“35-Million-Year-Old” Mayfly Looks Astonishingly Like a Mayfly

Okay, that might not seem like very big news. From a biblical standpoint, of course mayflies look like mayflies (and they aren’t 35 million years old anyway!). But for those who interpret the evidence with the evolutionary worldview, we have to ask: why are so many of the creatures scientists find preserved in amber virtually identical to their modern-day counterparts? (Consider, for example, mosquitoes filled with blood that look identical to modern mosquitos, tardigrades that remained tardigrades, plant mites that look like plant mites, and frogs that look like frogs.)

Why are so many of the creatures scientists find preserved in amber virtually identical to their modern-day counterparts?

To back up just a little, what is amber? Well, certain trees produce a sticky resin to protect themselves from insects. Insects (and other creatures) land in the resin and get trapped as it oozes around and buries them. If that resin then hardens, the creature inside is preserved as if in a time capsule. Some of these “time capsules” we see were buried catastrophically, preserving them, and now several deposits around the world yield striking fossils that can reveal a great deal about the preflood world.

But these chunks of hardened resin can’t tell us anything about the evolution of anything. Consider this new find of a tiny mayfly stuck in Baltic amber from the Eocene layer. This tiny mayfly—supposedly dated between 35 and 47 million years old—was studied using Micro-CT which allowed the researcher to “produce a 3D image of the insect using X-rays that captured even the tiniest of structures with detail down to 0.5 micrometers.” And what did this reveal?

That mayflies have always been mayflies! The similarities are so great that the researchers were able to place it in an already existing genus, Calliarcys (though the popular science reports incorrectly claim it was a new genus.1). So a supposed 35 million years has passed and no evolution occurred!

Fossils and amber won’t reveal any evolution no matter how hard researchers look because evolution never happened. It’s simply a story to explain how life and the universe can exist without the Creator God. But the true history of life and the universe is found in God’s Word, the eyewitness account of history.

Get More Answers on Answers News

This item was discussed Monday on Answers News with cohosts Bryan Osborne, Patricia Engler, and Tim Chaffey. Answers News is our weekly news program filmed live before a studio audience here at the Creation Museum and broadcast on my Facebook page and the Answers in Genesis Facebook page. We also covered the following topics:

• Taxing cows and sheep to save the earth?
• Did the “first stars split the universe apart”?
• Do conservative beliefs make parents unfit to raise their kids?
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Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.