Early Platypus Stuns Evolutionists
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With the possible exception of a monotreme tooth assumed to be 62 million years old, the oldest known platypus fossil was dated 15 million years old. Now, a fossil from Australia reported in Science sets a new record: 112 million years old.
"It's really, really old for a monotreme," Timothy Rowe of the University of Texas (UT), Austin, told the audience at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology last month in Austin, Texas. How to fit this with the evolution of monotremes?
That would push back the fossil record of the platypus quite a bit; the next youngest fossil is Obdurodon dicksoni from 15-million-year-old rocks in Australia. It is also much older than current estimates from DNA of when platypuses and echidnas diverged from their most recent common ancestor. Molecular clocks put that date somewhere between 17 million and 80 million years ago. Rowe speculated that one reason for the underestimate may be that monotremes evolve at slower rates than other mammals do, an idea that fits with their lower diversity.
Was this platypus a transitional form? No. Was it evolving from a simpler animal into a complex creature with a duck bill, poison spur, electrical sensing organ, webbed feet, fur, and ability to lay eggs? No -- it was Darwin's nightmare popping up way, way back in the record, over 100 million years earlier (in their own dating scheme) than the next clear platypus fossil. Why not consider the obvious, that there was never any 113 million years between the two fossils?
[Excerpts from Creation Matters, Volume 12, Number 6, November / December 2007]
"It's really, really old for a monotreme," Timothy Rowe of the University of Texas (UT), Austin, told the audience at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology last month in Austin, Texas. How to fit this with the evolution of monotremes?
That would push back the fossil record of the platypus quite a bit; the next youngest fossil is Obdurodon dicksoni from 15-million-year-old rocks in Australia. It is also much older than current estimates from DNA of when platypuses and echidnas diverged from their most recent common ancestor. Molecular clocks put that date somewhere between 17 million and 80 million years ago. Rowe speculated that one reason for the underestimate may be that monotremes evolve at slower rates than other mammals do, an idea that fits with their lower diversity.
Was this platypus a transitional form? No. Was it evolving from a simpler animal into a complex creature with a duck bill, poison spur, electrical sensing organ, webbed feet, fur, and ability to lay eggs? No -- it was Darwin's nightmare popping up way, way back in the record, over 100 million years earlier (in their own dating scheme) than the next clear platypus fossil. Why not consider the obvious, that there was never any 113 million years between the two fossils?
[Excerpts from Creation Matters, Volume 12, Number 6, November / December 2007]
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