This article will survey recently reported fossil discoveries that evolutionists use to support their tree of life icon. The fossils range from the Cambrian to the Neogene. My aim here is not to question their dates or placement in the standard geologic column, but to examine how fossils are used in the Darwinian narrative. We can compare the behavior of evolutionary paleontologists to overeager churchmen holding a piece of wood said to be a fragment of the true cross. They encase it in a shrine. But then a monk argues that the piece of wood came from the wrong place and time, too early for the cross. Then it becomes reinterpreted as a fragment of the harp that David played for King Saul. Analogously, fossils are only observable in the present, but the evolutionary narrative drives the interpretation of their positions in the story of life’s evolution.

Ediacaran and Cambrian Fossils

Ediacaran fossils of the genus Charnia (pictured above), discussed in the Journal of the Geological Society by D. McIlroy, occur in many parts of the world. No skeletal or muscular systems are observed in these frondose specimens that consist mostly of 2D impressions on rock. McIlroy’s interpretation uses the word “might” 15 times, as in: “the Charnia morphotype produced might be functionally plausible as example of an extinct metazoan clade.” (Emphasis added.) Darwinians would sure like to have a transitional form there! It would help bridge the gap between the mysterious Ediacaran fauna and the Cambrian explosion.

Another frondose Ediacaran specimen named Fractofusus is described in Nature Communications by Dunn, Donoghue, and Liu. It looks nothing like a Cambrian animal, but they need it to fit the Darwinian narrative. Interpretation: the fossil provides “a framework for explaining evolutionary transitions between the bodyplans of these members of the eumetazoan stem-group.” A framework is like a plot for a story.

Moving up to the Cambrian period, some putative “Drill holes [were] preserved in enigmatic fossils from South Australia,” reported by Bicknell et al. These are noted by Darroch and Casey in Current Biology. They look a bit like holes drilled by modern predators of shellfish. Interpretation: “arms races may have driven the Cambrian explosion.” What about conflict can generate beneficial mutations that a mindless “selector” can use to build arms to race with? Extinction is much easier, but Darwinism needs drivers for its march of progress.

Dozens of specimens of another Cambrian radiodont named Modura, similar to but smaller than the meter-long predator Anomalocaris portrayed in the film Darwin’s Dilemma, have been found at the Marble Canyon site 25 miles SE of the Burgess Shale. Interpretation: “This is a neat example of evolutionary convergence with modern groups, like horseshoe crabs, woodlice, and insects,” says Joe Moysiuk of the Royal Ontario Museum. Those animals are observable. Moysiuk did not observe them evolving.

Devonian Fossil Upset

Evolutionists adroitly move dates around to accommodate upsets about times when certain clades “emerged” on the scene. A highly publicized case made the rounds in March, when Nature announced a bombshell find: “Fossil claw marks show reptiles arose much earlier than thought” — almost 40 million years earlier, in this case. The paper in Nature, by senior author Per Ahlberg and colleagues, recognizes that this represents a major upset. Finding a full-fledged reptile so early means there must have been a whole lotta evolvin’ going on before that:

The cladogenetic event that gave rise to the tetrapod crown group was preceded by a series of others that gave off the various clades of limbed stem tetrapods, such as baphetids, colosteids and ichthyostegids, and before that the elpistostegalians and various tetrapodomorph fishes. All of these cladogenetic events must now be fitted into, approximately, the first two-thirds of the Devonian period. The origins of stem amniote lineages such as seymouriamorphs and diadectomorphs must lie in the Late Devonian. Remarkably, the inferred age of the tetrapod crown-group node presented here is approximately contemporary with the elpistostegalians Elpistostege and Tiktaalik, often perceived as antecedents and potential ancestors of tetrapods. This result strongly supports the much earlier origin of limbed tetrapods indicated by the Middle Devonian trackway record, and implies that tetrapods underwent a far faster process of cladogenesis and morphological evolution during the Devonian than has hitherto been recognized. [Emphasis added.]

Read that and gasp. For those remembering the hype about Tiktaalik, the fish-a-pod that made Neil Shubin famous, this fossil amounts to a major falsification of his evolutionary claim that had been celebrated around the world. The new fossil should cause public embarrassment. But since Darwin mustn’t lose no matter what evidence appears, all the popular reporters framed this finding as a great success. “Newly discovered claw-mark fossils suggest reptiles evolved earlier than we thought,” announces Jess Thomson at Live Science, sweeping everyone into the error by using the first person plural pronoun. (Who’s “we,” Jess?) Whatever happened, whenever it happened, tetrapods “evolved.” They appeared. They emerged. They just did it quickly.

James Woodford at New Scientist reproduced Marcin Ambrozik’s prepared artwork that portrays a fully equipped lizard with feet and claws and scaly, colorful skin. “This was a very big turning point in evolution,” John Long from Flinders University announces. The Flinders press release gives John Long a photo, a video, and additional minutes of fame.

“Once we identified this, we realised this is the oldest evidence in the world of reptile-like animals walking around on land — and it pushes their evolution back by 35-to-40 million years older than the previous records in the Northern Hemisphere,” says Professor Long, Strategic Professor in Palaeontology at Flinders.

Evolutionists solve these anomalies by adjusting the speed dial of evolution to keep their web of belief intact. “All stem-tetrapod and stem-amniote lineages must have originated during the Devonian period – but tetrapod evolution proceeded much faster, and the Devonian tetrapod record is much less complete than we have believed,” he assures wary reporters. They swallow the line because no alternatives are permitted. So, smile and join the Darwin celebration: “This discovery rewrites this part of evolutionary history,” says team member Dr Jillian Garvey, but no worries; it remains an evolutionary history. 

John Long, Per Ahlberg, and a colleague add more celebratory pomposity at The Conversation, not embarrassed at all that the earliest tetrapod known was far more advanced than the expected amphibian transition. “The emergence of four-legged animals known as tetrapods was a key step in the evolution of many species today — including humans.” You don’t want to mess with your family history, do you? The article includes a Walking-with-Dinosaurs-style animation of the lizard making its tracks across a floodplain. The authors admit that “This find now raises a big evolutionary question.” What do evolutionary questions get, class? Evolutionary answers.

From paper to press release to the popular press, the Darwinian evolutionary narrative not only survived the embarrassment, but thrived. The Associated Press took up the story, telling the world “How ancient reptile footprints are rewriting the history of when animals evolved to live on land.”

The discovery suggests that after the first animals emerged from the ocean around 400 million years ago, they evolved the ability to live exclusively on land much faster than previously assumed.

Triassic to Cretaceous Fossils: Age of Dinosaurs

At Phys.org, Justin Jackson depicts an unobserved account of how the bones of a dinosaur in India may have functioned in an unobserved creature brought to imagination by an artist.

Sun filters through dense stands of cycads and conifers of Gondwana, where a lithe, bipedal predator slowly moves through the Upper Triassic undergrowth. Standing just over a meter tall and measuring about two meters from snout to tail, Maleriraptor kuttyi navigates the terrain with calculated precision. Nearby, early sauropods graze in loose herds, towering only slightly over the small predator as it comes to a halt between concealing ferns — observant, watchful, waiting….

A story like this is much more likely to get clicks than a jargon-heavy dry paper in Royal Society Open Science, especially when the authors struggled with the interpretation of this dinosaur. For one thing, it was found on a different continent than others of its type. Maleriraptor’s ilium, in addition, illustrates “some degree of evolutionary plasticity among archosaurs” they suggested as they hassled to find its place in a phylogenetic tree. No matter the final consensus, they are certain that it will “shed light on the early evolution of dinosaurs,” they assure readers. They’ll be sure to tell us when the light arrives.

Meanwhile, in Australia, Vera Korasidis from the University of Melbourne tells about “polar dinosaurs” that thrived when Australia was within the Antarctic Circle. Their evolution coincided with the appearance of flowering plants, Korasidis writes in The Conversation. It seems to be a law of nature that any mention of the origin of flowering plants will be accompanied by the phrase, “Darwin’s abominable mystery.” That is the case again here. But her goal was guided by and informed by Darwin regardless.

My new research with palynologist Barbara Wagstaff, published in Alcheringa, builds on existing knowledge by using plant fossils from bone-bearing sites in the region to explain how the forests these dinosaurs lived in [sic]evolved — and, for the first time, illustrating them in detail.

Like the monk explaining the piece of wood, Korasidis observed bones in the present, not the unobserved past. The polar dinosaurs and the plants they ate surely lived, but did they evolve?

Archaeopteryx, the world’s most famous fossil bird, made headlines again. The “Chicago specimen” was studied in great detail using UV light and CT scanning in a non-destructive way, announced the Field Museum. They found never-before-seen “tertial feathers” that clinch the case that this bird could fly. How did Archaeopteryx gain powered flight? How did it gain cranial kinesis, giving it the ability to turn its head independently? Easy. These things evolved. Case closed.

Miracles of evolution are exciting. “This also adds to evidence that suggests dinosaurs evolved flight more than once — which I think is super exciting.” Imagine holding in your hand a piece of wood from the true cross or a fragment of bone from Saint James. Exciting!

The paper in Nature by O’Conner et al. assures the world that the bones have brought us “important data regarding skeletal transformation and plumage evolution in relation to the acquisition of flight during early avian evolution.” The tertial feathers “evolved for flight” — just believe. No statistics are provided on how many dinosaurs died trying to fly before all the coordinated mutations happened to come along in one of them. Whoops; the dinosaur didn’t get the flight instructions in the brain. Wait again for millions of years.

Cenozoic Fossils

Evolutionists had to rearrange tree frogs on their timeline after the University of New South Wales announced, “Australia’s oldest prehistoric tree frog hops 22 million years back in time.” That’s not as big an adjustment as with the Devonian lizard, but it represents another substantial upset. “Newly discovered evidence of Australia’s earliest species of tree frog challenges what we know about when Australian and South American frogs parted ways on the evolutionary tree.” The paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology admits that “The origins and evolution of Australian frogs are poorly understood.” Evolutionists, though, are resilient mammals. Though often challenged about what they know, they are certain the true evolutionary tree is out there. They have lots of pieces of it.

The final fossil is said to be 130,000 years old, but the mammoth calf still stinks like rotting flesh. Live Science tells about the baby mammoth, given the name Yana, that was found preserved in Siberian permafrost. The carcass, with head and trunk intact, smelled like a “mixture of fermented earth and flesh,” the report says. 

Researchers haven’t yet determined why Yana died so young, but they know modern humans (Homo sapiens)weren’t involved. Modern humans didn’t arrive in Siberia until at least 30,000 years ago, some 100,000 years after Yana died.

Humans were too busy evolving in Africa at the time, apparently.

Summary: The Circular Web

As our friend the late Günter Bechly reported in these pages for years, fossils almost never fit the Darwinian narrative, yet the narrative survives repeated falsifications and upsets. Darwin always wins no matter the evidence. Cornelius Hunter calls this phenomenon a “circular web of self-referencing literature.” It’s like the blind leading the blind, but it sure makes an exciting story. 

The formula goes like this: 1. Evolution is true. 2. Here’s how it must have happened. 3. Look, yet more proof of evolution.

Animators and artists love having a paradigm like this that lends itself to their craft. Oh, you wanted science to be about truth, verification, and knowledge? How old-fashioned.