Creationism Refuted - Dugongs and Manatees Blow Creationism Out of the Water.

Dugong

Manatee

Dugongs and manatees — the surviving members of the order Sirenia — are among the most revealing mammals when it comes to understanding evolution. Fully aquatic yet air-breathing, specialised yet constrained by their ancestry, they provide one of the clearest examples of how complex organisms arise through gradual modification rather than sudden creation.

Unlike whales, which are now well known as a textbook evolutionary transition, sirenians are less familiar to the public. That makes them especially valuable, because their fossil record is remarkably complete, their evolutionary trajectory is straightforward, and their genetic relationships were discovered independently of their anatomy. Taken together, they present a problem for creationism that cannot be explained away.

Terrestrial origins. The earliest known sirenians lived around 50 million years ago and were unmistakably terrestrial or semi-aquatic mammals.