Refuting Creationism - How Many Legs Had A Trilobite 250-300 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'?

Triarthrus eatoni

AI generated (ChatGPT40)

Cambrian trilobite

AI generated (ChatGPT40)

New York State Fossils Reveal Extra Set of Trilobite Legs | AMNH

In that vast amount of time before creationism's god allegedly created a small flat planet with a dome over it, containing nothing and nowhere that wasn't known to the Bronze Age Canaanite pastoralists who first wrote about it, when 99.9975% of Earth’s history happened, there were swarms of trilobites living in the seas and regularly molting to leave hard body parts to fossilise in the marine sediment.

They did this so frequently that trilobites are now amongst the commonest of fossils, but nevertheless fossils preserving the soft body parts are rare, like the soft body parts of the rest of the Cambrian biota.

However, just such a fossil has turned up in upstate New York that shows something surprising - it has an additional pair of legs to the usual trilobite complement. This discovery is the subject of a paper in the journal Palaeontology (the journal of the Palaeontological Association) by Jin-Bo Hou from Nanjing University and Professor Melanie Hopkins, curator and chair of the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Paleontology. The discovery is described in an American Natural History Museum news article:

Refuting Creationism - A strange Sea Slug - From 500 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Dorsal view of a complete Shishania aculeata

Image credit: G Zhang/L Parry.

Spines covering the body of Shishania aculeata

Image credit: G Zhang/L Parry

August: Mollusc discovery | News and features | University of Bristol

Palaeontology has a habit of throwing up surprises.

Sadly for creationists, these surprises never show us that science is fundamentally wrong and creationism is fundamentally right. It invariably shows us exactly the opposite.

The surprise today is that an early mollusc resembled a slug with a spiky armour, not the smooth shell we normally associate with snails which were believed to have evolved in the Early Cambrian when this species lived.

The confirmation that creationism is fundamentally wrong comes from the fact that this strange slug lived in that very long pre-'Creation' period of Earth history, 500 million years before creationists think the Universe was magicked up out of nothing by some magic words spoken in a language that no-one else spoke because, so the story goes, there was no-one else for the magician to speak to.

The mollusc, named Shishania aculeata, was probably an early evolutionary dead-end; an early response to the threat to soft-bodies creatures from the emerging predators that gave the impetus for the rapid radiation of forms that characterised the Cambrian.

Refuting Creationism - How Worms Turned - Into Insects

Fig. 1: Anatomical overview of Youti yuanshi.

Ancient worm fossil solves mystery of how insects and spiders evolved - Durham University

To anyone who has ever looked at the segmented body of an annelid worm and the segmented body of an insect, particularly in its larval stage, that the latter is really the former with legs and (usually as an adult) wings should be obvious. The same can be said for annelid worms and centipedes and, for that matter, worms with legs and arachnids (spiders, scorpions and mites). But maybe the connection between arachnids and crabs or insects and barnacles is not so obvious, until you look at how the legs work and how they both have an exoskeleton instead of an endoskeleton like the vertebrates.

But then even the primitive ancestors of the vertebrates were segmented like the annelids, as we can see in the spinal column and the way nerves arise from the spinal cord.

But, tell a creationist that a segmented worm evolved into the arthropods, and they'll immediately demand to see the 'transitional' fossil, that they've been fooled into thinking must exist because every generation of every species is obliged to leave a fossil so there is a complete, unbroken record of evolution somewhere, because the Theory of Evolution says so. In fact, a complete, unbroken fossil record of every generation of an evolving species over time would look suspiciously like something other than chance was at work in creating fossils.

So, what we have are the snapshots at random points in time that are left in the geological column, and various dating methods that tell us how old the fossil is. The rest is simple common sense and joining the dots.

And one such snapshot has just been announced by researchers working at Durham University, UK, who have identified a species that is clearly partway between a segmented worm and an early arthropod (euarthropod). The newly-named Youti yuanshi is about the size of a poppy seed and fits neatly into one of creationism's beloved gaps. And, of course, it is exactly what the TOE predicts should have lived, because, as I said, the connection between segmented worms and segmented arthropods is obvious.

Refuting Creationism - A Surfeit of Lamprey Evolution

Jawless lamprey

Image by T. Lawrence,
Great Lakes Fishery Commission

Petromyzon marinus, an invasive species in the North American Great Lakes.

Lampreys possess a ‘jaw-dropping’ evolutionary origin - Northwestern Now

It's a basic delusion of the creation cult that evolutionary biologists are turning their backs on the Theory of Evolution in favour of their childish notion of magic by a magic creator for which there is not an iota of scientific evidence. This probably tells us more about the ignorant gullibility of their target dupes and the contempt in which they are held by the cult leaders, than creationist frauds would want us to know.

The lie is designed to fool creationists into thinking that their childish superstition is ahead of science because their abysmal ignorance of the subject gives them a better understanding of biology than people who have university degrees in the subject and who use it every working day to reveal new facts and develop new medicines or more efficient agriculture, or simply to reveal the truth about the world we live in.

Creationists have also been fooled into thinking these millions of working biomedical scientists, their research assistants and staff of research institutes, together with those who publish the science journals, are all lying to mislead people because they 'hate' the imaginary, unproven creator, and none of them has ever broken ranks and blown the whistle on the 'deception'.

Meanwhile, in the grown-up world outside the creationist rabbit hole, real scientists are discovering facts that show how evolution from common ancestors involves genetic changes, just the way the Theory of Evolution predicts.

Refuting Creationism - Perfectly Preserved Trilobites From The Cambrian - 515 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Two species of Trilobite with approaching pyroclastic flow

© Prof. A. El Albani, Univ. Poitiers

Microtomographic reconstruction of the head and anterior trunk (“body”) limbs of the trilobite Protolenus (Hupeolenus) in ventral view.

© Arnaud MAZURIER, IC2MP, Univ. Poitiers

June: Prehistoric Pompeii | News and features | University of Bristol

Paleontologists have discovered a site in Morocco where hundreds of trilobites and other Cambrian species have been preserved by a pyroclastic flow of hot volcanic ash that preserved them in exquisite details. They have nicknamed them 'Pompeii' trilobites after the town near Naples in Italy similarly preserved by volcanic ash from Vesuvius, almost as a snapshot of a living Roman town, complete with molds of the bodies of people killed as they slept.

The trilobites were quickly embedded in volcanic ash and even their digestive tracts were preserved as they filled with the ash.

This means, of course, that the fossils can be dated extremely accurately using the uranium/lead (U-Pb) ratios in zircon crystals in the volcanic ash.

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: