Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Yet Another Gap Is Closing

Fossil discovery fills in missing information about modern fish evolution | Michigan News

Complete skeleton of the oldest jack fish, part of the group that includes modern jacks and trevallies.

A close-up of sharp teeth in an early relative of modern tunas.

Images credit: Professor Hesham Sallam, Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center

There are only two things in the universe faster than light: monarchy and gods. When a monarch dies, the monarchy passes instantaneously to the sovereign’s heir, regardless of where either of them happens to be at the time; and when science shines a light into one of the gaps in which creationists have been hiding their god, the god has already departed. That, presumably, is why no god has ever been detected by science.

Creationist dependence on these god-shaped gaps has produced an ever-shrinking god as science fills one gap after another with evidence. The fallacy depends on the gamble that, unlike every previous gap closed by science, this one will turn out to require a supernatural creation event. It never does, of course, but that never seems to diminish creationist confidence that the next gap will be different.

True to form, science has now closed yet another gap with evidence, not magic. It is one few creationists are likely to know about, and fewer still would be willing to acknowledge, because it concerns a gap in the fossil record between the K–Pg mass extinction, which eliminated the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and about 56 million years ago. In other words, it is a 10-million-year interval in the very long pre-‘Creation Week’ history of life on Earth — a history no self-respecting creationist can honestly admit exists without conceding that the Bible’s creation myth is not real history. Specifically, it is a gap in the fossil record of fish evolution, from the devastation at the K–Pg boundary to the later appearance of many species that look markedly different from those that preceded it.

That gap, known to palaeontologists as “Patterson’s Gap”, has now been partly filled by the discovery of the earliest known examples of six modern fish groups by a research team led by Sanaa El-Sayed, a University of Michigan doctoral student and researcher at the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center. The fossils were found in the Qreiya 3 Lagerstätte, dated to 62.2 million years ago, in Egypt’s Eastern Desert. The discovery has just been reported in Science Advances.

Background: The Qreiya 3 Lagerstätte. The Qreiya 3 Lagerstätte is an exceptionally fossil-rich deposit in Egypt’s Eastern Desert, dated to about 62.2 million years ago, in the early Palaeocene. That places it only about 4 million years after the Cretaceous–Palaeogene (K–Pg) mass extinction, the event that eliminated the non-avian dinosaurs and profoundly disrupted life in the oceans as well as on land.

A Lagerstätte is a fossil site with unusually rich or unusually well-preserved remains. Qreiya 3 qualifies because it preserves abundant, often articulated fish skeletons, rather than merely isolated teeth, scales or fragments. This makes it especially valuable because complete skeletons reveal much more about anatomy, relationships and ecology than scattered remains can.

The site is important because it falls within “Patterson’s Gap”, a poorly sampled interval in the fossil record of spiny-rayed fishes between the latest Cretaceous and the early Eocene. Before this discovery, palaeontologists had relatively little direct evidence of what happened to many marine fish lineages during the first few million years after the K–Pg extinction.

The Qreiya 3 fossils show that several modern-looking marine fish groups were already present surprisingly soon after the mass extinction. The assemblage includes 21 kinds of fishes across nine orders, with many belonging to the percomorphs, the huge group that now dominates much of modern marine fish diversity. Among the fossils are early representatives of groups related to jacks, moonfish, pipefish and tuna-like fishes.

Just as importantly, the site does not preserve the characteristically Cretaceous fish groups that palaeontologists had suspected disappeared at or near the K–Pg boundary. That absence strengthens the conclusion that their disappearance was real extinction, not merely a failure of preservation. Qreiya 3 therefore helps show how marine ecosystems were rebuilt after catastrophe, not by magic, but by evolutionary recovery, replacement and diversification over deep time.

The paper is accompanied by an article in Michigan News, which explains how this Egyptian fossil site has opened a window into a part of evolutionary history that had previously been frustratingly dark:

Fossil discovery fills in missing information about modern fish evolution
Fish have a missing chapter in their history: after an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, there is very little evidence of fish in the fossil record.
When whole fossil fish skeletons become common again about 10 million years after the asteroid impact, they include many species that look different than those that came before, leaving scientists to wonder what evolutionary paths fishes took between about 66 and 56 million years ago. Now, a research team including University of Michigan graduate student Sanaa El-Sayed has discovered the earliest known examples of six modern fish groups that still swim in Earth’s seas today.

The finding, published in Science Advances, describes marine fishes dated to 62.2 million years ago, helping to fill a 10 million year interval with sparse fossil information about modern fish evolution. Among the findings include the earliest known fossil skeletons of jack, a type of sportfish, moonfish and pipefish, the family to which seahorses belong.

The first clues of the new fish site in the Eastern Desert of Egypt came from a geologist who provided dates for the deposit. El-Sayed realized that this earlier study mentioned a fish fossil bed, dated to almost the middle of the 10 million year fossil record gap. She, along with the lab team of Hesham Sallam, founder of the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center (MUVP) in Egypt, began excavating the site.

We have this 10 million year gap with a very limited fossil record. We know the asteroid impacted the marine environment, but it was unclear how the oceans came to have these modern fishes. It was mindblowing that this site is now helping us answer the questions of when and where and what was present in the modern ocean just a few million years after the dinosaurs went extinct.

Sanaa El-Sayed, lead author
Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center (MUVP)
Mansoura University
Mansoura, Egypt.

A newly uncovered fossil jack fish, photographed in the field shortly after its discovery.

Fossil skeleton of the oldest known tuna-related fish.

Image credit: Professor Hesham Sallam, Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center.

In total, the researchers discovered 21 kinds of fishes across nine orders of fish. Most of the fishes are percomorphs, a major group in today’s oceans but which were relatively uncommon during the age of dinosaurs, according to Matt Friedman, co-author of the study and director and curator of the U-M Museum of Paleontology.

The findings also reinforce the idea that the biological crisis event linked to the asteroid impact, called the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction, led to the demise of certain kinds of fishes, followed by the rapid establishment of other groups of fishes that look distinctly modern.

A newly discovered fossil moonfish, the oldest known example of a group still living today. Moonfish are the most abundant fish at the site.

A first glimpse of the body armor of an early relative of modern pipefishes and seahorses, photographed at the moment of discovery.

The newly uncovered upper jaw of a marine fossil fish related to modern freshwater arowanas.

MUVP team excavating fossils at the Qreiya 3 site in Egypt’s Eastern Desert, July 2023.

Images credit: Professor Hesham Sallam, Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center

Patterson’s Gap

Part of the fossil collection recovered during the 2023 Qreiya 3 field expedition, photographed at the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center in Egypt after the end of fieldwork.

Image credit: Professor Hesham Sallam, Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center

Friedman has long been vexed by a fossil-poor part of the record around the K-Pg, a gap he and colleagues called Patterson’s Gap after a paleontologist who had previously noted it. Because of its timing, the gap muddies our picture of how fishes were impacted by the extinction.

This gap early in the Cenozoic record leads to two interrelated questions. First, did the fish that we generally assume went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period really not limp into the next interval, called the Paleogene, and we’ve just missed them because the record is poor? Second, when did the more familiar modern groups appear? The gap represents a long span of time during which we have poor grasp of what happened, and it’s frustratingly coincident with one of the most interesting intervals of Earth’s more recent history.

Professor Matt Friedman, co-author.
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI, USA.

Perhaps, researchers thought, that the gap in the fossil record meant the conditions did not exist during that time period to optimally preserve fish as fossils. That meant uncertainty about which groups the extinction impacted and how recovery proceeded.

Here we have this remarkable deposit that opens a new window on this critical time. There are plenty of skeletons preserved, but none of the kinds of fishes we thought went extinct were there. Our findings suggest that those fish likely did go extinct at or around that major cataclysm at the end of the Cretaceous, rather than their absence just reflecting a lousy record. At the same time, the site provides direct evidence that a lot of these modern-looking fish groups were established pretty early on.

Professor Matt Friedman.

Branching out the fossil search

The researchers say there could be many reasons why the 10-million-year gap has occurred. One reason could be that the majority of paleontological work has been concentrated in Europe and North America, missing valuable deposits that might be present elsewhere—something El-Sayed hopes will change.

It’s always good to look at other places for finding fossils. We can’t keep focusing on Europe and North America. New discoveries like this site in Egypt are showing us some of the oldest examples of this group, and this, in the long run, will change how we understand modern fish evolution. We are examining a site that’s very well dated—62.2 million years old. It’s hard to get more precise than that. What we are seeing now is only a small light illuminating a long and previously dark corridor in the early history of modern marine fish evolution. This Egyptian site shows that many important answers are still waiting to be discovered. Exploring older and new fossil localities in Egypt will be a major focus of our ongoing collaboration between our center and the University of Michigan.

Sanaa El-Sayed.

El-Sayed is also a senior student researcher at MUVP and assistant lecturer at Mansoura University, where she studied vertebrate paleontology as an undergraduate. There, she was the first student to work in the first lab in Egypt studying vertebrate fossils, led by Sallam, the first Egyptian scientist to earn a doctorate in vertebrate paleontology.

The study’s co-authors include the geologist who first identified the site, Robert Speijer, of KU Leuven in Belgium, as well as Belal Salem, Abdullah Gohar, Shorouq Al Ashqar, Mohamed Amin and Hossam El-Saka of MUVP and U-M’s Hadeel Saad.

Publication:
Sanaa El-Sayed et al.
Rise of modern marine fishes captured in an early Paleocene Lagerstätte. Sci. Adv. 12, eaec8978 (2026). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.aec8978

Abstract
The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction reshaped Earth’s biodiversity, yet its impact on marine fishes remains debated due to gaps in the Paleocene record. Here, we report a paleotropical assemblage from the early Paleocene (Danian) of Egypt that provides a window into this transition. The Qreiya 3 Lagerstätte [62.2 million years ago (Ma)] reveals an offshore marine ecosystem with at least 21 actinopterygian taxa across nine orders, exceeding the diversity of all other Danian skeletal assemblages combined. Most fishes are percomorphs and include the oldest skeleton-based records for at least six ecologically divergent extant groups. These findings reinforce inferences of fish extinction linked to the K-Pg and the rapid establishment of compositionally modern communities, marked by the first occurrences of new lineages no later than ~4 million years (Myr) after the event. Comparisons across sites indicate that percomorphs appear more common at lower paleolatitudes in the Paleocene, expanding into higher paleolatitudes by the Eocene.

Fig. 2. Non-acanthomorphs and non-percomorph acanthomorphs from Qreiya 3.
(A to D) Non-acanthomorph fishes. (A), †Pycnodontidae (cf. †Nursallia), specimen missing caudal fin (MUVP 642). [(B) and (C)] Osteoglossidae (bony tongues) (†Phareodontinae) undet. (B) maxillary fragment (MUVP 652). (C) Partial skeleton (MUVP 650). (D) Clupeiformes (Clupeoidei) undet. (MUVP 661). (E to G) Non-percomorph acanthomorph fishes. (E) Veliferidae (sailfin velifers) undet, partial skeleton (MUVP 666). (F) Zeiformes (dories) undet. Morphotype I, partial skeleton (MUVP 670). (G) Acanthomorpha undet., Morphotype I, complete skeleton (MUVP 671).

Fig. 3. Percomorphs from Qreiya 3. (A to C) Syngnathiformes. (A) Syngnathidae (pipefishes) undet., articulated skeleton missing caudal region (MUVP 698). (B) Aulostomoidea undet., skeleton missing caudal region (MUVP 705). (C) Aulostomoidea undet., skull (MUVP 706). (D and E) Scombriformes. (D) Scombridae (†Eocoeolopomini) (mackerel, tuna, and kin) undet., articulated skeleton missing the neurocranium and the caudal fin (MUVP 708). (E) Trichiuroidea undet. (MUVP 829). (F and G) Carangiformes. (F) Menidae (moonfish) (Mene sp.), complete skeleton (MUVP 804). (G) Carangidae (jacks) undet., complete skeleton (MUVP 805). (H and I) Distinct percomorph morphotypes. (H) Percomorpha undet. Morphotype I, skull and anterior region of the body (MUVP 709). (I) Percomorpha undet. Morphotype II, skull and the anterior abdominal region (MUVP 812).

(A) Summary of the new earliest skeletal occurrences of several acanthomorph lineages represented in this study. Previously documented stratigraphic ranges are shown in white (see table S4), and stratigraphic range extensions based on Qreiya 3 are shown in orange; open-ended arrows indicate lineages that extend beyond the plotted interval to the present. An asterisk in Aulostomoidea indicates that this may represent the earliest occurrence of the group, contingent on resolving the phylogenetic position of the Mexican syngnathiform †Eekaulostomus (38). (B) Artistic reconstruction of the Qreiya 3 fauna. Individual taxa shown approximately at scale to one another, with anatomy based on specimens from Qreiya 3 augmented by close living and extinct relatives. Image credit: I. Baylatry. Abbreviations: Ca, Carangidae; Cl, Clupeoidei; He, Hexanchidae; Me, Menidae (Mene sp.); Od, Odontaspididae; Pa, †Palaeophiidae; Ph, †Phareodontinae; Py, †Pycnodontidae (cf. †Nursallia); Sc, Scombridae; Sy, Syngnathidae; Tr, Trichiuroidea; up, undetermined percomorph; ua, undetermined acanthomorph; Ve, Veliferidae; Ze, Zeiformes.

Sanaa El-Sayed et al.
Rise of modern marine fishes captured in an early Paleocene Lagerstätte. Sci. Adv. 12, eaec8978 (2026). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.aec8978

Copyright: © 2026 The authors.
Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

So, once again, a supposed “gap” turns out not to be a place where a god can be safely hidden, but a place where scientists need better fossils. And when those fossils are found, they do what fossils always do: they fit into the long history of life on Earth, they illuminate evolutionary relationships, and they show change through deep time. They do not point to a supernatural magician conjuring fish into existence fully formed during a mythical creation week.

Qreiya 3 is especially damaging for creationists because it does not merely add another fossil to a list; it helps document recovery and diversification after one of the greatest biological catastrophes in Earth’s history. The K–Pg extinction devastated marine ecosystems as well as terrestrial ones, yet within a few million years, lineages ancestral or related to several modern fish groups were already present. That is exactly the sort of pattern evolutionary theory leads us to expect: survival, extinction, replacement, diversification and adaptation, all unfolding over immense spans of time.

Creationism, by contrast, has no explanatory framework for any of this. It cannot explain why there should be a K–Pg boundary, why the non-avian dinosaurs should disappear below it, why certain fish groups should vanish while others diversify above it, or why a 62.2-million-year-old Egyptian fossil bed should contain early representatives of modern marine fish lineages. All it can do is deny the timescale, misrepresent the evidence, or pretend that another gap has not just been made smaller.

And that is the recurring embarrassment for the god-of-the-gaps argument. Every time science shines a light into one of those dark places, the gap becomes smaller and the god supposedly hiding in it becomes more elusive. Patterson’s Gap has not been closed completely, but it has been narrowed by evidence — real fossils, in real rocks, in a real geological sequence, from a real period of Earth’s history tens of millions of years before any alleged Biblical creation. Once again, the facts have moved in, and the god has quietly moved out.

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