Page 734 - Atlas of Creation Volume 2

This fossil fern from the Carboniferous was found in the
Jerada region of Morocco. The interesting thing is that this
fossil, which is 320 million years old, is identical to pre-
sent-day ferns.

It has long been hoped that extinct plants will ultimately reveal some of the stages through which existing groups
have passed during the course of their development, but it must be freely admitted that this aspiration has been ful-
filled to a very slight extent, even though paleobotanical research has been in progress for more than one hundred
years. 308

Arnold accepts that paleobotany (the science of plant fossils) has produced no results in support of evolu-
tion: "[W]e have not been able to track the phylogenetic history of a single group of plants of our day from its

beginning to the present." 309
The fossil discoveries which most clearly deny the claims of plant evolution are those of flowering plants,
or "angiosperms," to give them their scientific name. These plants are divided into 43 separate families, each
one of which emerges suddenly, leaving no trace of any primitive "transitional form" behind it in the fossil
record. This was realised in the nineteenth century, and for this reason Darwin described the origin of an-
giosperms as "an abominable mystery." All the research carried out since Darwin's time has simply added to

the amount of discomfort this mystery causes. In his book The Paleobiology of Angiosperm Origins, the evolution-
ary paleobotanist N. F. Hughes makes this admission:
… With few exceptions of detail, however, the failure to find a satisfactory explanation has persisted, and
many botanists have concluded that the problem is not capable of solution, by use of fossil evidence. 310
In his book The Evolution of Flowering Plants, Daniel Axelrod says this about the origin of flowering plants,

The ancestral group that gave rise to angiosperms has not yet been identified in the fossil record, and no living an-

giosperm points to such an ancestral alliance. 311
All this leads us to just one conclusion: Like all living things, plants were also created. From the moment

they first emerged, all their mechanisms have existed in a finished and complete form. Terms such as 'develop-
ment over time," "changes dependent on coincidences," and "adaptations which emerged as a result of need,"
which one finds in the evolutionist literature, have no truth in them at all and are scientifically meaningless.

732 Atlas of Creation Vol. 2