New Mammalian Fossils Change the Evolutionary Story

It’s long been thought by evolutionists that the supposed extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago led to the “age of mammals,” as mammals quickly adapted to fill the ecological vacancy left behind by dinosaurs. But a new study of the leg bones of a variety of North American mammals “show[s] that a significant shift toward ground-dwelling occurred several million years before the mass extinction that ended the age of dinosaurs.” So now they think the mammals had already begun to come down from the trees and adapt to the same habitats as dinosaurs, millions of years (supposedly) before the dinosaurs went extinct.

The paper’s lead author says,

The vegetational habitat was more important for the course of Cretaceous mammalian evolution than any influence from dinosaurs.

In other words, what they thought before was wrong—now, there’s a new story!

Why is the evolutionary story always changing? Well, many evolutionists will say that’s how science works—new discoveries overturn previous ones. But what these constant adjustments and rewrites really point to are two things:

1. The plasticity of evolution. Anything, even evidence that is completely contrary to what was previously thought, can be explained within the evolutionary framework. It’s just reworked and tweaked to fit the new evidence. Since it explains everything, that really means it explains nothing. This can happen because it is a belief system not based on observational science.
2. The nature of historical science. The bits of mammalian bone found in Cretaceous rock layers (layers deposited toward the end of the global flood) are the evidence in the present. The idea that they are millions of years old and evolved from a previous ancestor is an interpretation of the evidence because of an evolutionary starting point. And the idea that these creatures were adapting toward ground-dwelling—rather than having been created for ground-dwelling—is an interpretation of the evidence based on their evolutionary assumptions.

The evolutionary story will continue to change because it’s nothing more than a fairy tale—an attempt to explain life without a Creator.

Yes, the evolutionary story will continue to change because it’s nothing more than a fairy tale—an attempt to explain life without a Creator. It’s a blind-faith belief. The proper lens for interpreting the evidence in the past is the history given to us by the one who knows everything, has always been there, and never makes a mistake: the Creator God who gave us his perfect Word.

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This item was discussed Monday on Answers News with cohosts Avery Foley, Dr. Tim Chaffey, and Patricia Engler. Answers News is our weekly news program filmed live before a studio audience here at the Creation Museum, broadcast on our Answers in Genesis YouTube channel, and posted to Answers TV. We also covered the following topics:

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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.