Fossils Questions and Answers

Do fossils give evidence of their quick formation during great catastrophe, such as Noah’s Flood?

• A fossil is a fossil is a fossil. Right?
• A ‘165 million year’ surprise
• Ancient mutant Jamaican sea cows?
• Buried Birth
• Dead whales: telling tales?
• Death March (horseshoe crab)
• Deluge disaster
• Fascinating Flinders Fossil Find
• Fascinating French Fossil Find
• Fast fossils
• Folded ferns
• Fossil Jelly Fish in Australia
• Frozen Feeding
• Giant oysters on the mountain
• Hundreds of jellyfish fossils!
• The Karoo vertebrate non-problem
• Lily of the sea
• Petrified flour
• Rapid fossils
• Tarawera’s Night of Terror (Rapid Fossilization)

Fast Fossils: What other evidence shows that fossils don’t take long periods of time to form?

• Amazing stone bears of Yorkshire
• Bell-ieve it: rapid rock formation
• Fascinating fossil fence-wire
• ‘Fossil’ hat
• Message in a Bottle
• Sparking interest in rapid rocks
• Vanishing giant
• Whale explodes fossil theory
• Zippy fossil finds
• Toy car rocks million-year belief
• Keys to rapid rock formation
• The clock in the rock
• ‘Fossil’ pliers show rock doesn’t need millions of years to form!
• Rusty rock
• Sandy surprise
• Mollie Kathleen’s marvellous mysteries
• A monstrous mound of ... minerals!
• Wood petrified in spring
• Fast fossils bug those long-agers
• That choking feeling
• Making rapid rocks
• Rocks forming in months
• Fossil orange update

Is there any type of order in the fossil record?

• Does the geologic column exist anywhere on Earth?
  [Journal of Creation article by John Woodmorappe, published on creationist True Origins site, refuting claims by the renegade former young-earth creationist (now theistic evolutionist), Glenn Morton]
• Exploding evolution
• Fish origins scaled back
• Fish Scales in the Cambrian (Semi-Technical)
• Fossil flip-flop
• Fossil platypus tooth in South America
• Fossil Pollen in Grand Canyon Overturns Plant Evolution
• The Fossil Record: Becoming More Random All the Time (Technical)
• Fossils: do they become more complex?
• The Fossils say what?
• How Well Do Paleontologists Know Fossil Distributions? (Semi-Technical)
• Slow Fish in China

Mammoths: What exactly are they, when did they live, how did they die, how come there are so many frozen specimens, and can they be cloned back into existence?

• See Mammoth Q&A

Does the fossil record of the horse prove evolution?

• The non-evolution of the horse

Are there really missing links? Is this a problem for particles-to-people evolution?

• A brief response to anti-creationist books
• That quote!—about the missing transitional fossils (Colin Patterson): Embarrassed evolutionists try to ‘muddy the waters’
• Are there any Transitional Fossils? (Luther Sunderland’s interview of leading museum paleontologists)
• Argument: The fossil record supports evolution (from Refuting Evolution 2)
• Bird evolution?
• Micro-primates? Heelbone hype!
• The links are missing
• Pterosaurs and bats have always been pterosaurs and bats
• Punctuated Equilibrium: Come of Age? (Semi-technical)
• ReMine on Punctuated Equilibrium
• Refutation of Boyce Rensberger’s anti-creationist Washington Post article
• Another leggy snake? (Eupodophis descouensi)
• Snakes with legs? A preliminary reply

Do fossilized plants and animals really look all that different from animals we see today?

• Death march (horseshoe crab)
• ‘Dinosaur Tree’ behind bars
• Fish that ‘fly’
• Folded ferns
• Fossil turtles confound evolutionists
• Ghostly shrimp challenges evolution
• ‘Ghostly’ shrimp update
• Gladiator: an ‘extinct’ insect is found alive
• Golden oldie
• Living fossils—Anthedon
• Living fossils—Busycon contrarium
• Living fossils—Pleurotomaria shell
• Living fossils—shrimp
• Living fossils—wasps
• ‘Living fossils’ enigma
• Another ‘living fossil’ tree
• Live plesiosaurs: weighing the evidence
• Letting rotting sharks lie: Further evidence that the Zuiyo-maru carcass was a basking shark, not a plesiosaur
• Salamanders are living fossils!
• Spot the Difference—shellfish (available in French and Greek)
• The Wollemi Pine
• Correcting the headline: ‘Coelacanth’ yes; ‘Ancient’ no

What about Archaeoraptor and Archaeopteryx, which some evolutionists claim are ‘missing links’ between dinosaurs and birds?

• Archaeoraptor Hoax Update — National Geographic Recants!
• Archaeoraptor — Phony ‘feathered’ fossil
• Archaeopteryx (unlike Archaeoraptor) is not a hoax — it is a true bird, not a ‘missing link’
• Bird evolution?
• Bird evolution: discontinuities and reversals (Technical)
• Bird evolution falls flat
• Bird evolution flies out the window (An anatomist [Dr David Menton] talks about Archaeopteryx)
• Claws on wings

What about dinosaurs? When did they live and how did they die, and did they evolve into birds?

• See Q&A: Dinosaurs

What about the human fossil record and ‘ape-men’?

• See Q&A: Anthropology

If humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, why aren’t their fossils found together?

• Where are all the human fossils?

What about plant evolution?

• Did plants evolve?
• Kingdom of the plants: defying evolution
• Orchids: witness to the Creator

Does the fossil record of whales show that they evolved from land mammals?

• Whale evolution? (response to PBS Evolution series)
• Whale evolution? (chapter from Refuting Evolution)
• A Whale of a Tale (Semi-Technical)
• Overselling of Whale Evolution (Semi-Technical, True Origins site)
• The Strange Tale of a Leg on a Whale
• To Make a Tail for a Whale
• The World of Whales

Are there transitional forms between fish and tetrapods?

• The fossil record of ‘early’ tetrapods: evidence of a major evolutionary transition?
• Tiktaalik—a fishy ‘missing link’
• Livoniana—Have they (finally!) found a missing link?
• Gogonasus—a fish with human limbs?
• ‘The oldest pregnant mum’—not! (Materpiscis attenboroughi or ‘Mother fish of Attenborough’)
• Ventastega—not a leg to stand on

See also:

• Flood Q&A
• Geology Q&A