If Indiana Jones discovered a 55 Chevy buried in the undisturbed tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh even he would be surprised. However Darwinists are unimpressed by an even more amazing discovery of something even further out of its place in time.

On May 29, 2008 scientists at the Victoria Museum in Melbourne, Australia reported finding the fossilized remains of the oldest vertebrate, placental animal ever discovered. The creature was a beautifully preserved placoderm (armored, jawed) fish found in a fossil bed in Northwestern Australia known as the Gogo Formation. What made this fossil so spectacular was that inside of this female fish was a tiny baby placoderm fish still attached to its mother by an umbilical chord. Until now the oldest known viviparous (animals that give birth to live young) vertebrate ever discovered was from the Jurassic period dating to about 180 million years ago. However this placoderm fish dates to at least the middle Devonian dating about 380 million years ago. Because the process appears to be in its fully developed form, it does not seem unreasonable to believe that viviparous birth in vertebrates probably dates back to at least the middle Silurian epoch to about 420 million years ago when placoderm fish first appear in the fossil record.

Viviparous insects are believed to exist from this period. However they are far more primitive than these fish, do not have umbilical cords and are clearly unrelated to them as any type of ancestral form. Scorpions for example hatch their eggs inside of the mothers and then release the live young. The placental birth process is extremely complicated. It requires many specialized organs and behavior. It also requires highly developed complex sexual organs, copulation, mating behavior and much more.

Here is what is so stunning about this find: the Cambrian period when true multi-cellular animals first appear in the fossil record only ends about 500 million years ago. These very advanced placoderms are in the fossil record only about 120 million years later and they appear suddenly, out of nowhere and fully developed. According to Darwinism they should have been developing gradually over long periods of time and should only appear much later in the fossil record. So there should have been lots of simpler intermediate forms in the fossil record not the fully developed form that was discovered at this stunningly early time.

Why This Is Important

The Darwinists while expressing surprise are just embracing this discovery as nothing truly stunning or creating a need to reexamine their assumptions about how evolution is supposed to work as an unguided, accidental process. Their conclusion will be that fully developed viviparous birth simply randomly developed earlier than expected. This is the equivalent of Indiana Jones concluding that there it was no big deal in finding a 55 Chevy in the tomb of a pharaoh. His conclusion being that the 55 Chevy was first built in 2500 BC instead of 1955 - no big deal - just revise the numbers and go on as before.

The real importance of this fossil is that it is another of a growing list of examples of highly advanced biological processes that appear far too early in the fossil record to be honestly explained as the result of an unguided random process.

Further Source: “The Oldest Pregnant Mum”, by Carina Dennis, Nature, 453, 575 (2008).

By: Lawrence Vescera, Ph.D.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Apologetics, Articles, Astronomy, Bible, Bible Study, Biology, Christian Apologetics, Christian Education, Darwin, Darwinism, Education, Evolution, Genetics, Geology, God, History, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Politics, Science, Teaching, archeology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.