms particularly well in the world at large, but Australia was an exception. It may be in part because animals spread out and away from mankind after the Flood while mankind stayed in one place for the most part, until God separated men by languages at Babel and caused them to spread out and populate the Earth.
It does not appear that Australia was widely populated by mankind in the past, so this probability is also in the equation. Perhaps marsupials were more successful in that region because the people of Australia were most interested in hunting down and eating the largest of them rather than having any intent of causing their extinction. We know from the upper levels of fossil rocks that the larger mammals of the past have not survived to this day for the most part and predation is a good explanation, as is the fact that larger animals need to eat more food to exist. If you are a huge walking food source and also you need more food to exist, you have a harder time living through times of famine and will be more likely to be targeted by both animal and man predators. As the fossil rocks began to harden and the surface of the Earth stabilized after the end of the ice age, creatures that were common in an area did not necessarily leave fossils because the primary causes of fossilization were no longer active. No more flood, no more dike breaks, no more mudslides and far fewer loess storms.
When the European pioneers ventured West into North America, they found vast herds of bison, sometimes so huge they extended into the horizon. We know that untold millions of bison inhabited the Western plains of the USA and yet bison fossils are remarkably rare. However, they are found in places they were not seen when the Europeans came to North America in the 1600's and 1700's. Bison did not roam in Florida when settlers came, but some rare bison fossils have been found there. A few bison fossils are found from Florida to California and up into Canada. But compared to the massive amounts of bison that thrived in the West the fossil finds are negligible. Therefore it is fair to say that post-Flood fossils are more accidental and therefore random that the fossils produced by the Flood itself.
The flood rocks have certain characteristic types of fossils - organisms buried in situ, organisms sorted by flow, and mixed burials of land and sea creatures that would not have lived together normally. The general overview of the fossil rocks is based more on the layers the organisms were likely found, especially in the lowest rocks.
Furthermore, much confusion comes from the naming of fossils found in the fossil rocks. Often the same organism is given a different name because it is found in a different layer. The presuppositions of paleontologists, most of whom are Darwinists, leads to not only mislabeled fossils, but also deliberate obfuscation and hiding of evidence. It is now commonplace for fossils from every layer having actual flesh and blood detected within them, but it was not until Mary Schweitzer's T. Rex drew national attention for such remains that other fossil finds were also publicized as containing actual flesh and/or blood remains. Then the stories of living organisms discovered in supposedly multiple-millions of year old rock or coal began to be told again, some of them incredibly well supported. This topic has been covered in detail on this blog.
With all of this in mind, finding fossil kangaroos is not likely even in places they were plentiful. A working hypothesis is that they were generally spreading to the South and after the Indonesian land bridge was overcome with water were cut off from the rest of the world and apparently to their benefit. There are only 13 varieties of the kangaroo kind found in New Guinea and so far just one found in Indonesia while the rest are found in Oz. Australia became a home to monotremes and marsupials, perhaps because the land bridge that led to Australia was overcome by water sooner than some, but more likely because few people traveled in that direction.
What does man have to do with it?
The sons of Japheth went primarily towards Europe and Asia, the sons of Ham went primarily South and the sons of Shem largely stayed in the Middle East. Descendants of both Ham and Shem made it to North and South America and even some from Japheth. DNA will eventually help identify this more carefully, but the Aborigines of Australia would seem to be a mixture of both Ham and Japheth by preliminary DNA and language and historical studies. We have genealogies of both Northern Europeans and people of the Far East who trace their ancestry to Japheth and of course Egypt is Cushite by way of Ham. Semites such as Jews and Phoenicians apparently also have ancestors in the New World. Even after the land bridges were submerged, sea travel in ancient times was far more common than once thought. We have found evidence of ancient maps that are fairly close to accurate depictions of the continents, maps copied from older maps that certainly far predated Christ.
If mankind did not populate Australia as extensively as they did the most of Asia and Europe and Africa, they were less likely to kill off the marsupials and monotremes that had migrated there. There may be some parts to the equation we cannot know for sure. We know that myriad organisms migrate from one area of the world to another. Some of the migrations are yearly. It is possible that the algorithms built into organisms did, to an extent, call them towards the area of the world closest to their habitat before the Flood. Perhaps marsupials and monotremes were most successful in the Southeast portion of the proposed original continent and were therefore drawn back towards the position on the globe closest to their previous location. However, as the Ark was located close enough to their habitat that a pair of each kind of marsupial and monotreme could be prodded by God to report to the Ark and enter in that is less likely. More likely is that these organisms migrated to the area before the land bridges were overcome by rising waters and that being separated from the majority of mankind and other mammals allowed them to thrive there while they were unsuccessful elsewhere.
By the way, about that fossil record?
Richard Dawkins dumps Fossil Record
In my research of the fossil record, it brings up more questions than it answers. As to the reason I believe Dawkins has decided to give it up as evidence for evolution.
- Living fossils: There are over 30 known living fossils of plants and animals, yet each one has the same problem. They are found in one layer of the supposed record, and alive. For some fossils that is a gap as big as 10 layers. These gaps exist for “every living fossil”. So 30 times there are 30 gaps of the record not recording the fossils surviving until present time.
- The layering of the Geologic Column: There is no observable or explainable mechanism to show how the layers the fossil are found in got laid over millions of years. Yet water will sort the layered sediments like this and is observable and repeatable (empirical evidence).
- Polystrate Fossils: Trees that run through several layers that are supposed to take millions of years to form. How does a tree not rot away while waiting to be buried in the millions of years it took to do this? It could be explained away if only a few were found but these Polystrate Fossils are found all over the world.
- Cross contamination of dating markers: Fossils can be cross contaminated by the layers they are buried in. Example: If you bury a bone that dates 1000 years bury it in a layer that dates 300 million years. Over a period of time the markers from the layer will cross contaminate the fossil and make it date the same as the layer even though it never was the same age. This raises several questions and answers why all fossils will “always” date the same age as the layer. There is no other option after so many years.
- The Geologic Column or the fossil record does not exist in one piece anywhere in the world. It is estimated that if it did it would be just under 15 miles deep. So the record is only connected together by the age each layer dates and the fossils found in that layer. So an assumption has to be made here.
Richard Dawkins Dumps the Fossil Record May 18th, 2013
(formatting changed by blogger)
The fossil record was no friend of Charles Darwin in 1859. Now, more than 150 years later, the fossil record is no longer a friend of Richard Dawkins, either.
“Why does not,” Darwin pointed out, “every collection of fossil remains afford plain evidence of the gradation and mutation of the forms of life?”
The question was unavoidable, the elephant in the room, yet troubling since Darwin recognized that the fossil record could eventually either make or break his theory:
“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ exists which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” “The distinctiveness of specific forms [fossil record],” Darwin acknowledged, “and their not being blended together in innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty.”
Evolutionary palaeontologist Stephen Gould in the book entitled The Panda’s Thumb reflecting on Darwin’s angst notes: “fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy.” In the face poor evidence, even contradictory evidence, Darwin excused the problem reasoning that “only a small portion of the surface of the earth has been geologically explored.” His reasoning kept hopes alive that further explorations would uncover the ever elusive “in innumerable transitional links.”
Things have not changed much in 150 years. “We need more fossils” Dawkins pleaded in his 2009 book entitled The Greatest Show on Earth. In turning from the fossil record Dawkins advances the concept of “comparative evidence” “Comparative evidence has always, as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, told even more compelling than fossil evidence” Regardless of what the “comparative evidence” actually is, Dawkins did not say what it is−dumping the fossil record as essential evidence for Darwin’s theory - “We don’t need fossils in order to demonstrate that evolution is a fact.”
As far as Dawkins is concerned the fossil record should just be moved out of the picture, even one of the most notorious icons in the history of evolution−the Archaeopteryx. “To put up a single famous fossil like Archaeopteryx panders to a fallacy,” Dawkins declared The Greatest Show on Earth.
When Darwin was disparate for evidence to “innumerable transitional links,” he had quickly turned to the newly discovered Archaeopteryx discovered in Germany. For Darwin, the Archaeopteryx emerged as a kingpin transitional link between birds and reptiles - “Even the wide interval between birds and reptiles has been shown by [Huxley] to be partially bridged over in the most unexpected manner, by the ostrich and extinct Archaeopteryx.”
The dumping of the Archaeopteryx as a missing link between birds and reptiles by palaeontologists during the late twentieth century, however, was gaining solid support. According to Larry Martin, an American vertebrate paleontologist and curator of the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center at the University of Kansas, the
“Archaeopteryx is not ancestral of any group of modern birds.”
Missing link status of the Archaeopteryx is only an illusion; a “once upon a time” story according to Henry Gee a British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist and senior editor of the prestigious journal Nature.
Abandoning the Archaeopteryx as a transitional link was actually only a tip-of-the-iceberg of the larger fossil record problem for evolution. Geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig of the Max-Planck Institute in Germany in the book entitled The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe, like Dawkins, candidly points to the fact that a “gradual series of intermediates in Darwin’s sense has never existed and hence will never exist.”
Evolution was once a theory in crisis, now evolution is in crisis without a theory. Without fossil record evidence of missing links, in Darwin’s own words, “my theory would absolutely break down.” The dumping of the fossil record by one of Darwin’s last remaining hard core advocates, signals the end of the Darwinism era.
Biological evolution only exists as a fact in philosophy, not in science.
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Which makes it simply a religion bereft of evidence. The evidence is on the side of Creation by God.
Evidence for kangaroos evolving in Australia is not there. Kangaroos appear suddenly in the fossil records (as do all organisms). They evidently were stranded by the rising waters of the post-ice age in Australia, New Guinea and Indonesia (large portions of New Guinea and Indonesia remain unexplored) and were able to survive while many other marsupials and monotremes could not compete with mammals in other parts of the post-Flood world.