Page 120 - The Cambrian Evidence that Darwin Failed to Comprehend

The Cambrian Evidence That Darwin Failed to Comprehend

forced to confess the extraordinary nature of the phenomenon:
[After the Ediacaran] Then there was something of an explosion.
Beginning about six hundred million years ago, and continuing for
about ten to fifteen million years, the earliest known representatives
of the major kinds of animals still populating today’s seas made a
rather abrupt appearance. This rather protracted “event” shows up
graphically in the rock record: all over the world, at roughly the same
time, thick sequences of rocks, barren of any easily detected fossils,
are overlain by sediments containing a gorgeous array of shelly inver-
tebrates: trilobites..., brachiopods, mollusks. All of the typical forma of
hard-shelled animals we see in the modern oceans appeared ... in the
seas of six hundred million years ago.
After stating that rather than representing evidence for evolu-
tion, this is actually a finding in favor of creation, Eldredge went on:

Indeed, the sudden appearance of a varied, well-preserved array of
fossils, which geologists have used to mark the beginnings of the
Cambrian Period does pose a fascinating intellectual challenge. 87
Bob Holmes described the fact of the Cambrian in the 18
October, 1997, edition of New Scientist magazine:
Glass skyscrapers, Gothic cathedrals, yurts, Georgian terraces, Shinto
shrines, wattle and daub, Victorian railway stations, Bauhaus, igloos,
mock-Tudor. Imagine that all the architectural styles that human inge-
nuity could ever devise appeared during one 35-year period, some-
time in the middle of the 15th century. Imagine how today’s historians
would be trampling over each other in their eagerness to learn what
made that window of profound creativity possible. That’s roughly
how palaeontologists feel about the Cambrian explosion.

In just 35 million years, the blinking of an eye for evolution, animal
life erupted in an explosion of inventiveness that far outshines any-
thing the planet has seen before or since. 88

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