Hidden fossils reveal secrets of oceans before major mass extinction

Image Courtesy of Jonathan Aitchisonaccr,

Joel Kontinen

According to evolution, one mass extinction took place many millions of years ago. The evidence for this was tiny fossils found in Australia.  However, the timing of the extinction was very wrong,

A tiny pellet of ancient rock, a mere half the size of a grain of rice, has yielded 20 microscopic fossils representing eight different species, including one that is entirely new to science. The discovery will enhance our understanding of the second-largest known mass extinction. It also shows how new analytical techniques are unlocking parts of the fossil record that according to evolution, have previously gone overlooked.

Jonathan Aitchison at the University of Queensland, Australia, and his colleagues extracted the pellet from a rock that was collected in late 2018 from the Sichuan basin in China, about 300 kilometres south of Xian. The rock is 445 million years old, which means it formed just before the Late Ordovician mass extinction – the second most severe to have occurred over the past 500 million years according to evolution.

Source: 

James Woodford 2026 Hidden fossils reveal secrets of oceans before major mass extinction | New Scientist 10 April 

Top predators still prowled the seas after the biggest mass extinction

 

Image courtesy of Christian Darkin/Science Photo Library

Joel Kontinen

The worst known mass extinction wiped out over 80 per cent of marine species. But despite these huge losses, many ecosystems did not collapse, with a variety of animals and even top predators managing to survive the cataclysm.

The findings suggest that each ecosystem’s fate was determined, in part, by its own unique mix of species. The same may be true of modern marine ecosystems, which are also facing major threats from climate change.

The mass extinctions that evolutionists think are true, never happened millions of years ago. Many creationists say that they happen ed at the time of Noah’s flood, some 4,500 years ago.

Source:

Michael Marshall 2026 Top predators still prowled the seas after the biggest mass extinction | New Scientist 4 March 

Our earliest vertebrate ancestors may have had four eyes

 

Illustration of Haikouichthys, a fish from the Cambrian period, with a second pair of eyes suggested by fossil evidence. Image courtesy of Xiangtong Lei, Sihang Zhang

Joel Kontinen

Extraordinary fossils of 518-million-year-old jawless fish, among the earliest known vertebrates, appear to show that these animals had two pairs of eyes

Over half a billion years ago, the world’s oldest known vertebrates seem to have sported an extra set of eyes – and humans may still carry a remnant of this ancient evolutionary innovation.

But this isn’t a story of evolutionary innovation. It is a story of Darwinian speculation. And fossils tell the story that evolutionists tend to like.

Extraordinary fossils of two species of jawless fish called myllokunmingids were found by Peiyun Cong at Yunnan University in China, and his colleagues between 2019 and 2024, on the banks of Dianchi Lake in south-west China.

Source: 

James Woodford 2026 Our earliest vertebrate ancestors may have had four eyes | New Scientist 21 January

Rhinos in Canada

 

Image courtesy of Julius Csotonyi

Joel Kontinen

Ancient 'frosty' rhino from Canada's High Arctic rewrites what scientists thought they knew about the North Atlantic Land Bridge

Rhinos were not supposed to life so far from the equator.  The evolutionists have a reason for this – they claim that the land bridge had brought the continents together, no mention of a global flood which is the more plausible examination as fossils from the flood could have brought to Canada.

Darwinists think that it took millions of years for these animals to reach Canada.

Scientists have called the animal Epiatheracerium itjilik, with the species name meaning "frost" or "frosty" in Inuktitut. These creatures were similar in size to modern Indian rhinos (Rhinoceros unicornis), according to a statement from the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN). The newly identified fossils are the only specimen found to date and show that the animal died of unknown causes as a young adult.

"What's remarkable about the Arctic rhino is that the fossil bones are in excellent condition," Marisa Gilbert, a CMN paleobiologist and co-author of a new analysis of the remains, said in the statement. "They are three-dimensionally preserved and have only been partially replaced by minerals. About 75% of the skeleton was discovered, which is incredibly complete for a fossil."

The bones were preserved inside the 14-mile-wide (23 kilometers) impact crater thanks to it rapidly filling with water. The crater formed from an asteroid or comet around the same time that the Arctic rhino lived, which suggests the rhino died inside the crater before it became a lake.

The climate in this region was far warmer then than it is today, and plant remains show that the Canadian High Arctic — specifically, Devon Island in Nunavut, where the crater is located — hosted a temperate forest, according to the statement.

As the Miocene epoch (23 million to 5.3 million years ago) transitioned into the Pliocene epoch (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago) and finally gave way to the last ice age, the fossils were broken up by freeze and thaw cycles and gradually pushed to the surface of the crater. Researchers then found the fossils in 1986.

 Source:

Sarah Kuta - Daily Correspondent 2025 Scientists Discover 'Frosty' Polar Rhino That Roamed the Canadian Arctic 23 Million Years Ago 29 October

 

 

 

 

Fossils reveal what the fur of early mammals looked like

 

Image courtesy of Chuang Zhao, Ruoshuang Li

Joel Kontinen

What did the early mammals look like, according to evolution? Some researchers say that the fossils say that they do like their ancestors of all today’s species.

But the fossils have many problems.  Some had said that the ancestor of all whales lived on land and then moved to waters.

“While many dinosaurs and pterosaurs flaunted flamboyant feathers, early mammals were a dull lot. A study of the fossilised fur of six mammals that lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods has found they all had greyish-brown fur.

“They were dinosaur food,” says Matthew Shawkey at Ghent University in Belgium. “You didn’t want to be conspicuous.”

A study of the fossilised fur of six mammals from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods has found they were all greyish-brown in colour, which would have helped them hide from dinosaurs.

Source:

Michael Le Page 2025 Fossils reveal what the fur of early mammals looked like | New Scientist 13 March 

Oldest tadpole fossil known to science dates back "161 million years"

 

Image courtesy of Mariana Chuliver et al., Journal (2024)

Joel Kontinen

Millions of years and evolution go together but a tadpole  fossils says they haven’t changed a lot, during those years.

An exquisitely preserved fossilised tadpole is the oldest ever discovered by science, dating back 161 million years, with an anatomy that is strikingly similar to some of today’s species.

“They did not achieve their goal,” says Mariana Chuliver at Maimonides University in Buenos Aires, Argentina. “However, after many days of digging, one team member found a stone with a particular imprint on it – a fossil tadpole.”

Chuliver and her colleagues have now identified the tadpole as belonging to the extinct frog species Notobatrachus degiustoi, deciphered from the hundreds of adult specimens found in the same fossil deposit since 1957.

Until now, scientists had never unearthed tadpole fossils from before the Cretaceous Period, which began around 145 million years ago. This specimen is also the first ever fossilised tadpole from an earlier frog lineage known as stem anurans, which predates modern species, known as crown anurans.

Source:

 James Woodford 2024 Oldest tadpole fossil known to science dates back 161 million years | New Scientist 30 October.

 

 

New Living Fossils Are Just Like Their Present Cousins

A present day beetle, Image courtesy of Udo Schmidt, CC By-Sa 2.0.




Joel Kontinen

“It is well-known that living fossils exhibit stasis over geologically long time scales. Examples are the panda and ginkgo. Now, two tiny beetles trapped in 99-million-year-old amber may join this group.”

“An international team led by Dr. Cai Chenyang, from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reported two new and rare species of the extant family Clambidae from Burmese amber: Acalyptomerus thayerae and Sphaerothorax uenoi.“

“Both species are extremely morphologically close to their living counterparts, and can be placed in extant genera.”

Fossils trapped in amber tend to be problematic for Darwinians, as – regardless of their assumed age – they almost always show a profound lack of change.

Practically all insects trapped in amber look the same as today’s animals. Creatures like ticks, beetles, spiders, wasps or ants defy Darwinian expectations by their stasis or lack of evolution.

While the dates are inflated, the discovery shows that life in the fallen world had its disadvantages.

Source:

Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2019. Two tiny beetle fossils offer evolution and biogeography clues. Phys.org (18 January).

Dino-Era Mushroom’s Fossilisation Inspires Darwinian Just-So Story

A somewhat younger mushroom, presumably. Image by an unknown artist, public domain.





Joel Kontinen

How do you preserve a mushroom for 115 million years? After all, they tend to disintegrate in just a few days.

Live Science attempts to give us an explanation: The poor mushroom fell into a river and was fossilised.

This is followed by more storytelling:

“After the mushroom fell into the river, it floated into a salty lagoon and sank to the bottom, where fine sediments began to cover it. Over time, the mushroom mineralized, and its tissues were replaced with pyrite, a mineral also known as fool's gold. Later, the pyrite transformed into the mineral goethite.”

Discovered in Brazil's Crato Formation, the mushroom is a mere 5 centimetres (2 inches) tall. Named Gondwanagaricites magnificus, it is the oldest known mushroom fossil.

Fossilisation is a very tricky business. It has to happen extremely fast.

The Flood of Noah’s days would have provided excellent conditions for preserving creatures of all shapes and sizes.

Source:

Geggel, Laura. 2017. World's Oldest Fossilized Mushroom Sprouted 115 Million Years Ago. Live Science (7 June).

”37-Million-Year-Old” Catfish Fossil Found in Sahara

Catfish. Image courtesy of Derek Dsouza, Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

We might not expect to find fish fossils in the Sahara Desert, but recently researchers dug up a 2-metre (6.5 ft.) long catfish in Wadi Al-Hitan, southwest of Cairo.

It is roughly the same size as today’s largest catfish.

The creature is assumed to be “37 million years” old. Clearly a catfish, it was named Qarmoutus hitanensis.

Evolutionists believe that Sahara was once covered with water. We would agree, although they tend to give inflated dates.

The real watery episode occurred around 4,500 years ago.

The entire world was then covered by water. Thus, we should not be surprised if fossils and huge animal graveyards are found all over the globe.

For Darwinists, fossils are often found in the wrong places. Here are some examples:

Dinosaurs in Alaska, turtle fossils in the Andes, a whale graveyard in the Atacama Desert in Chile, a fossilised tropical forest in Norway and pollen from tropical trees in Antarctica.

The catfish fossil is not the only evidence for Noah’s Flood in the Sahara. The Aloba Arch in Chad, an imposing natural formation, also looks like it was carved by huge amounts of water.

Source:

Drake, Nadia. 2017. Giant Catfish Fossil Found in Egyptian Desert. National Geographic (10 March).

More Evidence for Noah’s Flood: Pollen from Tropical Trees in Antarctica

Araucaria araucana aka monkey puzzle tree. Image courtesy of William S. Kessler, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

Dinosaurs in Alaska. Billions of dead nautiloids in the Grand Canyon. Turtle fossils in the Andes. A whale graveyard in the Atacama Desert in Chile. A fossilised tropical forest in Norway. Huge aquifers in arid Northern Kenya. Mountain gaps in Australia.

The most logical explanation for these phenomena is the global flood of Noah’s day.

The same could be said of natural formations that defy the idea of millions of years, such as the Natural Archway in Sahara.

The latest addition to this list is the discovery of pollen grains of tropical plants, including Araucaria araucana or the monkey puzzle tree, below the ice cover in Antarctica. They suggest that once the climate was a lot warmer.

The researchers found these remains in ice cores. While they interpreted their discovery in terms of millions of years, the Flood that devastated the early Earth some 4,500 years ago is a much more credible explanation.

Source:

Coghlan, Andy. 2016. Ice core reveals how lush Antarctica changed to icy desert. New Scientist (6 May).

Fossil Wars: What Do Fossils Really Tell Us?

Scientists seldom agree on fossils because they have to be interpreted.




Joel Kontinen

Interpreting and dating fossils is an intriguing game. In 1990 J. Shreeve wrote in Discoverer magazine: ”Everybody knows fossils are fickle; bones will sing any song you want to hear.”

Others would agree with this statement. In 1996 science writer Michael Lemonick expressed the same thought in somewhat different words: “Paleontology is much like politics: passions run high, and it’s easy to draw very different conclusions from the same set of facts.”

Paleontology is the science of fossils. When scientists dig up old bones they have to make a number of assumptions. They usually interpret the evidence according to a Darwinian framework.

Now, if they use an incorrect framework, the result will also be incorrect. For instance, so great is the belief in millions of years that only a few will dare to question this “truth”, even though researchers have found soft tissue in tens of fossils.

There is a more logical interpretation: the fossils cannot be that old. Most fossils were probably formed during the great flood described in Genesis.

Source:

Michael D. Lemonick. 1996. Parenthood dino-style. Time, January 8, page 48.

Exploding Whale Sinks Darwinian Icon

A humpback whale. Image courtesy of Whit Welles, Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

How easy is it to form fossils? We hardly see them forming in our time. A brief video clip produced by Creation Ministries International illustrates this difficulty.

In 2001 a dead whale floated off the coast of South Australia. A bomb squad was called in to sink it, as it was becoming a health hazard with people climbing on top of it. However, even three explosives failed to sink it.

Fossils have to form very quickly. What was needed was a catastrophe such as the global flood of Noah’s day.

How Not to Make a Fossil – The Case of a Dead Frog

Joel Kontinen

A frog hit by a car does not fossilize easily in hot conditions. No matter how long we wait, the deceased froggie remains unfossilized.

What would be needed is exceptional circumstances, including a lot of water. Almost always when science publications report on the discovery of a fossil, they suggest that the animal died in a local flood.

But why local? The global flood in Noah’s days remains the best explanation for most (but not necessarily all) fossils.

”We Have All the Fossils”

We often have different interpretations of the same fossil.



Joel Kontinen

Some time ago, an evolutionist tried to discredit Darwin doubters by claiming that he and other neo-Darwinists had all the fossils. His assertion is somewhat odd, because as Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis has said, we all have the same fossils.

The creation-evolution debate is not about who has the fossils but rather about what we infer about them.

Most fossils displayed in museums are actually not fossils at all but reconstructions made on the basis of a few bones. An artist has often given a Darwinian bias to a reconstruction, as seen in the case of Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis).

Most fossils remind us of the global flood of Noah’s day.

When a revolver became a fossil

This fossil is obviously not millions of years old.




Joel Kontinen

Many people think that fossils are millions of years old. But what if a fossilised animal – or thing- is only a few hundred years old?

Fiscardo is a small village on the Greek island of Kefalonia (Κεφαλονιά) in the Ionian Sea. Usually tourist guides remind the traveller that the island is as old as the dinosaurs that they assume lived at least 65 million years ago. Few have even heard of an interesting item on display in the museum of Fiscardo. It happens to be a partially fossilised revolver made in the 19th century.

At times, fossils can be more intriguing than we suppose. I have seen a photograph of a fossilised hat, for instance. Furthermore, a few years ago a yellow toy car was found buried inside a stone assumed to be extremely old. Yet the plastic car could not have been older than 200 years.

Skeptics might argue that the Kefalonian revolver is not a real fossil since it never was made up of organic matter. Some years ago, atheists protested the significance of a fossil hat popularised by Ken Ham. It indicated that petrification does not need millions of years.

PS. In 2002, Creation magazine had an interesting article on the stone teddy bears of Yorkshire, UK.

The oldest pelican looked just like today’s pelicans

Pelicans have had their long beaks for a very long time.



Joel Kontinen

Evolution is often defined as change over time but fossil discoveries frequently tell a very different story. Recently, doctor Antoine Louchart of the University of Lyon, France, found a ”30 million”-year-old pelican fossil in a colleague’s collection. It was originally discovered in the 1980s in southern France.

Louchart told BBC that the fossil resembled today's pelicans. The surprisingly well preserved fossil is almost like a copy of pelicans still living.

Like living fossils, non-living fossils often give support to the after its kind principle found in Genesis.


Source:

Walker, Matt. 2010. Oldest prehistoric pelican also had big beak. BBC News (11 June) http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8733000/8733503.stm

New winds from the fossil world

This is what is left of Lucy. New research cautions palaeontologists not to make too hasty interpretations.





Joel Kontinen


A new study challenges vertebrate evolution. Palaeontologists Mark Purnell, Robert Sansom and Sarah Gabbott at the University of Leicester, UK, published a report on their experiments in Nature. Their research changes our view of fossils.

Purnell and his colleagues killed amphioxus (Branchiostoma lanceolatum) and lampreys (Lampetra fluviatilis) for their experiment and observed how they decayed. They noticed that the traits that were the primary characteristics of these species disappeared rather quickly.

According to Nature, the research throws light on the development of chordates (Chordata), in particular the Cambrian animals. Although the report explains the differences between species in a typical Darwinian way, it suggests that researchers have often jumped to conclusions. In other words, they have seen what they wanted to see.

Scientists will probably have to discard some of their old ”discoveries”. The paper suggests that researchers should refrain from too hasty conclusions to avoid disasters like the one involving the Ida fossil.

Nature also produced a short video on the study:








Sources:

Cressey, Daniel. 2010. Something rotten in the state of palaeontology. Nature News (31 January)
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100131/full/news.2010.45.html

Sansom, Robert S., Sarah E. Gabbott and Mark A. Purnell. 2010. Non-random decay of chordate characters causes bias in fossil interpretation. Nature (published online 31 January.) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08745.html

National Geographic News: A Third of Dinosaur Species Never Existed

According to a National Geographic documentary there were far fewer dinosaur species than we thought. Image: dinosaurs at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum in Kentucky.




Joel Kontinen

Dinosaurs Decoded is a new documentary that challenges our views of dinosaurs. The film, produced by the National Geographic Channel, claims that a third of dinosaur species never existed.

Young dinosaurs differed in many ways from their parents. However, researchers have not always taken this into account. Science thus ”knows” species that have never existed.

Mark Goodwin of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jack Horner of Montana State University, are prominent palaeontologists who present their discoveries in the documentary. They suggest, for instance, that the relatives of T. rex were often classified as distinct species although they actually were juveniles that lacked the traits that are characteristic of adult Tyrannosaurs.

Nowadays many researchers regard Nanotyrannus as a young T. rex. They know that dinosaurs changed as they got older just like many present species do. For instance, deer get their antlers when they are full-grown.

Dinosaurs Decoded has important ramifications for the reliability of fossil finds. It suggests that we should perhaps take a more skeptical approach to them – or at least to headlines that advertise a discovery as the fossil of the century.

Later research almost always brings to light features that refute the original claims of the importance of the discovery. Recently, we saw this happen in the case of the Ida fossil.

Finding a new species brings prestige and fame to its discoverer. Is it any wonder, then, that scientists habitually defend the importance of their fossil and discount the significance of rival discoveries? Richard Leakey, whose research team found Turkana Boy, the famous Homo erectus fossil, for instance, moved Lucy or Australopithecus afarensis to a side branch of the hominid tree.

Seen from a creation perspective, Dinosaurs Decoded is a welcome innovation. Noah did not have to take as many dinosaurs on board the ark as evolutionists assumed. In addition, it is good to keep in mind that the average dino was as small as a sheep or a calf.

Sources:

Barras, Colin. 2009. Richard Leakey: Passionate, prickly and principled. New Scientist 2730 (14 October) http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427301.000-richard-leakey-passionate-prickly-and-principled.html?full=true


Handwerk, Brian. 2009. A Third of Dinosaur Species Never Existed? National Geographic News (9 October)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091009-dinosaur-species-never-existed.html

The Power of Presuppositions

Our presuppositions have an effect on our view of Lucy, for instance.




Joel Kontinen

Presuppositions have a profound effect on how we view the world around us. Popular science publications have caused many people to assume that ape men have once existed. The Bible, however, presents an entirely different view of history.

A few years ago Philip Bell, currently CEO of Creation Ministries International UK/Europe, used the following example to highlight the power of presuppositions:

If we have the information chain GODISNOWHERE, we might interpret it in two ways:

Either like this: GOD IS NOWHERE.

Or like this: GOD IS NOW HERE.

In both cases the data are the same but the latter interpretation has an extra blank space between the letters W and H.

Presuppositions can also have a profound effect on what we think about fossils. While a Darwinist, who rejects the idea of a Creator God, sees an ape man, a Bible-believing scientist sees an extinct ape, evidence for creation and the rich variety in the animal kingdom. (The word ‘kingdom’ used in a non-specific sense.)


Source:

Bell, Philip. 2006. Ape Men. Lecture at the Creation Without Compromise conference at Swanwick, UK (22 April 2006).