Rosa Rubicondior: Creationism Refuted - Exquisite Fossils From 226 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Other life of this time included the lizard-like ancestors of tortoises, large amphibians that lurked like crocodiles just below the water surface, and forests dominated by a tree called Glossopteris with an understorey of spore-producing plants such as mosses, ferns and horsetails.

Photo: PEXELS

Exquisite new fossils from South Africa offer a glimpse into a thriving ecosystem 266 million years ago

In the realm of palaeontology, few discoveries are as illuminating as those that offer a window into ecosystems long vanished. A recent study published in The Conversation by palaeontologist Rosemary Prevec of Rhodes University, South Africa, unveils such a discovery: an exquisitely preserved fossil site in South Africa's Northern Cape province, dating back 266 million years to the middle Permian period. This site reveals a thriving ecosystem teeming with diverse plant life and a myriad of insect species, providing an unprecedented glimpse into pre-dinosaur terrestrial life.[1]

The significance of this find extends beyond its immediate scientific value; it directly challenges fundamental creationist assertions. By presenting concrete evidence of complex ecosystems existing millions of years before the advent of humans, it undermines the young-Earth creationist timeline that posits a 6,000 to 10,000-year-old Earth. The detailed stratigraphy and radiometric dating techniques employed corroborate the Earth's ancient history, aligning with the broader scientific consensus on geological and biological evolution.

Moreover, the discovery underscores the continuity and gradual progression of life forms, countering the notion of sudden creation. The intricate details preserved in these fossils—ranging from delicate insect wings to diverse plant structures—highlight the complexity and diversity of life well before the emergence of humans. Such findings reinforce the evolutionary narrative of life's development over hundreds of millions of years, offering tangible evidence against creationist models that reject evolutionary theory.

Rosemary Prevec's article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Published: November 22, 2022 1.28pm GMT

Exquisite new fossils from South Africa offer a glimpse into a thriving ecosystem 266 million years ago

Rose Prevec

Rosemary Prevec, Rhodes University

South Africa is famous for its amazingly rich and diverse fossil record. The country’s rocks document more than 3.5 billion years of life on Earth: ancient forms of bacterial life, the emergence of life onto land, the evolution of seed-producing plants, reptiles, dinosaurs and mammals – and humanity.

Many will be familiar with hominid fossils such as the Australopithecus africanus skull Mrs (or is it Mr?) Ples and the paradigm-shifting Taung child. Less well known and equally important fossils such as the oldest terrestrial vertebrates in the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, which document the first steps from the ocean and onto land, have also emerged from South Africa. The country’s wealth of fossils is due in part to the region’s unique geology, which documents 100 million years of nearly continuous deposition in its Karoo Basin.

Fossils also hold clues to climatic shifts, from the great Carboniferous ice age over 300 million years ago, to the huge dunes of blazing Jurassic deserts where dinosaurs roamed 200 million years ago. Scientists can read the devastation of the mass extinction events that destroyed global ecosystems and changed the course of Earth’s history.

But in the race to understand the “big picture” of the evolution of life and to distil its dramatic ups and downs into punchy headlines, it is easy to forget the small and quiet things. Pause, and consider what life looked like on an average day, in a world without humans, mammals, birds, butterflies, flowers, or even dinosaurs. What was it like on the shores of a rippling lake, on a drowsy summer afternoon, 266 million years ago in what’s now the Northern Cape province of South Africa?

The search, and what we found

In a new paper, my colleagues and I provide the first glimpse of such an ecosystem. We have found a profusion of fossils of tiny insects that have never been found before, as well as important plant specimens that are changing our understanding of how they evolved.

Our findings give fresh insights into the effects of extinction events on ecosystems. The subject has taken on great urgency in the face of what scientists are calling the sixth great extinction event, which is being driven by the current trend of global warming.

For the past few years we have been excavating a small, nondescript rock outcrop near Sutherland in the Northern Cape.

This outcrop is yielding untold fossil treasures of plants, insects and other invertebrates that are new to science. These unique fossils, some only a few millimetres long, are telling us about what lived in and around a calm pool on a delta plain during the middle Permian period between 266 million and 268 million years ago. Rocks of this age contain fossils of the oldest therapsids, a group of reptiles that eventually gave rise to the mammals.

Other life of this time included the lizard-like ancestors of tortoises, large amphibians that lurked like crocodiles just below the water surface, and forests dominated by a tree called Glossopteris with an understorey of spore-producing plants such as mosses, ferns and horsetails.

Plant fossils have a lot to teach us about Earth's history

Teams of palaeontologists have discovered and excavated many hundreds of vertebrate fossils in the western and southern Karoo of South Africa that date back to the Permian, including the Sutherland District and surrounding areas. But the kinds of rocks that are rich in vertebrate fossil bones tend not to preserve plants and invertebrates. These seem to require the more anoxic, acidic conditions present in calm lakes and pools for high fidelity preservation, whereas bones preserve well in more oxygen-rich settings.

This makes it difficult to understand the ecosystems of this time – and means our discoveries are especially astonishing. These include the oldest freshwater leech, a record that pushes back the known range of this group by 40 million years, and the oldest water mites by 166 million years.

Other exciting finds include the oldest damsel-fly and oldest stoneflies from Gondwana, as well as a profusion of the tiny, aquatic, immature stages (nymphs) of an extinct group called the Palaeodictyoptera. Many of the insect wings we have found have yet to be identified.

A fossil of an insect nymph - so tiny that it is dwarfed by a human hand - and, on the right, seen under a microscope.

Rose Prevec

There are also mosses and liverworts, tiny soft plants that were among the first to colonise land. They too, have a very poor fossil record, and we have found both at our site. The liverwort is the oldest in Africa and one of only a few records for the Permian period globally.

One of the most exciting finds is the dense accumulations of the male and female cones of the Glossopteris plant, an unbelievably rare occurrence that is shedding light on the evolution and classification of this important coal-forming plant.

Male and female cones of the Glossopteris plant.

Rose Prevec

Great potential

Our work has been slow. Excavations have involved a lot of sitting on spiky rocks in the sun for weeks on end, extracting tiny pieces of mudrock and then examining them with a magnifying hand lens.

The fossil site is still producing new weird and wonderful plants and invertebrates, and will keep us busy for a while. There is also great potential for finding other sites in the region. The thousands of plants and insects we have collected so far are being carefully curated and studied at the Albany Museum in Makhanda. We are keenly aware of the need to conserve this precious part of South Africa’s protected natural heritage.

Our work to better understand the organisms we’re finding provides knowledge about how and when they evolved and interacted as well as about local climate, how their distributions changed through time, how the positions of the continents changed, and the effects of deserts, mountain ranges and seas on the movement and evolution of life.

This is very important when trying to understand extinction events such as the Great Dying, which marked the end of the Permian 252 million years ago. It destroyed most life in the oceans and on land and – in a chilling echo of the current global climate crisis – was driven by hundreds of thousands of years of volcanic activity that produced huge amounts of greenhouse gases, leading to an increase in global temperatures.
Rosemary Prevec, Palaeontologist, Rhodes University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

This South African fossil site presents young-Earth creationists with a formidable and, frankly, insurmountable challenge. The fossils are dated with high confidence to around 266 million years ago—long before the appearance of dinosaurs, let alone humans. This dating is not arbitrary; it is supported by multiple, independent lines of evidence including radiometric dating of volcanic ash layers, stratigraphic consistency across vast regions, and evolutionary placement of the fauna. Creationist claims that the Earth is merely a few thousand years old simply cannot accommodate this level of chronological and geological precision without resorting to widespread denial of established scientific methods.

Furthermore, the sheer diversity of life found in this site contradicts the idea of a single, sudden creation event. This was a fully functioning ecosystem with insects, plants, and vertebrates, many of which have no modern analogues. These organisms show clear signs of evolutionary adaptation to their environment—some were burrowers, some grazers, others predators. If creationist models were accurate, we would expect either a single creation followed by stasis, or a fossil record shaped primarily by a global flood. Yet the site shows no signs of being the product of chaotic sedimentation; rather, it was built up gradually, with fine layers of sediment preserving organisms in situ. This is consistent with slow accumulation in a stable environment, not rapid burial during a global catastrophe.

Perhaps most damaging to creationist narratives is the absence of any modern animals in this ancient ecosystem. There are no mammals, birds, or flowering plants—entire groups of organisms that creationists claim were created simultaneously with all others. Instead, what we find are organisms appropriate for the mid-Permian period, as predicted by evolutionary theory. The fossil record behaves exactly as we would expect if life evolved over hundreds of millions of years, with older layers containing more primitive organisms and newer layers showing increasingly derived forms. For creationism to be true, this perfectly ordered pattern would have to be a global and inexplicable coincidence—a claim that collapses under even the most basic scrutiny.

In other words, it utterly and completely refutes all the basic creationist claims - something which only the most intractable denialism and intellectual bankruptcy amounting to a mental disorder can ignore.

Advertisement

Amazon