Page 488 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

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 theory of the evolutionary tree upside down, be-
cause Walcott, at 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 releasing
them. The Burgess Shale fossils came to light only during an examination of the museum's archives in

1985. The Israeli scientist Gerald Schroeder makes the following comment:

Had Walcott wanted, he could have hired a phalanx of graduate students to work on the fossils. But he chose
not to rock the boat of evolution. Today fossil representatives of the Cambrian era have been found in China,
Africa, the British Isles, Sweden, Greenland. The explosion was worldwide. But before it became proper to
discuss the extraordinary nature of the explosion, the data were simply not reported. 26

For more than 70 years, these fossils had remained hidden until they were found and analyzed by

paleontologists Harry Whittington, Derek Briggs and Simon Conway Morris. These three scientists re-
vealed that the fossils Walcott had found dated back to the Cambrian period, one of the oldest geolog-
ical periods. The sudden appearance of such a wide variety of creatures during this period was termed
the Cambrian explosion. In the 1980s, two new areas of fossil remains similar to the Burgess Shale fossils
were discovered: one in Sirius Passet in northern Greenland, and the other in Chengjiang in southern

China. In both these areas were found fossils of very different creatures that came into being during
the Cambrian period. Among these the oldest and best preserved fossils were those found in
Chenjiang, which also contained the first vertebrates. In addition, two 530-million-year-old fish fossils

discovered in 1999 proved that all body structures, including the vertebrates, were already in existence
during the Cambrian. Investigations showed that the Cambrian explosion occurred within a 10-mil-
lion-year period, which in geological terms is quite a short time. And the creatures that suddenly ap-
peared in this period all had very complicated organs and had no resemblance with the one-celled and
a few multi-celled organisms that preceded them. Stephen J. Gould describes the Cambrian explosion

as follows:

The most famous such burst, the Cambrian explosion, marks the inception of modern multicellular life.
Within just a few million years, nearly every major kind of animal anatomy appears in the fossil record for the
first time. 27

Evolutionists have tried to explain away the Cambrian explosion in various ways, none of them con-
vincing. All the theses put forward against the Cambrian problem are flawed, which is demonstrated by

the arguments that evolutionists have among themselves. The February 1999 edition of the noted science
magazine Trends in Genetics (TIG) says that the Burgess Shale fossil finds cannot at all be explained in
terms of the theory of evolution, and that the theses proposed are not convincing:

It might seem odd that fossils from one small locality, no matter how exciting, should lie at the center of a

fierce debate about such broad issues in evolutionary biology. The reason is that animals burst into the fossil
record in astonishing profusion during the Cambrian, seemingly from nowhere. Increasingly precise radio-
metric dating and new fossil discoveries have only sharpened the suddenness and scope of this biological
revolution. The magnitude of this change in Earth's biota demands an explanation. Although many hypothe-
ses have been proposed, the general consensus is that none is wholly convincing. 28

In Icons of Evolution, the American biologist Jonathan Wells sums up the matter in these words:

Of all the icons of evolution, the tree of life is the most pervasive, because descent from a common ancestor is

the foundation of Darwin's theory. . . Yet Darwin knew—and scientists have recently confirmed—that the

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