Page 60 - The Transitional Form Dilemma

THE TRANSITIONAL-FORM DILEMMA

Paleontologists have long regarded vertebrates as latecomers who straggled
into evolutionary history after much of the initial sound and fury had fizzled.
Chinese paleontologists, however, have discovered fossils of two fish
that push the origin of vertebrates back to the riotous biological bash
when almost all other animal groups emerged in the geologic record.
Preserved in 530-million-year-old rocks from Yunnan province, the paper clip-
size impressions record the earliest known fish, which predate the next-oldest
vertebrates by at least 30 million years. 26

With this realization that vertebrates already existed in the
Cambrian Period, the theory of evolution’s “tree of life” metaphor lost
all credibility. All the basic categories of life, vertebrates included,
emerged during the same geological period, so evidently that there can
be no question of “evolution” from some common ancestor.
The fact that fish appeared at exactly the same time as all other
complex groups shows that they did not evolve from any other species,
but were created. Indeed, after the Cambrian Period, all the different

Haikouichthys ercaicunensis
A new discov-
ery in 1999 re-
vealed the
existence of two
fish species that
lived in the
Cambrian
Period.

Myllokunmingia fengjiaoa

58