Modern crab in dinosaur age amber found entombed in amber from Burma. A group of scientists led by Javier Luque of Harvard University and Lida Xing, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, have studied the fossil crab and found it was complete, and so exquisitely preserved they were able to study it in detail using micro CT scans, which showed it was remarkably modern looking.
They were shocked to find it had gills and no lung tissue. This indicated the crab lived in an aquatic environment, which made it difficult for them to explain how it was found in fossilised tree resin. There are land-dwelling crabs living today, and some do climb trees, but they have lung tissue to enable them to live out of the water. The research team suggest this crab was the juvenile of a semi-terrestrial crab migrating onto land, similar to Christmas Island crabs, where adults live on land but lay their eggs in the sea, where they hatch and the crab larvae live in the sea. When they develop into their adult form they migrate onto the land.
However, this does not fit the current theory of crab evolution. Burmese amber is dated as 100 million years old, which puts it in the Cretaceous era, better known as an age of dinosaurs. According to Javier Luque, “In the fossil record, nonmarine crabs evolved 50 million years ago, but this animal is twice that age”.
Luque also commented: “This study is pushing the timing of origin of many of these groups back in time. Every fossil we discover challenges our preconceptions about the time and place of origin of several organisms, often making us look further back in time”.
References and Links: ScienceDaily 20 October 2021, Science Alert 23 October 2021, and Science Advances 20 Oct 2021doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abj5689.
Editorial Comment: The only reason these scientists find this crab hard to explain is because Burmese amber has been given the 100 million year old date, and they are trying to fit the crab into the evolutionary timetable. Even if it had been found in Baltic amber, which is dated as around 44 million years, they would still have tried to classify what is obviously a marine crab as a land crab because it was found in fossil tree resin. However, both Baltic and Burmese amber have been found to contain fragments of sea creatures, coral and seaweed, none of which live in trees, but this is usually ignored.
So, let’s throw out these dates, and look at what is actually found – a fully formed water-dwelling crab embedded in fossil tree resin. Genesis tells us that all animals were created as fully functional creatures according to their kinds, so marine crabs and non-marine crabs had whatever structures needed for where they lived. Therefore, a crab with gills and no lungs lived in water, probably in the sea, where most crabs live.
When the world was devastated by Noah’s Flood, huge tsunamis of seawater would have flowed over the land areas, smashing forests and churning up the ground. Resin leaking out of the smashed trees would trap small creatures and other small pieces of debris, before hardening into amber, which was buried in sediment to form amber deposits, such as the Burmese and Baltic amber deposits.
Overall, this amber crab is a good example of how the history of the world, as revealed by the Creator and Judge who was there, explains what is found in the world much better than any evolutionary theories invented by people who weren’t there.
Photo of amber specimen from Luque, J. et. al. Crab in amber reveals an early colonization of nonmarine environments during the Cretaceous, Science Advances, 2021 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abj5689. Reproduced under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0.
Creation Research News 3 November 2021
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