"Evolutionists adroitly move dates around to accommodate upsets about times when certain clades “emerged” on the scene.
A highly publicized case made the rounds in March, when Nature announced a bombshell find: “Fossil claw marks show reptiles arose much earlier than thought” — almost 40 million years earlier, in this case.
The paper in Nature, by senior author Per Ahlberg and colleagues, recognizes that this represents a major upset.
*Finding a full-fledged reptile so early means there must have been a whole lotta evolvin’ going on before that:
Read that and gasp.
"The cladogenetic event that gave rise to the tetrapod crown group was preceded by a series of others that gave off the various clades of limbed stem tetrapods, such as baphetids, colosteids and
ichthyostegids, and before that the elpistostegalians and various tetrapodomorph fishes. All of these cladogenetic events must now be fitted into, approximately, the first two-thirds of the Devonian period. The origins of stem amniote lineages such as seymouriamorphs and diadectomorphs must lie in the Late Devonian. Remarkably, the inferred age of the tetrapod crown-group node presented here is approximately contemporary with the elpistostegalians Elpistostege and Tiktaalik, often perceived as antecedents and potential ancestors of tetrapods. This result strongly supports the much earlier origin of limbed tetrapods indicated by the Middle Devonian trackway record, and implies that tetrapods underwent a far faster process of cladogenesis and morphological evolution during the Devonian than has hitherto been recognized."
Read that and gasp.
* The new fossil should cause public embarrassment. But since Darwin mustn’t lose no matter what evidence appears, all the popular reporters framed this finding as a great success. “Newly discovered claw-mark fossils suggest reptiles evolved earlier than we thought,” announces Jess Thomson at Live Science, sweeping everyone into the error by using the first person plural pronoun. (Who’s “we,” Jess?)
Whatever happened, whenever it happened, tetrapods “evolved.” They appeared. They emerged. They just did it quickly."
SCT
