Page 71 - Once Upon a Time There Was Darwinism
P. 71
Walcott was very surprised to see what phyla these fos-
sils belonged to. No significant life had been discovered in
much older strata; but the layer he discovered contained crea-
tures belonging to nearly all known phyla, and fossils of hith-
erto unknown phyla as well. This showed that all the bodily
characteristics in the animal kingdom came about at the same
time, in the same geological period.
This dealt a fatal blow to Darwin's theory. He had pro-
posed that creatures had developed slowly and gradually,
like the twigs of a tree. According to Darwin's speculations, at
first there must have been one single phylum in the world,
and different phyla developed slowly, over the course of
time. Now, however, this theory had to contend with
Walcott's proof that all phyla came into being suddenly, at
the same time.
But it would be 70 years before this blow turned the the-
ory of the evolutionary tree upside down, because Walcott, at Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar)
the end of four years of meticulous study, decided to keep his
fossils a secret instead of revealing them
to the scientific world. He was the
Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington D.C. and a staunch
Darwinist. Thinking—correctly—that
the fossils he had discovered would
pose a major problem for the theory
of evolution, he kept them in the
museum's archives rather than
Charles D. Walcott
69