Page 61 - The Cambrian Evidence that Darwin Failed to Comprehend

HARUN YAHYA

were convinced that if there had been any ancestor anywhere, it would
have been discovered by now.
The claim that organisms from before the Cambrian had left be-
hind no fossilized remains because they were small and soft-bodied is,
as we have already seen, highly unrealistic. In order to see just how un-
realistic it is, only consider the fact that microfossils of bacteria have
been discovered in rocks dating back nearly 3 billion years. 34 In the
Ediacaran period, therefore, had there existed living things with a soft
structure and a complexity comparable to that of Cambrian life forms,
they would inevitably have left traces in the fossil record. Yet the organ-
isms we have from the Ediacaran consist of various multi-celled spe-
cies, completely different from and independent of the phyla that
would later emerge.
And despite their being soft-bodied, these have left traces behind
in the fossil record.
Simon Conway-Morris had this to say on the subject:
[German paleontologist Adolf] Seilacher has pioneered a radical alter-
native. He suggests that the Ediacaran fossils are certainly not cnidar-
ians, arthropods or annelids, and might not even be metazoans. One
reason to think he might be correct is the highly anomalous preserva-
tion of these fossils. Despite being almost entirely soft-bodied, the
Ediacaran fossils are typically preserved in relatively coarse-grained
sediments (siltstones and sandstones) deposited in shallow, turbulent
water—the last place a paleontologist could normally expect or look
for preservation of soft parts. 35
In 1984, Natural History magazine published a long article by
Stephen Jay Gould concerning the Ediacaran fossils in Australia. Gould
stated that, as in the Cambrian, these life forms shared a basic mode of
organization, with their unique characteristics. By the time Cambrian
life forms emerged to replace Ediacaran ones, the latter had become ex-
tinct. Therefore, Cambrian life forms were not more advanced forms of

Adnan Oktar

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