Evolutionists recently announced a stunning find in the Utah desert. An article, published in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature detailed this amazing find. A research team out of the University of Southern California and the University of Chicago discovered a small mammalian skull in rock labeled as being from the Cretaceous period. The discovery is shocking because mammals are not supposed to appear in rock with that presumed age. Due to this, evolutionists have described it as being half reptile, half mammal and made some very stretched claims about the fossil. This article will attempt to set the record straight on this newly discovered mammal skull.
When publishing their research, the scientists made a number of claims regarding what they have classified as a new species. The new species, classified as Cifelliodon wahkarmoosuch, is based on the cranial bone of a small mammal. Evolutionists claim the creature is around 130 million years old and thus coexisted with the last dinosaurs. Researchers postulated that the creature was around three inches tall, and weighed only two and a half pounds fully grown. From the teeth sockets found in the cranium, researchers deduced that Cifelliodon was largely vegetarian, with teeth designed to strip vegetation from its roots and stems. The skull eye sockets were small, likely indicative of poor eyesight. Researchers claimed that the Cifelliodon nursed its young much like other mammals, but laid eggs as the echidna and platypus do.
Beyond the mere details of Cifelliodon, the researchers attempted to use the fossil find to address the big picture. Researchers stated that the discovery of this skull indicated that the supercontinent of Pangea lasted around fifteen million years longer than had been previously believed. Further, researchers admitted that the mammals that existed during this time period were just as varied as what we see today, filling a variety of roles in the ecosystem.
Unfortunately for the evolutionists, they are making some key assumptions that significantly undercut both the broader picture and the specific comments they make about Cifelliodon. The idea of Pangea I debunked in the article linked above, but I’ll take a few sentences for it here. The supercontinent of Pangea supposedly was comprised of all the worlds landmasses jammed together. Plate tectonics supposedly broke it apart and continents drifted to their current locations slowly. One of many problems with this is that there is simply not enough time for the continents to drift to their current locations. With the purported discovery that Pangea persisted an extra fifteen million years, this problem only gets worse.
The researchers’ admission that mammals were varied in the time of the dinosaurs and not confined to a single role in the ecosystem does further damage to evolutionary theory. Consider this: mammals were supposedly just evolving in the Cretaceous period. There should not have been many of them, nor should there have been great variance in their roles. They were a new development and should not have had time to vary enough to fill every role that they fill today. Yet the lead author of the study, Dr. Adam Huttenlocker says “This finding by our team and others reinforce that, even before the rise of modern mammals, ancient relatives of mammals were exploring specialty niches: insectivores, herbivores, carnivores, swimmers, gliders. Basically, they were occupying a variety of niches that we see them occupy today.” Essentially, mammalian roles have not changed since they supposedly evolved, something that is completely contrary to evolutionary theory.
Cifelliodon itself is rife with assumptions and speculations that make it completely useless to evolution. Recall from the first paragraph pointed out that all that was found of Cifelliodon was a skull. Now skulls can tell us a lot about an animal. They can tell us about the teeth the animal had, how big its brain was, how big its eyes were and so on. That information allows us to make inferences, as the researchers did in saying that Cifelliodon was likely a plant eater that foraged nocturnally. What a skull does not tell us is if an animal gave birth to live young or laid eggs. Yet somehow evolutionists are certain that Cifelliodon laid eggs. This claim is presented without any evidence whatsoever to back it up and the public is expected to simply believe it. No evolutionist was there to see Cifelliodon laying eggs and all we have to observe is its skull, which has absolutely no bearing on whether it laid eggs or not. This claim is utterly without support and should be swiftly rejected as hypothetical only.
The only reason I can possibly postulate that this claim was made, was to strengthen the purported link between the reptilian dinosaurs, and the mammalian Cifelliodon. Essentially, the evolutionists made up something to support their theory. I should point out that the original article in Nature does not make this claim. The claim appears to originate on the state of Utah’s website, in a press release about the fossil find. Where the claim comes from is unclear. Regardless, Cifelliodon, while a neat fossil find, does not do anything to help evolution. In fact, tangentially, it actually handicaps their theory of Pangea even further than it already was, as well as challenging their ideas about the origin of mammals.
In His Image 