Flora, Fauna And Pre-Cambrian Issues.

AUSSIE FOSSIL ANIMALS ARE REALLY PLANTS, claims University of Oregon scientist, according to articles in ScienceNOW 12 December 2012 and ABC News in Science 13 December 2012. The Ediacaran fossils are imprints of creatures found in the rocks in South Australia dated as 635 to 542 million years old, i.e. before the Cambrian explosion. They have been interpreted as being soft bodied animals that lived on the sea floor long before there was any life on land. Gregory Retallack, a paleobotanist (expert in fossil plants) at the University of Oregon claims that some of the frond-like and sack-like fossils are more like land dwelling lichens, and the rocks in which they are formed were once soils rather than sea floor deposits. This claim is controversial because, according to the ABC, “If true, the finding would push back life's transition from sea to land by tens of millions of years—and possibly by 100 million years or more”. Furthermore, Retallack commented: “This discovery has implications for the tree of life, because it removes Ediacaran fossils from the ancestry of animals”. Ediacaran creatures are believed to be the evolutionary ancestors of the numerous marine invertebrates that rapidly evolved in the Cambrian explosion. However, according to ScienceNOW, “If Retallack is correct, it means that Ediacaran fossils represent an independent branch on the tree of life, and that life on land during this time may have been more complex than life in the sea”.

ED. COM. Can you spot the flaws in the assumptions being used? To have leaf shaped fly wings certainly would have been a great disguise against animals that might have wanted to eat hangingflies, or a brilliant cover to catch insects that hangingflies may want to eat, and both would certainly have benefited the ginkgo if the hangingfly preyed on leaf-eating insects as the evolutionists claim, (BUT when you throw in a Biblical basis from the God who was there, that all creatures, flies included, were vegetarian (Genesis 1:26-31), then you have to congratulate the evolutionists, who were not there, on their blind faith story-telling ability only.)

The Wired Science article also asks an important question that links to the researchers hidden assumptions: “The hangingfly does resemble the ginkgo, that much is clear, but how can we tell whether or not the insect’s anatomy was a form of camouflage or just coincidentally similar?” It goes on to comment: “The span of time between us and the Jurassic forest prevents us from knowing – such tantalizing traces of prehistoric interactions only come to life in our imaginations”. We couldn’t have said it better! So what’s the actual data? 1) Fossil ginkgo leaves and fossil hangingfly wings have similar shapes; and 2) their fossils were found in the same rocks.
Those who believe the story that an insect evolved to look like a leaf for the purpose of camouflage have yet to explain how changes in the shape of tree leaves (as the ginkgo evolved) could influence genes in an insect to make it have leaf-shaped wings. Otherwise, it’s time for evolutionists to admit they simply have faith that the same random processes that make trees evolve leaves, also happen to be able to change insects in just the right way at the right time. Now that is too much blind faith for us. Furthermore, ginkgoes are the first, and classic, example of a “living fossil”, i.e. a living organism whose fossil examples are very similar to their living forms, which means they have not evolved since their fossils were buried, irrespective of how long ago you believe the rock layers were formed. Since the fossil hangingfly was also recognised because it looked like a living hangingfly, neither of these fossils shows any evidence in support of evolutionary history.
Finally, did you notice the description of the fossils as “exquisitely preserved”? As we have said many times, this is always evidence that fossils were rapidly and deeply buried, and so this is one more case where the vast amounts of time used by evolutionists are not deduced from the rocks, but read into them. (Ref. foliage, arthropods, trees) Creation Research.