Creationism in Crisis - Newly Discovered Species of Trilobite Aid in Dating Rocks - To 490 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Ten newly discovered species of trilobites, hidden for 490 million years in a little-studied part of Thailand, could be the missing pieces in an intricate puzzle of ancient world geography.

Artist's rendering of a trilobite based on preserved soft body parts.

Nobu Tamura

Trilobites rise from the ashes to reveal ancient map | News

In my last blog post I wrote about the fact that Neanderthals were making marks, interpreted as art, on the wall of a French cave, 40,000 years before creationists believe Earth was created. This blog post is about creatures that lived much further into 'pre-Creation' history, some 490 million years 'pre-Creation' to be precise.

It's also about how the rocks in which their fossils were found were dated and how this means that fossils of these species can now be used to date other rocks, giving the lie to creationist claims that dating rock using 'index' fossils is circular reasoning. And dating those rock formations leads to a new understanding of the details of plate tectonics as the ancient continent, Gondwana, broke up.

Trilobites as a group are known to have diversified and diverged relatively quickly and became extinct relatively quickly too, so each species lived only for a few million years. This means, if we know when the species lived, we can date the rocks they are found in to within a few million years.

The fossils are of ten species of trilobite that are new to science which were found in layers of ancient volcanic ash between layers of sandstone in a little-studied area of Thailand. The ash layer forms greenish 'tuffs' which contains crystals of zircon produced during the volcanic eruption. Zircon crystals are extremely durable and remain unchanged embedded within the rocks. Trapped inside them are atoms of the radioactive isotopes of uranium, ²³⁸U and ²³⁵U, (both of which have very long half-lives and decay to stable isotopes of lead, which remains trapped within the zircon crystal lattice as a permanent record of what proportion of uranium has decayed to lead and which remain, giving a very precise date of the formation of the rock.

Creationism in Crisis - How Microscopic Organisms Were Evolving Half a Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fossil plankton from half a billion years ago. These tiny algae measure much less than a millimetre in size. They evolved their colonial structure to avoid being eaten by early animals.

Credit: THP Harvey

Algae-like fossils show colonial arrangement"

Bizarre new fossils shed light on ancient plankton | News | University of Leicester

A scientist at the University of Leicester, UK, has discovered a new type of fossil, that lived half a billion years ago in the Cambrian Era. It resembles an algae but shows evidence of the beginnings of colonial existence as groups of cells joined together to form larger masses.

It was part of the Cambrian biota which evolved at a time of increasing competition between predatory and prey species, after multicellular life had evolved motility and the ability to hunt and consume other life forms, so exterminating the Ediacaran biota that preceded it.

Evolving the ability to group together into larger masses could have happened because doing so made it harder for a predator to consume the algae-like organisms.

In their obsessive search for something to discredit the Theory of Evolution, creationists often abandon one or more of their basic dogmas, confident that their target dupes won't realise they don’t have a coherent set of ideas with which to counter the vast body of science that established the TOE beyond a shadow of doubt.

This cavalier approach to truth also demonstrates the truism that there is no truth agenda in creationism; it’s all about recruiting more people into the cult in the childish belief that a fantasy becomes more and more true, as more and more people are fooled into believing it - a childish way of seeking safety in numbers.

A classic example of this is the absurd claim that the so-called 'Cambrian Explosion', which actually lasted several million years, was a literal explosion of life forms that arose overnight without ancestors. They believe this shows the work or a creator and simultaneously refutes the idea of common origins and the evolution of multicellular life from single-celled organisms.

And of course, it abandons the notion of a 10,000-year-old Earth and the mythical account in Genesis of how and when life on Earth was created, in which there is no mention of the Cambrian biota or anything resembling it.

First, a little background to the era in which these newly-discovered organisms lived:

Creationism in Crisis - 520 Million-Year-Old Common Ancestor of Crustaceans and Insects Found in the Fossil Record

Kylinxia zhangi

Professor Yu Liu
Yunnan Key Laboratory for Palaeobiology

Artists impression of Kylinxia zhangi in life

X. Wang

Three-eyed distant relative of insects and crustaceans reveals amazing detail of early animal evolution | News | University of Leicester

A team from the University of Leicester, Yunnan Key Laboratory for Palaeobiology and the Institute of Palaeontology at Yunnan University, Chengjiang Fossil Museum, and the Natural History Museum in London, have redescribed a unique fossil animal from rocks nearly 520 million years old that fills in a gap in our understanding of the evolution of animals known as arthropods.

The animal, Kylinxia zhangi, simply shouldn’t be there if creationists claims were true. It is from almost 520 million years before Earth and the life on it was created and its one of those 'transitional' species showing characteristics of not just two different species, but two entire classes of the arthropod phylum. As such, of course, they are evidence of the evolutionary common origin of those two classes within the major taxon.

They're the sort of species that would have any creationist scratching their heads and declaring, "But they're still er... insects.... er... crustaceans"! before hurriedly redefining 'kind' as a major taxonomic class that includes hundreds of thousands of disparate species with different appendages and body plans of the sort that the same creationist will assure you can't have evolved because 'macro-evolution', i.e., evolving new appendages, body plans, etc., is impossible, while 'micro-evolution, i.e., evolution within the same 'kind' is now perfectly possible. 25 years ago, it was impossible until they realised no Ark could be big enough to contain 2 (or 7)of each known and extinct species.

So, the standard knee-jerk response will be necessary: the scientists lied; the scientists got the dates wrong; the dating techniques are flawed; the scientists are part of a world-wide satanic conspiracy to turn people away from Jesus - even the Chines scientists for whom Jesus and Satan are as mythical as are the Chinese Taoist gods to an American Christian fundamentalist.

But, leaving aside the arrogant cultural chauvinism in assuming the locally popular god in America is the only real one, I wonder how many creationists can explain why the dating methods used were wrong by many orders of magnitude, returning dates in the hundreds of millions of years when the real date should have been about 4,000 years.

The find and its significance is explained in a University of Leicester news release: