Charles Darwin described the fossil remains of large extinct land mammals he found in South America in his travel account "Voyage of the Beagle". He described some of them as having a high fat content and being capable of being lit so they burned with a yellow flame. This suggested they are perhaps not millions of years old as the theory he was later to propose suggested. Recent dinosaur bones have been unearthed that had soft material inside. It is important to understand that the dating of dinosaur and other fossils depends on assumptions about the past that canot be independently verified.
It has been proved experimentally and by direct observation that fossils can be formed in a very short time. Following a recent geological catastrophe at lake Tarawera, New Zealand, several household objects, including a ham and a bowler hat were petrified (turned into stone) in a few years. Further items on fossils can be viewed by clicking here.
There is a famous 'dripping well' in Yorkshire where objects such as Teddy bears have been fossilised. There is no independently verifiable evidence that fossils we are told are millions of years old are in fact so old. Carbon dating is reasonably accurate for several thousand years into the past, but the dating methods which claim to prove that certain fossils and rocks are millions of years old are based on assumptions which cannot be independently verified.
Dinosaurs
occupy an iconic place in the minds of evolutionists and others. Who
can forget their first sight of the brontosaurus and T rex
reconstructed skeletons in the London Natural History Museum? Some
folks seem to believe that the very fact that dinosaurs existed in the
past and are now (almost certainly) extinct is of itself a supportive
evidence for evolution. In a TV dramatisation of Arthur Conan Doyle's
drama 'The lost world' , a much imitated story about finding live
dinosaurs on a lost plateau in South America. the writer added a strand
to the story, which was not present in the novel, which I have read, in
which a fundamentalist Christian preacher knows about the dinosaurs,
but believes that they disprove his faith, being 'made by the Devil,
not God' so want to keep them a secret from the world. He deliberately
cuts the bridge leaving the band of explorers AND HIS DAUGHTER to be
killed , in order to protect the secret. This is the most abominable
caricature of a 'creationist' that could be imagined. This was
broadcast at Christmas a few years ago, I didn't bother to write to
point out the vicious anti-Christian twist, you
always get the standard 'artistic creativity' response from the
radically pro-evolution BBC.
The fact is that dinosaurs and their extinction pose
fewer problems for the young earth creationist than the evolutionist.
for a detailed discussion of this, check
out this item on dinosaurs and their extinction from James Foard's web
site
Dinosaurs are mentioned in the Bible in the book of
Job, see here for more on why dinosaurs are no
problem for creationism.
In many places, large numbers of dinosaur fossils
are found together in mass graves in sedimentary rocks. The most
obvious explanation for this is that they were running from the flood
waters, which overwhelmed them together. Nearly all fossils globally
occur in sedimentary rocks, which must have formed from mud and silt
which killed the animals then rapidly buried them.
It is generally taught to children and others that fossils of fishes and land animals were formed when the animals died, fell to the sea bed or earth, and then over long periods of time dust or silt covered them and they were gradually turned into fossils as dissolved salts trickled through and made a sort of plaster cast. The first part of this scenario is extremely unlikely. As any sea angler knows, (and I am a sea angler) if a dead fish, crab or worm falls to the sea floor, it will be eaten by other fish, crabs, shrimps etc within minutes, hours at the most. Whole shoals of fossil fish are found in the ancient rocks, they must have been overwhelmed by some catastrophe, a colossal underwater mud slide perhaps? Animals have been fossilised eating other animals and giving birth. Certainly animals that die and fall to the ground will be eaten before they can form fossils. It takes a massive mudslide or other catastrophic event to overwhelm and envelop animals quickly enough to allow them to form a cast which will later (not much later, as the Tarawera and dripping well experience linked to above show) form a fossil. Fossils can form over several years from animals and plants that are entombed in a few minutes or seconds. Animals which die an ordinary death are scavenged and eaten by other animals in a short time-as we can see today.
We are often told that the fossils 'prove' evolution-but do they?
Setting aside the question of the age of the fossils (and there is good evidence to doubt the reliability of the methods we have been told 'prove' the age of the rocks), we have to ask the same question that Charles Darwin asked in 'Origin of species', namely, if, as Darwin believed, all the living things we see today and that have ever existed came about by gradual small changes, each change viable and better than the last, then where are the intermediate types? If birds came from reptiles, men came from apes, amphibians came from fish, then there should be examples of things which are 90% fish 20% amphibian, 80% fish 20% amphibian, 70% fish 30% amphibian, and so on. Darwin acknowledged this, and he acknowledged that the intermediate kinds his hypothesis required did not exist either alive today or as fossils. Darwin's excuse for this was the 'imperfection of the fossil record' and he was sure that future fossil discoveries would validate his theory by finding the missing kinds. How valid is this excuse today?
If you walk from Southampton to Inverness, it will
take
you several weeks, much longer if you walk slowly or have to keep going
back as you have forgotten something, or suffer an injury. Assuming you
walked though towns, you would probably be caught several hundred times
on CCTV cameras, would you not? So if fishes gradually changed into
human
beings over hundreds of millions of years, and fossilisation events
happened
every few hundred years or so, would you not expect a large number of
the
intermediate steps to have been caught on the 'fossil camera'?
Darwin
was unable to deny that the many successive intermediate stages his
theory
required
had not been found. He believed the 'missing' fossils which he needed
to
support his hypothesis would be found. He wrote a chapter in 'Origin'
on 'The extreme imperfection of the fossil record' but was sure that he
problem would be ironed out and that the large numbers of intermediate
fossils he needed to prove that different animals morphed into each
other over millions of years by gradual changes would be found.
True theories make predictions which are
fulfilled-this key prediction has not been fulfilled, despite the
finding of
billions of fossils-and don't forget that most of the fossil hunting
has been done by well-funded institutions and people who believed
evolution and wanted to get the credit for discovering the fossils
which would 'prove' it.
150 years of energetic and well funded world-wide searching for fossils to 'prove' evolution have failed to reveal more than a tiny handful of disputed possible intermediate forms. If Darwin was right about gradual changes happening over millions of years, millions and millions of 'missing links' would have come to light. The fact that each Archaeopteryx, Tiktalik, Flores man is triumphantly announced as 'THE' missing link only underlines the lack of the MILLIONS of intermediate missing links which Darwin's hypothesis of gradual change over millions of years requires to sustain it.
The rocks tell a different story, one which if it is possible to suspend the indoctrinated hostility against the Bible which most people have these days, fits the facts better. The deepest, supposedly the earliest, rocks which contain any fossils, the 'Cambrian' rock layers show large numbers of complicated life forms, most of which in their large groups (phyla) still exist today, some practically unchanged. This sudden appearance of life forms is called the Cambrian explosion and is unexplained by evolutionists. The fossil record shows sudden appearance of complicated life forms with no 'ancestors' followed by stasis (no change over time, e.g. Wollemi pine, Coelacanth) and some extinctions, which fits the creation and global flood model better than the evolutionary model. The evolutionists won't admit that the Cambrian explosion goes against Darwin's suppositions, but they can't explain it satisfactorily.
What about the evidence of progress from one sort of animal to another in the fossil record? Evidence of such progress simply does not exist. If it did, the creationists would shut up and go away. The so called horse series is just rubbish. Again, an example of beginning with a conclusion and then massaging, cutting , pasting and selectively deleting the evidence to fit the pre-determined conclusion. This is the opposite of the scientific process, something that is only tolerated in evolution.
What about all the hominid, ape-man, Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon man and other fossils? Basically these represent a classic case of beginning the scientific process with a conclusion, then seeking 'facts' to fit the conclusion, rather like solving a jigsaw puzzle by cutting the pieces to fit and using glue and paint. The 'hominid' fossils were apes, the Neanderthals (who had bigger brains than us) were humans suffering from rickets and syphilis, and Cro-Magnon man is indistinguishable from today's men and women.
The fossils, when the overlaid Darwinistic interpretation is removed and they are viewed with an open mind, show the sudden appearance of many diverse and complicated life forms with no ancestors, followed by stasis, limited variations within kinds (as in different dog varieties), and some extinctions. All of this is more consistent with the Biblical Genesis account that atoms to us by accident via millions of tiny 'undirected progress' changes.
No wonder evolutionists have so often resorted to fantasising, fraud and bullying to bolster their incredible storytelling.