New rodent is living fossil, according to report on BBC News, 9 March 2006 ScienceNOW and Science vol. 311 p1456, 10 March 2006. Last year a previously unknown (to the scientific community) rodent was found in a hunter’s market in Laos by Robert Timmins of the Wildlife Conservation Society and specimens were sent to the Natural History Museum, London for study and classification.
The animal is similar in size to a red squirrel, but has grey fur and is known by the local people as the kha-nyou. Scientists found that its teeth and bones were a “striking match” to a fossil rodent believed to have been extinct for 11 million years, making the animal a “living fossil”. The scientists who studied and classified it have given the animal the scientific name Laonastes aenigmamus and refer to its discovery as “a particularly striking example of the “Lazarus effect” in recent mammals, whereby a taxon that was formerly thought to be extinct is rediscovered in the extant biota, in this case after a temporal gap of roughly 11 million years.” Taking up the theme of Lazarus, the ScienceNOW article is entitled “Rodent rises from the Dead”.
Editorial Comment: Charles Darwin used the term “living fossil” to describe living creatures that are the same as fossilised creatures. If you believe the evolutionary timetable, the rodent Laonastes aenigmamus has stayed the same for more than 11 million years, and that is no help to a theory that claims animals change from one kind to another.
In fact, living fossils like this creature are good evidence for the accuracy of the Genesis account which states that organisms were created as fully functional organisms, designed to multiply after their kind. Both the fossil and living specimens of this rodent are only known as fully formed creatures, and if the living specimens are the descendents of the fossil specimens they must have reproduced after their kind.
The use of the Biblical term “Lazarus effect” is an example of both ignorance and hypocrisy in the scientific community. If the authors of the Science paper and ScienceNOW article knew their Bibles, they would know that Lazarus was resurrected after being observed to be dead for a few days, not simply out of the sight of scientists for many years. As the local people had a name for this animal, it can’t even claim to have been missing, let alone presumed dead, except by the ignorance of western evolutionists who assume their observations are the only ones that count. If creationists display this kind of ignorance about evolutionists’ writings they are loudly condemned. (Ref. mammals, Asia, biodiversity)
Evidence News 10 October 2007