Darwinism: Cretaceous buttercup a “doubly abominable” mystery, it seems

anonym, you are right to ask the question. There have been many reports of the "fossil factories" that exist to make money for the organisers. They are quite happy to touch up fossils if someone will pay the price. The Chinese palaeontologists are undoubtedly aware of the problems. There have been some finds that have received a lot of attention, but when you look at the small print, you find the fossils have been purchased. Some of the feathered dinosaurs come by this route - they command a good price! However, there are some fantastic sites in China that have preserved tissues and bones in exquisite detail. The fossils are often surrounded by volcanic ash - they have been abruptly buried and rapidly fossilised. This applies to the buttercup cousin. It is an exciting time to be studying fossils, as the findings are significantly changing the consensus views of the previous decade. David Tyler

There's something about this flood of revolutionary fossil discoveries out of China that makes me nervous. Does anyone care to reassure me? anonym

Sounds like a "rabbit in the pre-Cambrian" to me. I'll be looking for Haldane to convert soon... Oops, he died in 1964. Gage

'living fossils' are amusing to watch neo-Darwinists try to explain. i.e. 'Species can change very rapidly in an evolutionary blink of an eye, leaving no trace of any transitions, except when species has to stay the same for tens to hundreds of millions of years; (who said 'A theory that explains everything explains nothing'?) Fossils Without Evolution - June 2010 Excerpt: New fossils continue to turn up around the world. Many of them have an amazing characteristic in common: they look almost exactly like their living counterparts, despite being millions of years old,,, http://www.creationsafaris.com/crev201006.htm#20100618a THE FOSSILS IN THE CREATION MUSEUM - 1000's of pictures of ancient 'living' fossils that have not changed for millions of years: http://www.fossil-museum.com/fossils/?page=0&limit=30 Ancient Fossils That Have Not Changed For Millions Of Years - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4113820 Oldest fossil shrimp preserved with muscles - November 9 2010 Excerpt: Rodney Feldmann and Carrie Schweitzer (both Kent State University) report on the oldest fossil shrimp known to date. The creature in stone is as much as 360 million years old and was found in Oklahoma. Even the muscles of the fossil are preserved. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-oldest-fossil-shrimp-muscles.html Picture of the ancient 360 million year old fossil shrimp compared to a modern shrimp: http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/oldestfossil.jpg Rare insect fossil reveals 100 million years of evolutionary stasis - February 2011 http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-rare-insect-fossil-reveals-million.html Living Fossils Refute Evolution - pictures https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1p-ZI-ipQCoS-IHkZNEVN6EMFTgS0yuseO2r_ANzp51k Punctuated Equilibrium and Patterns from the Fossil Record - Casey Luskin Excerpt: “The Cambrian Explosion is by no means the only “explosion” in the fossil record. One evolutionist concedes that for the origin of fishes, “this is one count in the creationists’ charge that can only evoke in unison from paleontologists a plea of nolo contendere [no contest].” Plant biologists have called the origin of plants an “explosion,” saying, “the … radiation of land (plant) biotas is the terrestrial equivalent of the much-debated Cambrian ‘explosion’ of marine faunas.” Vertebrate paleontologists believe there was a mammal explosion because of the few transitional forms between major mammal groups: “There are all sorts of gaps: absence of gradationally intermediate ‘transitional’ forms between species, but also between larger groups — between, say, families of carnivores, or the orders of mammals.” Another study, “Evolutionary Explosions and the Phylogenetic Fuse,” found a bird (as well as a mammal) “Early Tertiary ‘explosion’” because many bird and mammal groups appear in a short time period lacking immediately recognizable ancestral forms. Finally, others have called the origin of our own genus Homo, “a genetic revolution” where “no australopithecine (ape) species is obviously transitional” leading one commentator to call it, like others called the Cambrian Explosion, a “big bang theory” of human evolution." The Fossil Record and Falsifiable Predictions For ID - Casey Luskin - Audio http://intelligentdesign.podomatic.com/player/web/2010-03-26T14_56_42-07_00 Whale Evolution Vs. Population Genetics - Richard Sternberg PhD. in Evolutionary Biology - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4165203 etc.. etc.. bornagain77