Friday, October 16, 2015

Creation Moment 10/17/2015 - Preserved Fur Found

He taketh the wise in their own craftiness:  
Job 5:13

"A mammal fossil from Spain perfectly preserves fur and internal organs, but is said to be 125 million years old.
Believe it or not: “Breathtaking fossil of tiny mammal preserves fur and internal organs,” Sid Perkins writes in Science Magazine. You can almost hear the gasps in his coverage:
Most of our knowledge of very ancient life comes from fossilized remains of hard tissues—bones, shells, and teeth. Now, the exquisitely preserved fossil of a tiny mammal from the time of the dinosaurs reveals a variety of soft tissues, including skin, fur, and spines; even remnants of its external ear were fossilized. The find pushes back the earliest record of mammalian internal organs and well-preserved fur by more than 60 million years, and shows that ancient fur and spines formed just as they do in today’s mammals.

"The creature lived 125 million years ago -
and its fur, organs and skin remain intact"
says the BBC


Finding complete fossils like this raises the bar for the rest of us,” says Richard Cifelli, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, who was not involved with the new study. “My breath is taken away.

The fossil was announced in Nature a day before official publication: Martin et al., “A Cretaceous eutriconodont and integument evolution in early mammals.” But is the tissue original material, or just mineralized soft-tissue impressions?  It appears from the paper that some of the fossil contains the real stuff,..

 Update 10/15/15: Live Science made some comments worth repeating. 

* The fossilized remains of a furry critter that once roamed the Earth alongside dinosaurs suggests that mammals have been growing hair the same way for at least 125 million years. 

* The new discovery of Spinolestes pushes the fossil record further back by some 65 million years, into the Mesozoic era, proving that mammals have been hairy creatures for a really, really long time. You may think that, over the course of 125 million years, the process by which mammalian hair grows would have changed somehow, but that’s not the case, Luo said. The bones of Spinolestes, which was about the size of a small rat, are proof that ancient mammals grew hair the same way as modern mammals do.  
* The fossilized remains of the fur ball also held evidence of the animal’s soft tissues. Iron-rich residues associated with the creature’s kidney were preserved, as were microscopic bronchiole structures of the lung and an open body cavity that may have once held a muscular diaphragm used for respiration. 

Rapid burial – modern traits – does that sound like evolution? .....what has been revealed so far fits abrupt appearance of modern-looking animals, recent creation, and a flood." CEH