Cambrian Fossils of Chengjiang, China

Nature_ v. 430, 22 July 2004, p. 405, "A window on early animal evolution" by Zhe-Xi Luo is a review of _The Cambrian Fossils of Chengjiang, China: The Flowering of Early Animal Life" by Xian-Guang Hou, _et al.

"In the early Cambrian period (544 million to 520 million years ago) there was agreat evolutionary radiation of animal life. Within a short geological time, the vast majority of modern animal phyla (groups defined by their distiinctive body plans) appeared in the fossil record worldwide."

All creationists should know these basic facts about the "Cambrian explosion." Evolutionists are busy trying to explain away their beloved fossil record on this point, trying to come up with a convincing explanation why all these different and distinct body plans don't show up at all before, and then all show up virtually at once in this set of deposits.

Besides, you may surprise an evolutionist who doesn't know about it. I once caught a professor who had confused (in his newspaper column attacking creationists) the Cambrian explosion with the Permian-Triassic extinction!

It's especially interesting that, not only are all the extant basic body plans found in these deposits, but also several more, that have since gone extinct. "Several organisms from Chengjiang are so extraordinary that they cannot easily be placed in any modern animal phylum."

One kind "looks like a crustacean, judging by its tail, but has gill slits that some palaeontologists would argue indicate chordate affinities," and in a research paper in this article, they're placed as branching from the common ancestor of all "deuterostomes," which includes the echinoderms such as sea cucumbers and starfish (see Figure 4 on p. 428).

While other sites also have many forms of life in Cambrian strata, of course the Chinese argue that "the presence of new species of the earliest vertebrates and their putative chordate and deuterostome relatives that are not known elsewhere" shows that "Chengjiang really is a cradle of early chordate evolution."



Until Next Time,
David Bump