New Study Rewrites the Cambrian Explosion

A new study of trace fossils (the remains of organisms’ behaviors or activities) from the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition, a supposed “turning point in the evolution of complex life on Earth,” has researchers claiming the Cambrian explosion “may have occurred much earlier than estimated.”

The Cambrian explosion is a big puzzle for evolutionists. It’s supposedly a geological layer where “animal body plans suddenly appear” with no clear evolutionary predecessors in the layers below. In other words, life just explodes on the scene with no evolutionary transitions from the creatures in the layers below. It’s almost like evolution never happened at all (because, of course, it didn’t!).

The Cambrian explosion is a big puzzle for evolutionists.

According to the popular summary of the new study, the so-called Ediacaran period was dominated by soft-bodied organisms that, by nature of being soft-bodied, were not fossilized as often as the hard-bodied Cambrian creatures. So this new study instead looked at trace fossils, things like trackways or burrows, and found that “organisms with slender body profiles thrived around 545 million years ago.” This led to the interpretation that:

The so-called Cambrian explosion and its evolutionary implications may have occurred much earlier than estimated.

In other words, the evolutionary timeline for both biology and geology has to be changed yet again, and that has happened over and over. This is a common theme for evolutionists! The “science” (really the interpretations of the evidence from an evolutionary worldview) is constantly changing because evolution is such a plastic model it can always flex and bend to fit whatever evidence is uncovered. It’s not science (it’s not repeatable, testable, or observable)—it’s storytelling!

In the biblical worldview, we understand the Cambrian explosion represents some of the earliest flood layers. While evolutionists have to explain how most major animal groups appear out of nowhere, we understand that these fossils were formed as a catastrophic global flood began all around the world—about 4,300 years ago.

As always, the problem isn’t the evidence—we have the same evidence in the present. The problem is different interpretations of the same evidence because of two different starting points: Man’s ideas (blind-faith beliefs) about the past vs. the eyewitness account of history in God’s Word.

You can learn more about the Cambrian explosion and the evolutionary problems inherent in it in “Life’s Unexpected Explosion” on our website.

Get More Answers on Answers News

This item was discussed Monday on Answers News with cohosts Dr. Georgia Purdom, Kevin Hadsall, 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:

• Murder case treats unborn baby as a person.
• 1 in 4 Americans reject evolution.
• Are tomatoes de-evolving?
• And more!

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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.