Early complex life forms found, according to reports in Geotimes, July 2005, BBC News, 12 July 2005 and New Scientist, 16 July 2005, p13. Palaeontologists from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, USA and Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, China, have found well preserved three dimensional fossils in limestone rock dated as 538 to 551 million years old. This puts them in the Ediacaran period, just before the Cambrian explosion on the evolutionary timetable. The fossils are “frondose vendobionts” – small soft bodied tubular structures that spread out in a branching pattern. They are believed to have lived on the sea floor. According to Bing Shen, who was part of the research team that described the fossils, “The creatures have a unique body plan never before seen in living or extinct creatures.” David Bottjier, a paleoecologist at the University of Southern California, Santa Cruz, claims the discovery is “verification that they are biota that may not exist anymore.”
Editorial Comment: Finding unique creatures that don’t exist anymore is no help to the theory of evolution, because the only thing it proves is that some living creatures have died out.
The fossils also present a problem for the popular belief about the formation of limestone. Limestone is often portrayed as being formed slowly and gradually by the deposition of shells and bones of dead marine creatures in shallow tropical seas. According to the evolutionary timetable, creatures with shells and bones did not evolve until the Cambrian period, which came after the Ediacaran period. Furthermore, the fact that these tiny soft bodied creatures are well preserved in three dimensions indicates they were buried rapidly. Genesis provides a better explanation for this fossil find, i.e. the different kinds of living creatures are unique creations, designed to multiply after their kind. Since the coming of death into the world, due to human sin, and the destruction and degeneration caused by Noah’s flood, some groups of plants and animals have been completely wiped out, which is why we know them only as fossils. (Ref. fossilisation, extinction, palaeontology)