Creationism in Crisis - Penguin Fossils Expose Creationist Lies

Ancient Penguin Fossils Offer New Window into Antarctica’s Changing Climate | Blog

Fossil collection sites, Seymour Island, Antarctica.
Images credit: Boyang Xia et al.

Embarrassed by the wealth of fossils documenting an orderly succession of changing life over hundreds of millions of years, creationists traditionally fall back on several almost equally implausible attempts to reconcile the evidence with their preferred origin myth. According to young-Earth creationism, Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old, while most of the fossil-bearing geological record was supposedly produced during a single, year-long global flood in which almost every terrestrial vertebrate was exterminated in an act of divine genocide, leaving only a handful of survivors aboard a wooden boat.

The principal pseudo-scientific attempt to explain the orderly fossil record is something creationists call “hydrological sorting”. This proposes that the Flood sorted organisms according to such factors as their size, density, buoyancy, habitat or ability to escape the rising water. The term therefore has a nominal meaning, but it provides no credible explanation for the observed succession of organisms in the rocks. It cannot explain why particular groups appear only after their presumed ancestors, why countless short-lived species occur in a consistent order across different continents, why terrestrial and marine ecosystems succeed one another coherently, or why the same sequence agrees with radiometric dates, palaeomagnetism, plate tectonics and independent records of environmental change.

When this supposed mechanism fails, creationists can retreat into claims that are conveniently immune to evidence: that their creator deliberately planted or manipulated the fossil record to make Earth look ancient; that Satan planted the evidence to deceive the faithful; or that generations of geologists, palaeontologists, physicists and biologists have participated in a vast conspiracy to conceal the “truth”. Each claim abandons any pretence of scientific explanation because none can be tested, falsified or distinguished from an invented excuse. They serve only to protect a predetermined conclusion from inconvenient facts.

The latest inconvenient facts come from three researchers at the China University of Geosciences (Beijing): Boyang Xia, Huaichun Wu and Quanguo Li. In a paper recently published in the open-access journal Fossil Record, they report that fossil penguin bones from Seymour Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula, preserve a geochemical record of changing environmental conditions during the Eocene.

Seymour Island contains one of the world’s richest and most nearly continuous successions of Eocene penguin fossils. Xia and colleagues examined bones from three different levels in the La Meseta and Submeseta formations: an early Eocene horizon dated to 55.3–54.1 million years ago, a younger horizon dated to 49.1–45.8 million years ago, and a middle-to-late Eocene horizon dated to 41.2–37.7 million years ago. For comparison, they also examined bones from living chinstrap and emperor penguins.

Refuting Creationism - Our Earliest Animal Ancestors May Have Been Sea Sponges - 541 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Some of the first animals on Earth were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge, according to MIT geochemists who unearthed new evidence in very old rocks.

Image: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT

The first animals on Earth may have been sea sponges, study suggests | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Another fatal blow against creationism was revealed recently by geochemists led by Professor Roger E. Summons of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with news that they have found chemical evidence in ancient rocks suggesting that the earliest animals may have been the ancestors of sponges, living some 541 million years ago. Their findings have just been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

They succeeded in extracting the chemical signature of animal life from rocks in Oman, where they found an abundance of steranes that they determined were the preserved remnants of 30-carbon (C₃₀) sterols — a rare form of steroid that they showed was most likely derived from ancient sea sponges known as demosponges.

Not only is this fatal to creationists' notion of Earth being just a few thousand years old, with all living organisms magically created without ancestry and with different “kinds” unrelated to other “kinds”, but it also delivers another hammer blow to the creationist parody of the so-called 'Cambrian Explosion' as a literal explosive creation of multiple body plans in a single event. Slightly more sophisticated creationists attempt to claim that this was the act of creation for which the tales in Genesis are merely a metaphor, with each day of 'creation week' representing millions of years — a claim that collapses on realisation that, according to Genesis, green plants would have had to exist for millions of years with no sun to drive photosynthesis, since the sun is supposedly created the 'day' after plants.

This analysis pushes the origins of the Cambrian biota back into the Ediacaran, showing not a sudden spontaneous creation 540 million years ago, but the cumulative products of evolutionary diversification, probably beginning with these early multicellular organisms.
In addition to Professor Roger E. Summons of MIT, the team included Dr Lubna Shawar of Caltech, Gordon Love of the University of California, Riverside, Benjamin Uveges of Cornell University, Alex Zumberge of GeoMark Research in Houston, Paco Cárdenas of Uppsala University in Sweden, and José-Luis Giner of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.