Living fossils expose evolution

By who? As with mammals in the age of the dinosaurs, it's not a problem for natural history as we know it to find fish in the Cambrian. From wikipedia:

quote:

---

Vertebrates originated about 525 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion, which is an event of massive rise in organism diversity that occurred in the Cambrian period.

---

Now, that little picture's not good enough for my untrained eye to guess at what it is - do you have a bigger resolution? It looks like some sort of jawless vertebrate but, significantly, doesn't appear to look like any extant jawless vertebrate (hagfish and lampreys). To demonstrate that species haven't changed, you're showing us a primitive fish (or perhaps some other early vertebrate) very different to the fish around today.

It's a misrepresentation to pretend a major shift in evolutionary explanations was required to account for vertebrates in the Cambrian. In these debates you may have listened to or watched on vertebrates in the Cambrian, I'd lay good money those on the other side of the debate were also 'evolutionists'. It used to be a matter of controversy whether vetebrates existed this early as no fossils of Cambrian vertebrates were discovered until the 90s. As more are found, whose vertebrate affinities are harder to deny, the debate becomes more settled.None of this changes the fact that your example of a modern animal (a fish) in the Cambrian is actually an unusual extinct animal unlike anything existing today. It's the opposite of what you're trying to demonstrate.

That wasn't the position you presented. You wrote that "(the fish)is dated 500 million yrs by evolutionists and we are told that there were no vertebrates living during that time." This to me, particularly the use of present tense, implies that the absence of vertebrates in the Cambrian is an important, universally accepted part of evolutionary theory - and that their discovery poses a problem for it. If you're agreeing that the presence of vertebrates in the Cambrian was a disputed issue only because we had few or no fossils, and that this matter is being settled by the discovery of such fossils, why on earth did you bother to post this in the first place? It has nothing to do with your point.You also, I notice, don't address the question of how a primitive vertebrate, very different from anything living today, falls in to the category of a living fossil. If you're leaving this thread, though, could I point out a new thread I started to address another of your complaints - that of how marine fish could evolve into air-breathers without suffocating - it's here.