Another evolutionary icon bites the dust
Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2014 4:04 am
No surprises here.
Another evolutionary icon bites the dust
Museums and textbooks claim that whale fossils provide the clearest proof of evolution today (they have mostly gone cold on horse evolution because that story no longer withstands scrutiny). Three key fossils are Pakicetus, Amubulocetus and Rodhocetus, which are claimed to link a land animal with the whales known as Basilosaurids. Without these three the story collapses.
Dr Carl Werner, author of Evolution: the Grand Experiment, has checked out the claims made about these fossils, interviewing the researchers who published on them, and has discovered that none of these fossils holds up as transitional to whales. To be blunt, Dr Werner has discovered a pattern of fraud, or at the very least extremely wishful thinking and imaginative story telling that is not supported by the fossil evidence.
We have already pointed out the extreme story telling that occurred with Pakicetus, involving Dr Philip Gingerich. An incomplete skull fossil was imagined to be that of a whale-like creature, displayed as an artist’s impression on the cover of the prestigious journal, Science, in 1983. Some years later the rest of Pakicetus was found, published in 2001, and it proved to be nothing like a whale. Contrary to what Dr Gingerich had imagined, there was no blowhole, there were no flippers (only hooves), and there was no whale neck (just a neck typical for land mammals). Even so, Dr Werner reveals that the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Natural History Museum in London have not stopped using the falsely-reconstructed skull that shows a blowhole.
Dr Werner reveals that in a National Geographic documentary in 2009 Dr Gingerich still claimed that Pakicetus should be classed with whales, based on its ear-bone. However, the ear-bone is not like a whale, which has a finger-like projection (sigmoid process), but is plate-like, like the fossils of land animals known as artiodactyls.
Ambulocetus is portrayed as an intermediate between Pakicetus and Rodhocetus. Dr Hans Thewissen, former student of Gingerich, said that there were eight characteristics that showed the Ambulocetus was a whale ancestor. We have also reported on Ambulocetus, but Dr Werner recorded on video Dr Thewissen admitting that a key ‘evidence’ of whale ancestry, the sigmoid process of the ear-bone apparatus, (again) was actually nothing like a whale ear bone. Also, the cheek bone, which Thewissen claimed is thin like a whale cheek bone, is actually not thin at all; a horse, for example, has a much thinner cheekbone than Ambulocetus (see illustration). Furthermore, Dr Thewissen’s lab has supplied models of Ambulocetus to various museums that show a blowhole in the snout of the skull, but there is no fossil evidence of a blowhole. Dr Werner says, “All eight characters he reported as whale features are disturbingly non-whale features.”
Rodhocetus is claimed to be an aquatic animal that is developing front flippers and a tail with a whale-like tail and fluke (horizontal fins)—i.e. supposedly well on the way to becoming a whale. However, when Dr Werner pointed out to the paleontologist who discovered Rodhocetus, Dr Gingerich, that there was no fossil skeletal evidence for a tail or flippers, Dr Gingerich admitted that this was so. He also admitted that he now thought that the creature had neither of these critical whale features. We provided some of this information in our Creation magazine article in 2012. However, the tail and flippers are still displayed in many articles, and I expect that, like Haeckel’s embryos, will be for many years to come.
Dr Werner provides more evidence in his press release,1 and many more details in a major new appendix in the third edition of his informative and beautifully-illustrated book Evolution: the Grand Experiment.
In addition, you can witness many of these explosive admissions by the paleontologists themselves, as they are recorded in the documentary DVD, Evolution: the Grand Experiment (see products, top right).
Another evolutionary icon bites the dust!
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