Page 72 - Confessions of the Evolutionists

70 CONFESSIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONISTS

middle Cambrian. At the class level there are 27 paleontologically impor-
tant living groups and all have documented occurrences which are
Silurian or older…The same relative pattern can be seen in the geologic
records of vertebrates and land plants. 168
Niles Eldredge is curator in the division of paleontology of the
American Museum of Natural History:

There is still a tremendous problem with the sudden diversification of
multi-cellular life. There is no question about that. That's a real phenom-
enon. 169
Most families, orders, classes, and phyla appear rather suddenly in the
fossil record, often without anatomically intermediate forms smoothly in-
terlinking evolutionarily derived descendant taxa with their presumed
ancestors. 170
Darwin confesses in his own book The Origin of Species: To the question
why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed
earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory
answer. … The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be tru-
ly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained. 171
From a pro-Darwinist text book:
Most of animal phyla that are represented in the fossil record first appear,
“fully formed,” in the Cambrian some 550 million years ago... The fossil
record is therefore of no help with respect to the origin and early diversi-
fication of the various animal phyla. 172

Ernst Mayr was one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the
twentieth century:
New species usually appear in the fossil record suddenly, not connected
with their ancestors by a series of intermediates. 173
Marshall Kay is a geologist and professor at Columbia University
and Edwin H. Colbert is an authority on paleontology and curator at the
American Museum of Natural History:

The introduction of a variety of organisms in the early Cambrian, includ-
ing such complex forms of the arthropods as the trilobites, is surprising...