Researcher: And it provides strong evidence to suggest that a Limulus, or horseshoe crab-like behavior, already existed in the Cambrian completely by convergence. So, it really helps us to get a sense of how these animals were actually living millions of years ago.”
stasis
Those awful comb jellies betray the Darwinians again: They were even more complex than feared, starting at maybe 635 million years ago
They’re said to have appeared between 634 and 604 million years ago (Peterson and Butterfield, 2005) and figure in the Cambrian Explosion. Darwinians have been trying to Cancel the Cambrian Explosion since practically forever but it keeps coming back into the fact base.
Researchers: Sand dollars and sea biscuits emerged earlier than thought
They are using the “molecular clock” technique to determine that. One wonders if that technique is not too risky in the absence of a fossil record. But “earlier than thought” has been a good bet in principle. Not so good for the “long, slow process of evolution” stuff though.
The oldest cephalopods — much older than thought — had 10 working arms, not 8
Wouldn’t that mean that the cephalopods had an even more complex nervous system in the past? For that matter, why do we hear about so much stasis and so little about evolution? The evolution must be happening very fast, punctuated by long periods of stasis.
Amber fossil shows 100 million-year stasis in plant genus
It creates an odd naming situation in the process.
How Darwinians deal with the lack of evidence for gradualism
They pick an easy target like body size, for one thing. A supposedly slam dunk paper deals with body size in mammals. Trouble is, says Casey Luskin, it’s too easy a topic. Body size is — everyone agrees — easily malleable, compared to say, the development of vision.
Sea spiders as a remarkable example of stasis: 450 million years?
Their biology doesn’t sound like it would work — yet no big changes seem to have been needed for nearly half a billion years.
Crab trapped in amber at 99 million years ago is remarkably similar to modern crabs
But by now we know enough to expect that, don’t we?
Claim: Modern crocodiles are evolving rapidly
Into what? Crocobirds? Smithsonian Magazine is anxious for us to know that they are NOT “living fossils.” They have evolved a lot, we are told, though admittedly they are evolving around in a circle. It would be interesting to know why stasis became such a threatening concept in some quarters.
Three-eyed dinosaur shrimp are NOT living fossils!, docent insists
Despite the fact that they go back 350 million years to the Devonian period.
Stanford: Plants evolved complexity in two rapid bursts — 250 million years apart
Researcher: “The most surprising thing is this kind of stasis, this plateau in complexity after the initial evolution of seeds and then the total change that happened when flowering plants started diversifying,” said lead study author Andrew Leslie, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “The reproductive structures look different in all these plants, but they all have about the same number of parts during that stasis.”
Reptile’s skull changed little in 22 million years
At ScienceDaily: “”Basically, in anything except living fossils, you don’t go 22 million years without evolving,” said [Louis] Jacobs, professor emeritus of Earth Sciences at SMU and president of ISEM at SMU.” (Well, first, if that’s true, maybe they were the “living fossils” of their day. Maybe it is not even that unusual. Any chance there is a pattern here that devotion to Darwinism prevents people from seeing?)
At Mind Matters News: Do brains really evolve? The horseshoe crab’s brain didn’t
At Science News: “The preserved central nervous system lends insight into the ancient crab’s behavior, the researchers say. Because the fossil brain is so similar to the brains of modern horseshoe crabs, Bicknell says, it’s safe to say the ancient animal’s walking, breathing and even feeding habits were probably similar to horseshoe crabs’ today, including eating with their legs. “
Fossil spores on land pushed back 20 million years
The big story here isn’t about the disconnect between molecular and fossil data; it’s about how early on more complex life forms got started (all that complexity in such a short time isn’t looking good for random mutations).
Botanist Margaret Helder asks: How can a “simple” or “primitive” sponge surprise engineers with its optimal physics?
Helder: A team of Italian and American scientists researching this topic declared that the sponges display “exceptional structural properties” which enable them to thrive. In fact, their study reveals “mechanisms of extraordinary adaptation to live in the abyss.”