More Aussie fossils in South America, according to Fossil Science 15 January 2014 and ScienceDaily 9 January 2014. Scientists from USA and Argentina have found fossils of Kauri Pines in two sites in Patagonia, Argentina. One site, Laguna del Hunco is dated at 52.2 million years old, and the other, Río Pichileufú is dated as 47.7 million years old. The fossils consist of leaves, branches, pollen cones, and seed cones, including a winged seed still attached to a cone. These enabled scientists to compare them to living Kauri Pines.
The botanical name for Kauri Pines is Agathis. According to Peter Wilf of Penn State University, “There is a fossil record of Agathis in Australia and New Zealand, where it still lives. However, Agathis fossils have never been found anywhere else until now, and they have never been as complete as these”.
Living Kauri Pines are found in Queensland (Australia), New Guinea, Borneo, New Zealand and some western Pacific islands, and the new fossils are most similar to a species in Borneo. Kauri pines will grow in South America, as some have been imported and planted. Wilf suggests they once grew across Australia, Antarctica and South America but “Climate change in Antarctica – the cold and ice – killed them there, and a change to seasonal dryness in southern South America put an end to them in Patagonia”.
Editorial Comment: Several points can be made: The fossils were able to be identified as Kauri pines because they are the same as living Kauri Pines. Therefore, these trees have reproduced after their kind, just as Genesis says, from the time the fossils were formed until the present. Evolution does not work as an explanation at all.
The only change in Kauri Pines is that they once grew more widely across the world, but due to degeneration of the environment they are now more restricted. Genesis 1:31 tells us all that God made was “very good,” so earth’s first climate would have been mild and pleasant worldwide. None of the cold and ice or seasonal dryness, so today’s tropical and subtropical trees could have lived all over the world. However, following the worldwide flood God told Noah there would be times of cold and heat, and by the time of Job there was ice and snow, and periods of drought. These extremes of climate caused Kauri pines to die off in many places, and only survive where there was sufficient warmth and moisture. This is natural selection at work, but it is not evolution. Natural selection is a real process, but it is the result living things struggling to survive in a world going downhill, not a process that produces new and more abundant living things. (Ref. botany, trees, conifers, palaeontology, palaeobotany)
Evidence News, vol.14, No.1
5 February 2014
Creation Research Australia