The Great Creationist Fossil Failure

Thus for creationists, an invisible sky-wizard who poofs animals into existence by magic is essential. Yet we do not observe any invisible sky-wizard who poofs animals into existence by magic, therefore creationism is a weak theory to explain the origins of modern organisms. Evolution better fits the evidence.Also I've told you about gene-adding processes on this and other threads, but you ignored me. Perhaps we should return to one of those threads for further discussion about fossils, as this thread is devoted to creationist errors concerning the fossil record, not genetics.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

[citation needed]

Liar.

Well, let us know when you find it, and then you'll have more than fantasy and conjecture to work with.Were the whales also hiding behind trees somewhere? How 'bout the lobsters?How about the crocodiles and the frogs? If your excuse for not finding any pre-Triassic mammals is that the land was one vast swamp (which it wasn't, as we know from studying the rocks) then why don't we find the exact sort of animals that live in swamps?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

You're missing all of them, mindspawn.

But a little googling around shows that we do have pre-Triassic fossils from the Siberian Traps. For example, Tunguska is slap in the middle, and has Ordovician tabular corals. Up north a bit is Anabar, with Cambrian Small Shelly Fauna. To the east, the Lena River exposes Cambrian trilobites. Indeed, I read that "the Cambrian of the Siberian Craton is famous for the variety and preservation of its fossils". None of which, mindspawn, are giraffes, or mice, or hedgehogs, or aardvarks, or antelopes, or gnus, or naked mole rats, or leopards, or pangolins, or wallabies ... are you beginning to see a theme here?

I don't see your objection. Why is he not right?

Where to even begin?Midspawn requires that all the mammals and frogs and lobsters and crocodiles and ichthyosaurs and so on should have been hiding away somewhere, so if we can't find any examples of them before the Triassic, it's because they were hiding.His excuse for why we can't find land mammals is that they were all in Siberia, and the fossils that they would doubtless have deposited are all hidden by the Siberian Traps. To which we might reply:* The deposition of the Siberian Traps would in fact have annihilated any mammals living there.
* And we can find pre-Triassic species living in the area covered by the Siberian traps.
* These are overwhelmingly marine species.His excuse for why mammals didn't live anywhere but Siberia is that the rest of the world was a big swamp.To this we might reply:* No it wasn't, as proved by geology.
* Mammals live in swamps.
* We do not find in the pre-Triassic those species that do live in swamps, such as frogs and crocodiles.Again, his explanation of why we don't find lobsters and whales and ichthyosaurs in the pre-Triassic fossil record is (I paraphrase) "Er, they were hiding somewhere."In particular, his excuse for why we find pre-Triassic trilobites but not lobsters is that the trilobites could cope with sulfurous anoxic conditions, which would not have suited lobsters.But we know that coral grew and flourished in these conditions.And having got even this far, he's only supplying excuses for why the Paleozoic was different from what came after. How does he explain why the Mesozoic was the age of the dinosaurs and contains no giraffes or elephants or hippopotamuses?How, indeed, does he account for the existence of dinosaurs at all? He has claimed that they all evolved severally from pre-Triassic reptiles --- which apparently all evolved convergently to have the same synapomorphies. The reason why they could possibly do such a thing is apparently left as an exercise for the reader.And then we might ask how the conditions of deposition changed so much since a couple of thousand years ago and today? Because in historical time --- if we look, for example, at the burial of Roman remains --- they have been buried under a scant couple of feet of soil and have not been fossilized. Whereas if we believe mindspawn, animals living only a couple of thousand years earlier have been buried under hundreds of feet of rocks and been lithified.Well, this is what comes to mind right now. I'm sure I could find more things if I looked back at his older posts --- for example, his excuses about ichthyosaurs could do with closer examination.Finally, one more question for mindspawn, which I have asked before. It is more usual for creationists to put the Flood, not at the Permian-Triassic boundary, but at the KT boundary. So, mindspawn, how would you convince such a creationist that he was wrong and you were right --- given that he can employ exactly the same expedients for fudging the evidence as you can?

The manatee and the dugong
prove clearly that Darwin was wrong:
subject to correction
by sexual selection
they wouldn't have lasted this long.

OK, but I still don't see why you're jumping up and down on himWe do think that all species are descended from the Last Universal Common Ancestor, because that's what it means. If you're disagreeing with him, I think you may be arguing at cross-purposes.

Except that in the creationist fantasy all the varieties of life were not magicked into existence successively over hundreds of millions of years (which would conform to your inaccurate beliefs about the fossil record) but were all magicked up in just one week In The Beginning.Which leaves you with much, much, bigger lapses to explain away (see this thread) --- and, as we have seen, a bunch of excuses for them which on examination turn out to be wretched ridiculous nonsense.Take mammals, for example. We have in fact got beautiful sequences of intermediate forms showing their evolution from more basal tetrapods. But suppose we didn't, suppose for a moment that your daydreams about the fossil record (based on an outdated passage written in the 1860s) were correct. Then you would still have to face the awkward question of why the fossil record shows mammals suddenly appearing some time after the Flood (which you place at the PT boundary). That isn't what your creation myth says, mindspawn.As it is, since we do have the intermediates in the fossil record, you face two questions --- why were there no mammals before the Flood, and what are all these intermediate forms doing?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Which are the intermediates showing the evolution of mammals, and what is the reason for your answer?And can you tell us why there is no evidence of mammals until some time after the Flood? So, imaginary things amuse imaginary people ...

Interesting admission. And then all the mammals that had been killed by molten lava would have gotten on board? I don't see how this is meant to help. I know that it was terrestrial some of the time. But it was also underwater some of the time. So, where were the mammals living at that time, and what's your excuse for not being able to find their fossils in those locations?You have not responded to my main point, which is that we can find fossils from pre-Triassic Siberia, whereas your excuse for not finding mammal fossils there was that we can't 'cos of the Siberian Traps. I think you miss my point. Your excuse for not finding lobsters was that almost all of the oceans was too chemically inhospitable for them. But if delicate organisms like corals could survive all over the oceans, then this cannot be the case. What are you suggesting, that they trod water for over a year until the flood waters subsided? Apparently it took them longer than it took many species of dinosaur to actually evolve from more basal reptiles. We are meant to believe that stegosaurids and ankylosaurids and so on managed to evolve and spread through the world sufficiently as to leave fossils before birds became so numerous as to leave a single fossil?And even the first birds to leave fossils were all primitive-looking weirdos like Archaeopteryx which look almost exactly like dinosaurs for reasons which you (but not I) must find deeply puzzling, and which are now all extinct for reasons that must baffle you. (Any ideas? Do tell.)So if we consider modern birds like (say) doves and ravens, which were allegedly on the Ark, we are expected to believe --- really, mindspawn? --- that every single species of dinosaur had time to evolve, spread widely enough to leave its fossils for us to find, and go extinct before these birds had time to leave any evidence of their existence whatsoever. Well, this must be a new usage of the phrase "strong resemblance" with which I was previously unacquainted. Have you ever looked at a triceratops or a stegosaurus?As to your "others" besides the archosaurs, I refer you to post #790. You didn't reply to it before, do you want to have a crack at it now? Science and mainstream geology tells you that there was no global flood at the PT boundary. You ignore this rather than absolutely respecting it. So, I'll ask again, if some other creationist was equally willing to ignore the fact that there was no global flood at the KT boundary either, why should he not do so? and what would you have to reproach him with if he did?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Oh my, I missed the bit about arthropod diets ...

Some things evolved, some things were poofed. Mindspawn has yet to give us a definitive ruling on which is which.