"Prehistoric" Embryos Caught Dividing

Geologists reported this week on the analysis of fossilized embryos discovered in the Doushantuo Formation in China's Guizhou Province. Based on uniformitarian assumptions, the scientists believe these embryos are approximately 600 million years old. Modern embryos, after hundreds of millions of years of evolution, must be completely different, right? But what have the researchers discovered?

• the embryos “appear to have been dividing in a way similar to the way modern embryos divide”
• the embryos contain “what appear to be specialized structures . . . 'things that look like organelles'”
• most of the embryos “look like modern-day blastocysts [early embryos]”

In other words, these embryos appear to be identical to the embryos of modern-day animals. Yet because of the assumptions behind the analysis, they are assumed to be eons old.

This article also offers a glimpse at how evolutionary postulations are easily amplified by the media in order to sensationalize stories. For example, the first paragraph of this article boldly claims:

Six hundred million years ago, in what is now China, a small, sponge-like animal laid eggs that started to divide into embryos.

Of course, there's absolutely no evidence behind this wild guess; only a mountain of evolutionary assumptions.

Yet when we finally read the very last paragraph, we discover:

Hagadorn [the study leader] said no one knows what kind of animals would have grown from these embryos, but guessed it might be a sponge-like creature.

Of course, there's absolutely no evidence behind this wild guess; only a mountain of evolutionary assumptions. Yet the article leads off by spreading the false idea, which many who do not read the full article will take as a scientific certainty.

Also interesting is the fact that these embryos were fossilized-and especially that they were fossilized while dividing. The traditional uniformitarian model of fossils forming over long periods of time is entirely impotent to explain such rapid fossilization. First, it would have to explain how these embryos would simply die while separating. Second, it would have to explain how these embryos-which are described as “little blobs of jelly”-could have lasted, exposed to the elements, for years and years before being buried and fossilized.

The obvious truth (to which even evolutionists subscribe) is that these fossils were formed catastrophically.