Tetrapod Problems

"This is a huge discovery... the breakthrough of the year. It is going to be hard to imagine other discoveries happening throughout the course of the year having this type of implications... It is a paradigm buster." ~ Dr. Frazale Rana

The above quote comes from biochemist Dr. Rana's comments on a paper published in the journal Nature back in early January named "Tetrapod trackways from the early Middle Devonian period of Poland". This paper discusses the discovery of fossilized tetrapod footprints in an abandoned rock quarry in the Holy Cross Mountains (south-eastern Poland). Such "trace fossils" (fossils that display records of biological activity but not the fossils of the organism itself) would not normally be that interesting if it were not for the date associated with the fossils. The paleobiologists who discovered these footprints used several different dating methods to establish that these trace fossils date to 397 million years ago. That date is very disturbing for evolutionary biologists because it means that the alleged transitional species between fish and tetrapods (which date from 385 to 365 million years ago) are, in fact, not transitional species at all since they appear after the tetrapod footprints.

"Tetrapod" is the scientific name for vertebrate animals with for limbs. You and I are tetrapods as are dogs, cats, lizards, etc. Being able to explain how tetrapods emerged in evolution is a very important facet of evolutionary models. It has been alleged by naturalistic evolutionary biologists that the fossil record documents the transition from fish to fishapods (transitional species) to land-base tetrapods. There are three species of fishapod that supposedly document this transition: Panderichthys (roughly 385 million years ago) which evolved into Tiktaalik (about 375 million years ago) which evolved into Ventastega (about 365 million years ago) which evolved into true land-based tetrapods like Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. Now, ever since these fossils were discovered and the "family tree" was drawn there have been many issues that cast serious doubt on this story but none so big as this one. Did you notice the dates? These fishapods (that are supposedly transitional species between fish and tetrapods) first show up in the fossil record about 12 million years after these recently discovered tetrapod footprints. That means they cannot be transitional species because they do not even appear on the scene until after tetrapods were walking the earth.

This is another example of "proof" for naturalistic evolution (that presumably has fossil evidence to support it) that has been overthrown by a single fossil find. This line of fishapods has been touted for quite a long time as documented evidence for evolution but with this new find we see that it cannot be. If that is the case then what other "well established" evolutionary explanations are awaiting overthrow?

By His Grace,
Taylor