Teeth evolved twice according to a report in New Scientist, 1 March 2003, p18. Moya Smith of Kings College, London and Zerina Johansson of the Australian Museum, Sydney, studied the fossils of a Western Australian placoderm, an extinct fish believed to be 370 million years old, and found they had fully formed teeth. It was previously believed they only had primitive bumps on the jawbones that were not true teeth. This fish is thought to have evolved from an older placoderm, which did not have teeth. During the same period sharks are believed to have evolved from toothless “protosharks” to the well-armed monsters we are all familiar with.
Based on these findings, evolutionists have concluded that teeth evolved twice. Rich Cifelli of the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History commented “Palaeontologists have long viewed certain morphological characteristics, such as teeth and jaws, as sacred cows in vertebrate evolution, things that are so complex and of such adaptive importance that could have evolved only once.” Cifelli has studied fossil mammal teeth and believes mammals evolved molars twice.
Editorial Comment: Teeth are not the first complex features that evolutionists claim to have evolved twice. In recent years they have made similar claims for insect wings and sonar in bats. Biologists recognise that such structures and functions require the simultaneous working of many genes and they are straining belief in random mutations to claim these evolved once, let alone twice.
The problem really comes from their desire to draw up neat tree-like patterns of simple creatures gradually evolving into more complex features. However living and fossil creatures do not fit such a pattern. The observed facts are that some fish have teeth and some don’t, some have bones and some have cartilage, some had bony plates in their skin and some didn’t. Each type of fish is a unique combination of non-unique parts – exactly what you would expect if each kind of fish was separately created. (Ref. teeth, fish, evolution)