Evidence of species alive today?

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Yeah, like how come you never find grass and dinosaurs? It's not like the Flood is going to sort plants, after all. Why don't we find them together?

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Grass is an Angiosperm, a flowering seed bearing plant. Before the sudden end of the Tertiary, most plants were not seed bearing and there were few niches for the Angiosperms. When the Earth was plunged into the long winter and then came out of it at the beginning of the Quaternary, the seeds were able to survive and then flourish in the empty niches left behind. Relatively few non-seeded plants remained.The dinosaurs did not disappear either BTW.

Speel-Vi,I beg to differ, angiosperms were widespread in the late cretaceous, plus the seed habit had been around since the late Devonian. By the tertiary most of the true plant biomass was seed bearing, that is, angiosperms & gymnosperms combined. In fact all the major groups of seed bearing plants had appeared by the Triassic, excepting angiosperms.Mark

Whoops, I have my time periods off slightly, but what's a few tens of millions of years between friends anyway. Yes, angiosperms came to be plentiful after the Yucatan asteroid collision which killed off the majority of species on Earth at the time. We now live in the Age of Angiosperms, of which the grasses are an important part of modern flora.Thanks for the link Mark.

Thanks for that excellent info, Q. Another example of a "living fossil" that doesn't get much press, only because they are so familiar, is the horse family. What remains of this once-proud group now, maybe three genera? Horse, ass, and zebra? And there were scads of them in the Eocene. They aren't thought of as a "remnant" because we've all seen them, and possibly because they're a little bigger and more one-toed than their ancestors, but they aren't much more diverse now than your other examples - just more populous.

Horses still have plenty of close relatives living in the same family and order, although it is sad to think about the great extinction of new world horses.Most of the "living fossil" species are notably less diverse, usually confined to a few species in an entire family or order.------------------
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I think we have forgotten about one of the best living fossils alive today. A dinosaur that survived the mass extinction ... the crocodile."Modern crocodiles first appeared in the Cretaceous period, 65 to 135 million years ago, and any animal that can so defy the laws of natural extinction is a superb work of adaptation"
http://www.unearthed.australia.com/apr99/profile1.htm

Other than the "dinosaur" part, good point. Crocs aren't at all like dinosaurs; but they are amazing examples of adaptation and survival.

Hi Coragyps,If you want an excellent and excruciatingly detailed discussion of horses and phylogeny, I can't recommend more highly Groves CP, Ryder OA, 2000, "Systematics and Phylogeny of the Horse", in Bowling and Ravinsky, eds. "The Genetics of the Horse", CAB International. Equus is definitely another example of a very small remnant of a once highly-diverse group of lineages (at least in terms of numbers of species alive today vs numbers extinct). I think one of the reasons creationists don't use these guys as "living fossil" thingys is because they weren't "alive at the time of the dinosaurs" which for some reason is a criteria for proclaiming that evolution is dead. Honestly never understood the logic there.