The Fossil Record and Transitional Forms

Genesis Apologetics

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Natural history museums have some of the most amazing fossil collections in the world. These fossils are typically used to frame the idea of life slowly progressing over millions of years, rather than a worldwide catastrophe being the best explanation.

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Is this true? Is the fossil record really stacked in a way that proves life evolved on Earth over millions of unseen years?

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Or does the fossil record provide evidence that the world was covered by a massive flood in Noah's time just thousands of years ago?

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Actually, the fossil record does not show increasingly complex life emerging over the millennia.

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What it shows is a record of death in the order that the creatures were buried during the worldwide flood. Think about it for a minute.

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Genesis 7, verse 11 says that the fountains of the great deep were broken up and the windows of heaven were opened, creating floods and tidal waves that were unimaginable.

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The Bible says the floodwaters increased upon the Earth for 150 days until all the high hills under heaven were covered with over 20 feet of water.

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This process successively buried all creatures outside the ark based on where they lived as the floodwaters prevailed, how smart they were, their means and speed of mobility, and their body density.

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This is precisely why the fossil record generally shows the shallow water marine creatures buried in the lower layers.

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Then, as the ocean waters rose higher and higher, the suffocated fish were buried, followed by amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and then birds.

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Dr. Carl Warner spent 17 years traveling to museums and dig sites around the globe, photographing thousands of original fossils and the actual fossil layers where they were found.

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His research revealed a lack of evidence for evolution theory, including no transitional fossils and clear evidence that shows animals have remained the same over the supposed millions of years of evolution.

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We went to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. We filmed at the Smithsonian, the

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American Museum of Natural History. We filmed at the Chicago Field Museum, all of the greatest museums of the world, basically, and photographed their fossil collections.

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Museum Victoria in Melbourne, the Natural Institute in Brussels. We filmed at the

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New Zealand Natural History Museum in Auckland and the Red Path Museum in Montreal, Harvard Peabody Museum, the

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California Academy of Sciences, etc., etc. We went to 60 museums, and Debbie took 60 ,000 photographs.

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Wow. At the dinosaur dig sites, we found examples from every major animal phyla living today, buried with the dinosaurs, and these animals look the same.

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Say that again. It's incredible. At the dinosaur sites, we found fossils, examples of modern animals from every major animal phyla, buried with the dinosaurs, and they look the same.

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You started out not knowing if there would be any. Zero. And then you found them in every group in the same strata with the dinosaurs.

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Yeah, and it's worse than that. Not only did we find this for animals, then for the plants, we found examples from every major plant division of plants living today, buried alongside the dinosaurs, fossilized, and they look the same as the modern plants.

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So you photograph fossils from dig sites and museums, and you realize that modern animals live with dinosaurs.

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That seems too simple. You know, Don, there is a rule in science called the rule of simplicity, or parsimony, or Oskam's razor, that says the simplest explanation for a series of problems is usually the correct explanation.

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So, yes, it is very simple. I love this phrase, simply profound. What you have found is profound by its simplicity, that here are these animals that are just like they are today, and they were there then, therefore evolution didn't happen.

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According to the fossils that I look at, evolution did not occur. The plants looked the same.

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The animals looked the same. Sure, some of the animals went extinct, like dinosaurs, pterosaurs, but extinction is not evolution.

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The animal fauna has not changed. Look what he found about bats. Scientists have found over 1 ,000 fossil bats.

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Now these, some of these fossils are beautifully preserved, full fossils of bats, even showing the wing membranes, the gut contents, et cetera.

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If evolution is true, you would expect to find not only bats, but a ground mammal similar to a mouse slowly changing over millions of years into a bat.

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There should be many, many steps. If you find 1 ,000 bats, you would expect to find thousands and thousands of each of these steps.

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And how many have been found? Zero. No ancestors for bats. Wow. Over 1 ,000 bats in museums and not a single transitionary fossil leading to bats.

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They just show up, completely formed. Wouldn't you expect that after uncovering over 1 ,000 bats, that at least a few pre -bats would be found?

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The same has been said by evolutionists for several other creatures. Leading dinosaur expert,

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Dr. Weishample, wrote this about dinosaur ancestors. For my reading of the fossil record of dinosaurs, no direct ancestors have been discovered for any dinosaur species.

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Alas, my list of dinosaurian ancestors is an empty one. Wow. It's almost like a divine designer just put them here, all fully formed, just like the

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Bible says. Consider pterosaurs, massive flying reptiles with wingspans sometimes over 40 feet that could likely only fly in the pre -flood world.

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Dr. Weihl, curator of the famous Jura Museum in Germany said, Yes, I must say we know only little about the evolution of pterosaurs.

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The ancestors are not known. When the pterosaurs first appeared in the geological record, they were completely, they were perfect.

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They were perfect pterosaurs. After finding so many specimens in complete form, shouldn't some predecessors have been found by now?

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If museums have over 1 ,000 fossilized bats and many pterosaurs, why haven't they found any fossils that have been classified as pre -bats or pre -pterosaurs?

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Why are they always found in complete form? Where are the millions of transitional fossils that should exist if evolution theory is true?

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Why don't we see a reasonably smooth continuum among all living creatures, or in the fossil record, or both?

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Perhaps this explains why the evolutionary ideas about dinosaur ancestors keep changing, especially when they've now found dinosaurs even buried alongside their supposed ancestors.

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After Dr. Warner interviewed dozens of leading dinosaur experts from museums across the globe, he summarized his findings on this chart from the

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Chicago Field Museum. Note the counts of the different dinosaur varieties found. For example, 78

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T. rex specimens. Think about it. If over 100 ,000 dinosaurs have been collected by museums and dinosaurs evolved from one type into another as theorized on the chart, shouldn't there be counts on the nodes of these supposed branches between dinosaur kinds?

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Instead, this chart demonstrates what we would expect if creation is true, the counts of the individual types of creatures found, with zero transitions.

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It's also amazing when you look at the creatures on this chart that are supposedly evolving from the same branch, yet they are so obviously different, like Ankylosaurus and Triceratops.

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They've never found a single creature that looks anything like an earlier version of either of these dinosaurs, or one that looks like some hybrid of the two of them.

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With hundreds of these creatures found in their existing form, and always found in these forms, it becomes clear that the evolution of dinosaurs is a far, far reach.

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If they both come from a supposed common ancestor, where are the millions of transitional design changes it would take to go from one of these creatures to the other?

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Yet, not a single such creature has ever been found. Here's what leading paleontologist Dr. R.

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Chadwick has to say on this topic. We hear a lot about transitional forms. What's the real story there?

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Scientists have been able to lay out some forms they think are transitional. And some of them are very interesting, some even challenging.

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But they are the exceptions to the rule. The rule is there are no transitional fossils. And what we find in the fossil record, and contrary to Darwin's hopes, this is the rule, is that a form exists in the fossil record.

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It basically stays unchanged, and it disappears from the fossil record without having been changed.

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That's got to mean something besides evolution, because we don't ever see changes from this form into this form in the rocks themselves.

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So it's coming from somewhere else. It's a paradigm that's being imposed on the data, rather than the data providing the paradigm.

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So I think it's very easy for me to be a creationist just based on my understanding of the complexity of life forms.

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And when we look at the fossil record, we can see that the complexity is all there from the beginning. And this begs the question of where did all this complexity come from?

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You know, it's one thing to have faith. I have faith that God was the creator. But that's substantiated by what

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I see around me. To say I have faith that evolution produced this, when

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I can't even see how it could have happened. This chart was reproduced from the Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, published in association with the

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British Museum of Natural History. In small print at the bottom, it says, Tinted areas indicate solid fossil evidence.

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We've highlighted these in yellow. The rest of the chart, shown in grey, shows the theoretical ideas about dinosaurs' ancestors and transitions in the dinosaur evolutionary tree.

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When you remove the theoretical grey lines, the imagined ancestors and transitions, all that remains are dinosaur kinds that were created in the beginning.

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Then, when the long ages are removed, you can see that these dinosaur kinds suddenly appear together, by creation, on the sixth day of creation week.

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So much for dinosaur ancestors and transitions. Over the last few decades, scientists have been discovering soft tissues in dinosaur bones.

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We're talking about over 50 peer -reviewed secular science journals that have now reported 14 bio -organic materials found in dinosaur bones.

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They're finding blood cells, blood vessels, connective tissue, and even collagen, which has a maximum shelf life of just tens of thousands of years, with some stretching it out to a maximum of 900 ,000 years.

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Either way, with a maximum shelf life of less than 1 million years, what's collagen doing in dinosaur bones that are supposedly 65 million years old?

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Many dinosaur bones are even found unfossilized in places like Madagascar, Alaska, and Montana.

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Even the founder of the largest dinosaur museum in the world admitted that, usually, most of the original bone is still present in a dinosaur fossil.

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Just look at this soft, pliable dinosaur tissue. This type of bio -organic material has been found in the bones of several different dinosaur species.

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It sure doesn't look like a 65 million -year -old rock, does it? Even Charles Darwin said, as by evolution theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed.

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Why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the Earth? And, why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?

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Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain. And this is the most obvious and serious objection, which can be urged against the theory.

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Darwin expected that these challenges would be resolved after more research was conducted. But today, 150 years and millions of fossils later, the proof still doesn't exist.

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When the famous Dr. Colin Patterson of the British Museum of Natural History was asked why evolutionary transitions were not included in his book titled

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Evolution, Patterson said, I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book.

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If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You say that I should at least show a photo of the fossil from which each type organism was derived.

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I will lay it on the line. There is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.

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Wow! After working with thousands of fossils for over 16 years in one of the largest natural history museums in the world, he makes a statement like this.

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Even the two leading transitional fossils that are used in school textbooks today are falling apart.

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The Archaeopteryx supposedly shows the transition between dinosaurs and birds, but now leading experts regard it as just a bird.

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Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earthbound feathered dinosaur, but it's not.

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It is a bird. A perching bird. And no amount of paleobabble is going to change that.

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Archaeopteryx was further disqualified as an evolutionary ancestor for birds when scientists found a crow -sized bird and extinct four -winged birds in rock layers designated to be below those containing

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Archaeopteryx. Next, there are supposed evolutionary fish, like Tiktaalik, typically shown in textbooks as a 375 -million -year -old fossil that was on its way to progressing into a land -dwelling creature.

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Sometimes the coelacanth is also shown in this same lineup, living about the same time frame. Now, however, both of these have been ejected out of the evolutionary lineup.

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Evolutionists used to think that Tiktaalik's strong front fins did most of the work to pull this transitional fish up onto land, leaving the hind legs to evolve later.

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But now, after more investigation of the pelvis and fins, the discoverers of Tiktaalik have developed updated illustrations showing how it used its strong pelvic structure for paddling.

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Even more amazing is the fact that scientists announced in the 2010 Nature Journal that they had found footprints of a four -legged land creature in Poland that are supposedly 10 million years older than Tiktaalik.

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So, if Tiktaalik was the ancestor of land creatures, how could land creature fossils sit 10 million years earlier in the rock layers than their ancestor?

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There goes Tiktaalik as a clear transitional fossil, yet it's still found in school textbooks today.

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Coelacanths have also been used for promoting evolution because their fins looked like they were becoming arms and legs.

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But all of this changed in 1938 when a museum curator in South Africa found a living one stacked up with a bunch of other fish on a fishing dock.

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They've since found a lot more of these fish. You can even go swimming with them near the Comoros Islands. So much for that sea -to -land transition.

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While doing his research, Dr. Warner noted, if evolution was not true and if animals did not change over time,

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I should be able to find modern -appearing plants and modern -appearing animals in the dinosaur rock layers. And this is in fact what

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I found. In fact, Dr. Warner has documented 432 mammal species in the dinosaur fossil layers.

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But after visiting 60 museums around the world, he did not find a single complete mammal skeleton from the dinosaur layers displayed at any of these museums.

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Some mammals are even found in the stomachs of dinosaurs. Mixed in among dinosaurs, Dr. Warner found all of today's reptile groups as well as birds, including parrots, owls, penguins, ducks, loons, albatross, cormorants, and sandpipers.

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How does this work if dinosaurs evolved into birds as evolutionists claim? Something's not lining up with evolution theory.

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The latest findings continue to confirm the recent demise of most of the dinosaurs by a massive flood.

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Consider this 3 ,000 -pound nodosaur fossil just found in Canada. Evolutionists date this fossil at 110 million years old.

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But how did everything stay intact for so long? Skin pigment, guts, scales, full bony armor, keratin, even its last meal was found in its stomach.

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Paleobiologist Jacob Vinter said, the dinosaur is so well -preserved that it might as well have been walking around a couple of weeks ago.

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I've never seen anything like this. Rather than being scavenged after death, this dinosaur was rapidly entombed by Noah's flood just thousands of years ago.

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If the Genesis account is true, and we believe that it is, we would expect the fossil record to bear out a wide variety of various kinds of animals that lived in a pre -flood world much different than today.

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Animals that were catastrophically buried quickly, and in many cases, torn apart, grated, and sorted, buried with marine life, mummified, unfossilized, and discovered with many bio -organic materials that simply can't last for millions of years.

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We would expect to find massive bone beds all over the world and covering hundreds of thousands of square miles like the

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Morrison Formation. We would also expect to find that even leading transitional examples like Archaeopteryx, Tiktaalik, and Coelacanth would not hold up over time as true evidence of evolution.

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So, rather than museums being filled with fossils that show evolution over millions of years, instead, what we see is a snapshot of life at the time of the flood with countless billions of dead things buried in mud laid down by water now found in rock layers all over the

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Earth. Looking for answers about what the Bible teaches about creation, the fossil record, dinosaurs?

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