What? Living fossil? they shouldnt exist, millons of years? come on man!!

[Mark]

This is just an awesome article!! filled with so much false hoods

Found: Whale Thought Extinct for 2 Million Years

 The pygmy right whale, a mysterious and elusive creature that rarely comes to shore, is the last living relative of an ancient group of whales long believed to be extinct, a new study suggests.

The findings, published today (Dec. 18) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, may help to explain why the enigmatic marine mammals look so different from any other living whale.

"The living pygmy right whale is, if you like, a remnant, almost like a living fossil," said Felix Marx, a paleontologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand. "It's the last survivor of quite an ancient lineage that until now no one thought was around."

Living fossil

 The relatively diminutive pygmy right whale, which grows to just 21 feet (6.5 meters) long, lives out in the open ocean. The elusive marine mammals inhabit the Southern Hemisphere and have only been spotted at sea a few dozen times. As a result, scientists know almost nothing about the species' habits or social structure.

The strange creature's arched, frownlike snout makes it look oddly different from other living whales. DNA analysis suggested pygmy right whales diverged from modern baleen whales such as the blue whale and the humpback whale between 17 million and 25 million years ago. However, the pygmy whales' snouts suggested they were more closely related to the family of whales that includes the bowhead whale. Yet there were no studies of fossils showing how the pygmy whale had evolved, Marx said. [In Photos: Tracking Humpback Whales]

To understand how the pygmy whale fit into the lineage of whales, Marx and his colleagues carefully analyzed the skull bones and other fossil fragments from pygmy right whales and several other ancient cetaceans.

The pygmy whale's skull most closely resembled that of an ancient family of whales called cetotheres that were thought to have gone extinct around 2 million years ago, the researchers found. Cetotheres emerged about 15 million years ago and once occupied oceans across the globe.

The findings help explain how pygmy whales evolved and may also help shed light on how these ancient "lost" whales lived. The new information is also a first step in reconstructing the ancient lineage all the way back to the point when all members of this group first diverged, he said.

http://www.livescience.com/25656-pygmy-whales-living-fossils.html

[Mark]

What’s Old Is New: 12 Living Fossils

vids and pics at site 
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/whats-old-is-ne/

To navigate the currents of ecological fate, most creatures adapt — but a few have stuck to their evolutionary guns.

Known as living fossils, they lasted for millions of years with barely a change,  even as their relatives went extinct or took different paths across the tree of life.

Many are now threatened or endangered. But with some luck and a little help, living fossils will be able to survive the age of humans, too.


 The Purple frog, discovered just five years ago in western India, likely escaped detection because it lives underground, emerging for just two weeks during the monsoon season. Distinguished by a pointed snout, it’s related to a family of frogs now found only on the Seychelles islands, which split from India 100 million years ago. 

 Scientists disagree over whether the frilled shark has survived for 380 milllion years, or a mere 95 million years. Only two living specimens have been found — both off the coast in Japan, in the late 19th century and again in 2007 — but they are sometimes caught accidentally by deep-sea fishing nets.

 Until a preserved specimen was found in the Smithsonian in 1975, the 10-footed, lobster-like Jurassic shrimp was thought to have gone extinct 50 million years ago. Living Jurassic shrimp have since been found.

 What it lacks in convenient nomenclature, the Siberian Sikhotealinia zhiltzovae
makes up for in uniqueness: it’s the only three-eyed beetle. Some scientists consider it a forerunner of nearly all winged insects. 

 Found mostly in Southern Hemisphere rain forests, velvet worms have legs and — unlike other worms — bear live young. Closely related to tardigrades, their legs are hollow and supported by fluid pressure. After a few early adaptations for land, they’ve hardly changed in 360 million years.

 The most widespread of all living fossils, crocodiles have barely changed in the 230 million years since dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

 One of the relatively few mammalian living fossils, duck-billed platypuses have been weird for 110 million years: in addition to their bills, they lay eggs and have venom-filled leg spurs. No wonder they were considered a hoax by early naturalists.

 Its spiraling chambered shell was a symbol of perfection in ancient Greece, and the nautilus has changed little in 500 million years.

 Found commonly on Atlantic beaches, horseshoe crabs are more closely related to spiders, ticks and scorpions than crabs. Their ancestors evolved in the Paleozoic’s shallow seas, and they’ve evolved only slightly in the last 445 million years. If you see one on its back, flip it over: They can regrow lost limbs, but can’t right themselves when tossed in the surf.

 Better known as the "Ant from Mars," Martialis heureka is a direct-line descendant of the last common ancestor of all ants — a subterranean forager who wouldn’t go above-ground until flowering plants evolved 120 million years ago. 

 Coelacanth vanished from the fossil record 410 million years ago — and then one was caught in 1938 off the coast of South Africa. A second species was discovered in Indonesian waters in 1999.

 Neither a mantis nor a shrimp, the mantis shrimp has changed little in 400 million years. It has the world’s most complex eyes, and its prey-killing claw motion is the second-fastest animal motion. To quote mantis shrimp eye researcher Tom Cronin, "Whenever they get into any type of situation, they smash things. You can’t pick these up. They’re really great animals to have around."

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/whats-old-is-ne/

[Mark]

"Living fossils" are plants or animals that closely resemble species known from fossils. Many of those listed below were considered extinct and only known through fossil evidence, but were later discovered to still be alive.

It is presumed by evolutionists that fossils are much older than is correct due to a failure of the scientific community to recognize the occurrence of the Biblical global deluge. Based on an incorrect naturalistic assumption, the stratified layers are believe to have accumulated gradually, and are separated by millions of years.

Animals, such as the dinosaurs, are believed to have gone extinct 65 million years before humans lived on earth. However, according to the Bible and its chronology, all plants and animals were created at the same point in time only a few thousand years ago. Most naturalists find this thought laughable and yet many plants and animals are alive today having changed very little from their relatives that reportedly lived millions of years ago. In fact, most living fossils are almost identical to their fossilized ancestors.

lots of links and pics
http://www.nwcreation.net/fossilsliving.html

[Psalm 51:17]

Looks like Project Blue Beam is really accelerating their agenda now, especially with some of their recent "discoveries" like this.

[Kilika]

Some hunter comes dragging a Bigfoot out of the woods he just nailed with his shiny new "assault rifle", and things would really get wound up.

[Psalm 51:17]

Yet MORE Propagnda...

http://news.yahoo.com/10-weirdest-animal-discoveries-2012-174755525.html

The 10 Weirdest Animal Discoveries of 2012

As the year comes to an end, it's time to look back at the grossest, oddest and simply most fascinating animals to make the headlines in 2012. There were zombie worms and **** fish, not to mention turtles with a strange way of getting rid of urine. Read on for 2012's most bizarre.
 
1. A 'tulip' with a digestive system
 
An ancient fossil found in Canada looks like a field of tulips frozen in stone. In fact, these plantlike creatures are animals unlike any seen before.
 
Siphusauctum gregarium, a 500-million-year-old filter feeder, was the length of a dinner knife with a bulbous "head" containing a feeding system and a bizarre gut. Instead of filtering water past its feeders externally, S. gregarium appears to have pumped water through its tuliplike head, capturing any food particles that passed through, study researcher Lorna O'Brien of the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada told LiveScience. Scientists aren't sure where this unusual creature fits into the evolutionary tree.
 
2. A sea predator that makes T. rex look weak
 
Moving on to other ancient marine wildlife, here's a sea creature much scarier than an animal that looks like a flower. "Predator X," a giant marine reptile that was the top predator of the seas 150 million years ago, finally got its scientific name this year.

Pliosaurus funkei, as it is now properly known, was 40 feet (12 meters) long with a 6.5-foot (2 m)-long skull.
 
"They had teeth that would have made a T. rex whimper," study researcher Patrick Druckenmiller, a paleontologist at the University of Alaska Museum, told LiveScience.
 
3. Cannibal lemurs roam the night
 
You don't have to be 40-feet long to be scary. This year, researchers studying the adorable gray mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus) in Madagascar came across a grisly scene: a male of the species feasting on the flesh of a dead female.
 
Although other primates (including humans) have been known to practice cannibalism, scientists had never before seen a gray mouse lemur so much as eat another mammal, according to ScienceNow, which reported the creepy meal. Scientists documented the case in the American Journal of Primatology.
 
4. A millipede with far too many legs
 
File this under "Things You Don't Want to Step on With Bare Feet:" A white millipede that manages to cram 750 wiggly legs onto its 0.4- to 1.2-inch (1- to 3-centimeter)-long body.
 
Illacme plenipes is the world-record holder for "leggiest creature." It's found, bizarrely, in only a 1.7 square mile (4.5 square kilometer) area in northern California — doubly odd, because the creature's closest living relative calls South Africa home. The millipedes may have spread out across the globe when most of the land on Earth was part of one supercontinent, Pangaea. When the supercontinent broke apart 200 million years ago, the relatives could have been separated, explaining the long-lost connection. [Image Gallery: The Leggiest Millipede]
 
5. A teeny-tiny creature trapped in an ancient cocoon
 
Bad luck for a trapped ancient animal, good luck for modern scientists: Some 200 million years ago, a leech secreted a slimy cocoon under water or on a wet leaf, and a tiny animal the width of just a few human hairs attached itself to the new cocoon.
 
This bizarre little creature clung on with its springlike tail, becoming rapidly trapped and engulfed by the cocoon. The unusual circumstances resulted in something almost unheard of: the complete preservation of a soft-bodied animal with no hard bones to fossilize.

 Scientists say the microscopic creature looks like it might come from the genus Vorticella. Its secret talent is coiling and uncoiling its springy stalk at a speed of 3.1 inches (8 centimeters) per second, the equivalent of a human getting across three football fields in that amount of time. 
 
6. 8 tentacled snakes born
 
How's this for a bundle of joy? This October, eight snakes with tentacles were born at the Smithsonian's National Zoo.
 
It was not a Halloween prank. Zoo staff had been trying to breed the rare aquatic snake Erpeton tentaculatus for four years before success. These bizarre Southeast Asian serpents are the only snakes with two little tentacles on their snouts. These tentacles act like whiskers to help the snakes sense vibrations from swimming fish.
 
7. A new fish with a peni$ on its head

 Speaking of fish, this one has an … odd anatomy. Researchers in Vietnam's Mekong Delta reported the discovery of a fish with a **** on its head this August.
 
Yep, a ****. And it's not just any **** — the organ includes a jagged hook for grabbing females during sex. (The female fish's genitals are located on her throat.)
 
The species is named Phallostethus cuulong and is one of few fish that fertilizes eggs inside the female's body rather than outside. The nasty-looking hook appendage seems to have evolved to ensure the male's sperm get to the right place. [7 Sexy Facts About Sperm]
 
8. A beautiful, meat-eating sponge
 
It looks like a harp or a delicate candelabra, but beware to any crustacean that gets too close: The so-called "harp sponge" will snare and slowly digest you before you know it.
 
This truly bizarre creature had never been observed by human eyes before 2000, when a team from the Monterey Bay Research Aquarium Institute in California took a remotely operated submersible into 2-mile (3.5-km)-deep waters off the central California coast. They later captured two specimens of the animal, which is scientifically called Chondrocladia lyra, and took 10 more video observations, reporting their analysis of the new species in October in the journal Invertebrate Biology.
 
The sponges feed by clinging to muddy sediment on the ocean floor and letting ocean currents wash hapless tiny crustaceans into their harplike limbs. The candelabralike branches of the limbs may help maximize how many shrimplike critters these carnivorous sponges catch.
 
9. Zombie worms use acid to eat bones, have weird sex life
 
If you need even more proof of the horrors of the deep, consider the zombie worm, which feeds off the bones of whales and other scavenged sea creatures … despite not having a mouth. This July, researchers at the Society for Experimental Biology's annual meeting announced that they'd figured out how this mouthless creature eats bone. It excretes acid.
 
The acids allow the worms to break down and absorb the bone, the researchers explained. But that's just the tip of the weirdness iceberg for these amazingly adapted worms. The females grow about an inch (3 cm) long, but males never grow larger than 1/20th of an inch (1 millimeter). They seem to live in the gelatinous tubes covering the females, serving no purpose but to fertilize her eggs.
 
10. Turtles pee from their mouths

 A sharp-snouted turtle found in China often submerges its head in puddles on dry land, a mystery given that these animals breathe air. Now, scientists say they've figured out why: The Chinese soft-shelled turtle (Pelodiscus sinensis) can essentially pee from its mouth.
 
The turtles excrete urea, the main component of urine, through the gills in their mouths, a talent previously seen only in fish, the scientists reported in October in the Journal of Experimental Biology. This may be an adaption to the turtles' salty environment. Because they can't get enough freshwater to wash urea out through their urine, they transport it through their gills and then rinse their urea-filled mouths out with saltwater. And you thought flossing was bad.           

[Mark]

Another Cambrian Discovery Discredits Evolution

A fossil creature from the phylum Entoprocta (invertebrate animals that have tentacles and lacking a mineralized skeleton) was found in marked abundance (over 400 individuals) in Burgess Shale. The Burgess is a sedimentary layer that's purportedly part of the Cambrian period about a half-billion years ago, according to evolutionists.1 The problem for paleontologists is that the supposedly 520 million year old creature looks exactly like its living counterparts, only up to 8 eight times larger.

The Cambrian geologic system is an enigma for the evolutionary paradigm. If evolution is true, life would have started out simple and then evolved in complexity over time. The Cambrian system is one of the oldest geological layers containing billions of sophisticated fossils, supposedly formed after the Precambrian system. The Precambrian layers contain "simple" single-celled life, but also have jellyfish and annelids (worms).

In the Cambrian system, the fossils represent an explosion of complex multicellular life forms—hence the term "Cambrian Explosion." The problem for evolution is that the Cambrian explosion occurs suddenly with no transitional forms preceding it. Furthermore, many of the types of fossils found in the Cambrian layer are represented by modern organisms, such as entoprocts, that are alive and well today. For a summary of the Cambrian geological system and Burgess Shale, see the excellent review by Dr. John Morris in Acts & Facts.2

This species of entoproct, Cotyledion tylodes, was identified previously, but the specimens were not well preserved and difficult to characterize. The discovery of hundreds of new extremely well preserved fossils in much older strata was a huge surprise. Another shock was the extremely well defined detail of the fossil's mouth, anus, and digestive tract, proving that the previous classification of C. tylodes as a cnidarian (a jellyfish-like creature) was wrong. In fact, not only was the creature postulated to be much older than previously estimated, it was incredibly more complex.

Interestingly, the fossils of C. tylodes also appear to have somewhat more complex features than modern entoprocts. Unlike living entoprocts, the stem and flowerlike feeding cup of the "ancient" version was covered by tiny hardened protuberances (sclerites), and the creatures were much larger.

Clearly, a majority of the fossil record was formed as a result of the year-long global Flood recorded in Genesis, making it one of evolution's greatest enemies.3 The original diversity of organisms were created by God to reproduce "after their kind," which is why fossils like the entoproct are complex, fully formed, and similar to their modern living counterparts.

References

Pappas, S. 2013. 500-Million-Year-Old Animal Looked Like a Tulip. LiveScience. Posted on livescience.com, January 17, 2013, accessed January 23, 2013. 
Morris, J. 2008. The Burgess Shale and Complex Life. Acts & Facts. 37 (10): 13.
Morris, J. and F. Sherwin. 2010. The Fossil Record: Unearthing the History of Life. Dallas, TX: Institute for Creation Research.
Image credit: Copyright © 2013 LiveScience. Adapted for use in accordance with federal copyright (fair use doctrine) law. Usage by ICR does not imply endorsement of copyright holders.

* Dr. Tomkins is a Research Associate and received his Ph.D. in Genetics from Clemson University.

Article posted on January 30, 2013.

http://www.icr.org/article/7251/

[Psalm 51:17]

I have a question about salt, minerals found in the oceans and seas.

Honestly, whenever I hear Creation Science people talk about salt layers(or whatever) found in the oceans(and minerals), what are they talking about? Why has salt built up? I don't understand.

[Mark]

Because we do not build up enough salt from run off as we loose it from natural process's over the years.

https://www.icr.org/article/5484

[Psalm 51:17]

[Psalm 51:17]