For those wondering what "macroevolution" actually is...

[Buzzard3]

We also don't find a lot of pre-Cambrian life because the vast majority of pre-Cambrian life was softer than the harder organisms that came during and after the Cambrian Explosion, meaning they wouldn't fossilize well. Fossils form under specific circumstances. Those circumstances aren't met, the bones just go.

"According to Gaines et al. (2012),
“Burgess Shale−type biotas occur globally in the Cambrian record and offer unparalleled insight into the Cambrian explosion, the initial Phanerozoic radiation of the Metazoa. Deposits bearing exceptionally preserved soft-bodied fossils are unusually common in Cambrian strata; more than 40 are now known.”

Thus, we definitely should expect to find the postulated ancestors of the Cambrian animal phyla in Burgess Shale-type localities of the preceding Ediacaran era. The artifact hypothesis suggested that there are no such localities. However, in the past years several fossiliferous Burgess Shale-type (BST) biota from the Ediacaran have been discovered:

Pusa Shale of Spain (Brasier et al. 1979, Jensen & Palacios 2016)

Chopoghlu Shale / Soltanieh Formation of northern Iran (Ford & Breed 1972)

Khatyspyt Formation of Siberia (Grazhdankin et al. 2008)

Miaohe biota of southern China (Xiao et al. 2002, Tang et al. 2008, Ye et al. 2017)

Lantian biota of southern China (Yuan et al. 2011, 2013)

Jinxian biota of northern China (Luo et al. 2016)

Zuun-Arts biota of western Mongolia (Dornbos et al. 2016, Hassell et al. 2017)

Guess What?
None of these Ediacaran biotas yielded any uncontroversial fossil record of animals! Especially important are the vast deposits of the Miaohe and Lantian biotas in China and the Zuun-arts biota in Mongolia, which both lack any bilaterian animals and only yielded fossil algae and problematic organisms ...

Even the most recent study by Daley et al. (2018), which very unsuccessfully (Bechly 2018a) tried to downplay the abruptness of the Cambrian explosion, acknowledged that these new localities have proven that fossil animals are not just unknown from the Ediacaran because of preservation issues but because they definitely did not yet exist. Daley et al. discussed all the above-mentioned Burgess Shale-type localities from the Ediacaran and concluded that the “modes of fossil preservation are comparable in the Cambrian and Precambrian.”
In their abstract they affirmed that: “BSTs from the latest Ediacaran Period (e.g., Miaohe biota, 550 Ma) are abundantly fossiliferous with algae but completely lack animals, which are also missing from other Ediacaran windows, such as phosphate deposits (e.g., Doushantuo, 560 Ma)”" ...

continued in next post ...

 

[Buzzard3]

... continued from previous post:

From the Royal Society

Now, a new study by Anderson et al. (2020), published in a Royal Society journal, analyzed microfossils from a 1-billion-year-old and two 800-million-year-old localities in Russia, Svalbard, and Canada, which also belong to the Burgess Shale type and thus could preserve early soft-bodied animals. The authors conclude in their abstract: “These deposits lack metazoan fossils even though they share fossilization conditions with younger BST deposits that are capable of preserving non-mineralizing metazoans. Thus metazoans, at least those typically preserved in BST deposits, were probably absent from sedimentary environments before approximately 800 Ma.”

Here is what Demming (2020) commented about this new study: “The results suggest the same processes preserved pre-Cambrian microbes as later larger animals. ‘So the fact that there are no animals in the 800-million-year-old rocks, even though they’ve got the same type of preservation — all you find there are bacteria or the algae analyzed — that would suggest that animals really haven’t evolved at that time,’ says Anderson.”

So, demonstrably no animal biota existed 1 billion, 800 million, 560 million, and even 550 million years ago (the only remotely plausible candidates are the late Ediacaran jellyfish Haootia, the mollusk-like Kimberella, the worm-like Yilingia, and the possible lophophorate Namacalathus, which I will discuss in future articles). But in the lowermost Cambrian, 537 million years ago, there were already complex arthropod body plans with exoskeleton, articulated legs, and compound eyes (Daley et al. 2018), as well as many other bilaterian animal phyla. TO DENY THAT THIS IS A MAJOR PROBLEM FOR DARWINIAN EVOLUTION IS ABSURD.

Finally Put to Rest

We can conclude that the artifact hypothesis, which was nothing but an ad hoc strategy to get rid of conflicting evidence, can finally be put to rest for good. The absence of Ediacaran fossils of putative precursors of the Cambrian animal phyla is not an artifact of undersampling or an artifact of taphonomy, but simply reflecting the fact that there were no such organisms living in this period. With increasing paleontological research and better knowledge of the Proterozoic fossil record, the Cambrian explosion has turned out to be even more abrupt than was previously thought (Bechly 2018a).
If a problem does not dissolve with increasing knowledge but only gets worse over time, it is a good indicator that this problem is very real.

Darwinists have to face the fact that a core prediction of their theory miserably failed an important empirical test."


( Günter Bechly, "The Demise of the Artifact Hypothesis", evolutionnews.org. emphasis added)

Günter Bechly is a German paleo-entomologist who specializes in the fossil history and systematics of insects (esp. dragonflies), the most diverse group of animals. He served as curator for amber and fossil insects in the department of paleontology at the State Museum of Natural History (SMNS) in Stuttgart, Germany. He is also a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Dr. Bechly earned his Ph.D. in geosciences from Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen, Germany.

He has authored or co-authored more than 160 scientific publications, including a co-edited and co-authored book published by Cambridge University Press and a German popular science book on evolution, as well as several book chapters (including three chapters in the latest and largest monograph on the Solnhofen fossil locality and the chapter on insect evolution and systematics in Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia).
He pioneered the phylogenetic re-classification of the insect order Odonata (dragonflies, damselflies, and their fossil relatives), made substantial contributions to the question of the evolutionary origin of insect wings, and rank among the world leading experts on fossil dragonflies and on fossil insects from the Solnhofen and Crato limestones.

He has discovered and described more than 180 new species (incl. three new insect orders), and 11 biological groups have been named as eponyms by other scientists in his honor.

 

[Job 33:6]

... continued from previous post:

From the Royal Society

Now, a new study by Anderson et al. (2020), published in a Royal Society journal, analyzed microfossils from a 1-billion-year-old and two 800-million-year-old localities in Russia, Svalbard, and Canada, which also belong to the Burgess Shale type and thus could preserve early soft-bodied animals. The authors conclude in their abstract: “These deposits lack metazoan fossils even though they share fossilization conditions with younger BST deposits that are capable of preserving non-mineralizing metazoans. Thus metazoans, at least those typically preserved in BST deposits, were probably absent from sedimentary environments before approximately 800 Ma.”

Here is what Demming (2020) commented about this new study: “The results suggest the same processes preserved pre-Cambrian microbes as later larger animals. ‘So the fact that there are no animals in the 800-million-year-old rocks, even though they’ve got the same type of preservation — all you find there are bacteria or the algae analyzed — that would suggest that animals really haven’t evolved at that time,’ says Anderson.”

So, demonstrably no animal biota existed 1 billion, 800 million, 560 million, and even 550 million years ago (the only remotely plausible candidates are the late Ediacaran jellyfish Haootia, the mollusk-like Kimberella, the worm-like Yilingia, and the possible lophophorate Namacalathus, which I will discuss in future articles). But in the lowermost Cambrian, 537 million years ago, there were already complex arthropod body plans with exoskeleton, articulated legs, and compound eyes (Daley et al. 2018), as well as many other bilaterian animal phyla. TO DENY THAT THIS IS A MAJOR PROBLEM FOR DARWINIAN EVOLUTION IS ABSURD.

Finally Put to Rest

We can conclude that the artifact hypothesis, which was nothing but an ad hoc strategy to get rid of conflicting evidence, can finally be put to rest for good. The absence of Ediacaran fossils of putative precursors of the Cambrian animal phyla is not an artifact of undersampling or an artifact of taphonomy, but simply reflecting the fact that there were no such organisms living in this period. With increasing paleontological research and better knowledge of the Proterozoic fossil record, the Cambrian explosion has turned out to be even more abrupt than was previously thought (Bechly 2018a).
If a problem does not dissolve with increasing knowledge but only gets worse over time, it is a good indicator that this problem is very real.

Darwinists have to face the fact that a core prediction of their theory miserably failed an important empirical test."

( Günter Bechly, "The Demise of the Artifact Hypothesis", evolutionnews.org. emphasis added)

Günter Bechly is a German paleo-entomologist who specializes in the fossil history and systematics of insects (esp. dragonflies), the most diverse group of animals. He served as curator for amber and fossil insects in the department of paleontology at the State Museum of Natural History (SMNS) in Stuttgart, Germany. He is also a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Dr. Bechly earned his Ph.D. in geosciences from Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen, Germany.

He has authored or co-authored more than 160 scientific publications, including a co-edited and co-authored book published by Cambridge University Press and a German popular science book on evolution, as well as several book chapters (including three chapters in the latest and largest monograph on the Solnhofen fossil locality and the chapter on insect evolution and systematics in Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia).
He pioneered the phylogenetic re-classification of the insect order Odonata (dragonflies, damselflies, and their fossil relatives), made substantial contributions to the question of the evolutionary origin of insect wings, and rank among the world leading experts on fossil dragonflies and on fossil insects from the Solnhofen and Crato limestones.

He has discovered and described more than 180 new species (incl. three new insect orders), and 11 biological groups have been named as eponyms by other scientists in his honor.

The ediacaran dates back to 635 mya, of what value is it looking in rock that is 800 to 1 billion years old in a quest to find Cambrian precursors?

This is like trying to argue that you didn't have enough time to go to the store today because you were born in the 1970s. "Well I was born in 1975, so I guess I didnt have enough time to run to the store last week!".

This appears to be some 150 million years off target. I wonder if the author further argues that there weren't animals in the Archean, and that somehow this is an issue for the Cambrian. "Well there aren't animals 4 billion years ago, so I guess that's an issue for Cambrian diversification!"

 

[Astrid]

... continued from previous post:

From the Royal Society

Now, a new study by Anderson et al. (2020), published in a Royal Society journal, analyzed microfossils from a 1-billion-year-old and two 800-million-year-old localities in Russia, Svalbard, and Canada, which also belong to the Burgess Shale type and thus could preserve early soft-bodied animals. The authors conclude in their abstract: “These deposits lack metazoan fossils even though they share fossilization conditions with younger BST deposits that are capable of preserving non-mineralizing metazoans. Thus metazoans, at least those typically preserved in BST deposits, were probably absent from sedimentary environments before approximately 800 Ma.”

Here is what Demming (2020) commented about this new study: “The results suggest the same processes preserved pre-Cambrian microbes as later larger animals. ‘So the fact that there are no animals in the 800-million-year-old rocks, even though they’ve got the same type of preservation — all you find there are bacteria or the algae analyzed — that would suggest that animals really haven’t evolved at that time,’ says Anderson.”

So, demonstrably no animal biota existed 1 billion, 800 million, 560 million, and even 550 million years ago (the only remotely plausible candidates are the late Ediacaran jellyfish Haootia, the mollusk-like Kimberella, the worm-like Yilingia, and the possible lophophorate Namacalathus, which I will discuss in future articles). But in the lowermost Cambrian, 537 million years ago, there were already complex arthropod body plans with exoskeleton, articulated legs, and compound eyes (Daley et al. 2018), as well as many other bilaterian animal phyla. TO DENY THAT THIS IS A MAJOR PROBLEM FOR DARWINIAN EVOLUTION IS ABSURD.

Finally Put to Rest

We can conclude that the artifact hypothesis, which was nothing but an ad hoc strategy to get rid of conflicting evidence, can finally be put to rest for good. The absence of Ediacaran fossils of putative precursors of the Cambrian animal phyla is not an artifact of undersampling or an artifact of taphonomy, but simply reflecting the fact that there were no such organisms living in this period. With increasing paleontological research and better knowledge of the Proterozoic fossil record, the Cambrian explosion has turned out to be even more abrupt than was previously thought (Bechly 2018a).
If a problem does not dissolve with increasing knowledge but only gets worse over time, it is a good indicator that this problem is very real.

Darwinists have to face the fact that a core prediction of their theory miserably failed an important empirical test."

( Günter Bechly, "The Demise of the Artifact Hypothesis", evolutionnews.org. emphasis added)

Günter Bechly is a German paleo-entomologist who specializes in the fossil history and systematics of insects (esp. dragonflies), the most diverse group of animals. He served as curator for amber and fossil insects in the department of paleontology at the State Museum of Natural History (SMNS) in Stuttgart, Germany. He is also a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Dr. Bechly earned his Ph.D. in geosciences from Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen, Germany.

He has authored or co-authored more than 160 scientific publications, including a co-edited and co-authored book published by Cambridge University Press and a German popular science book on evolution, as well as several book chapters (including three chapters in the latest and largest monograph on the Solnhofen fossil locality and the chapter on insect evolution and systematics in Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia).
He pioneered the phylogenetic re-classification of the insect order Odonata (dragonflies, damselflies, and their fossil relatives), made substantial contributions to the question of the evolutionary origin of insect wings, and rank among the world leading experts on fossil dragonflies and on fossil insects from the Solnhofen and Crato limestones.

He has discovered and described more than 180 new species (incl. three new insect orders), and 11 biological groups have been named as eponyms by other scientists in his honor.

I dont have time now for all of that butbscanning it
I note " if a few things.
1. You ignored most of what i asked
2. A lot of editorializing-" Darwinists ( use ofvthatvword is a tell)
have to face the fact"..." strategy to get rid of evidence"..." Darwinian evolution"..." finally put to rest"... etc.

3. Evolution news. Seriously? Do I have tomexplain why
nothing from DI AIG, and related creationist sites can be trusted?

Our friend Dr K Wise, PhD paleontology:
"...if all the evidence turned against yec, I would
still be yec, as that is what the bible seems to
say."

That would do splendidly as dictionary example of
intellectual dishonesty.
Guess where he works?
Intellectual dishonesty is written right into the
charter of those creationist organizations.

Something besides a gish from a creo- site will be
needed to make a case.

To original topic- I said there is no data contrary to
ToE.
I will add that it Nobel, its being hailed as the
greatest scientist of the age to disprove ToE.

We dont see that happening in any of the issues
described, which in total does what?
Identify areas for more research coz of scanty data?

Show us something from a respectable source.

 

[Job 33:6]

On fossils predating the Cambrian explosion, of which there are more and more being published on every year, though in defense of naysayers, these discoveries are relatively recent.

Why I don't believe in evolution...

 

[Buzzard3]

We also don't find a lot of pre-Cambrian life because the vast majority of pre-Cambrian life was softer than the harder organisms that came during and after the Cambrian Explosion, meaning they wouldn't fossilize well. Fossils form under specific circumstances. Those circumstances aren't met, the bones just go.

A theory that depends on assumed evidence that doesn't exist ... that's an interesting take on the scientific method, I must say.

 

[Buzzard3]

The theory of evolution DID predict a single tree of common descent, but that is an old school prediction that has been replaced with the bush of descent you so mention before.

What the difference between a phylogenetic "tree" and a phylogenetic "bush"?

 

[Buzzard3]

Almost like you are 'on a mission'. or witnessing or something

That sounds funny coming from an atheist whose only reason for being on a Christian site is to spread the godless gospel of evolution.

 

[Astrid]

A theory that depends on assumed evidence that doesn't (yet) exist ... that's an interesting take on the scientific method, I must say

Snarky mischaracterization is not very legit or amusing.

If you want a unique take on scientific method
and thinking you neednt,have looked past your
own cut n paste- talk of "proof ", say,
or the claim that only " algae" existed
(No animals) 150 million years after the first
sponges!
Its just garbage.

 

[Job 33:6]

So, demonstrably no animal biota existed 1 billion, 800 million, 560 million, and even 550 million years ago (the only remotely plausible candidates are the late Ediacaran jellyfish Haootia, the mollusk-like Kimberella, the worm-like Yilingia, and the possible lophophorate Namacalathus, which I will discuss in future articles). .

There are no precambrian animals! Except A,B,C,D, and E! But I talk about those later!

The article goes on to ignore Claudina and sinotubilites, undisputed and well known precambrian metazoan precursors to the Cambrian explosion.

In fact, micro fossil precursors have been discovered for at least a dozen precambrian metazoans now. Completely independent of ediacaran metazoans. 50 years ago these kinds of arguments against paleontology may have held some weight. Maybe even 20 or 30 years ago. But today they're just dated arguments. Usually made based on a lack of awareness of the growing mountain of microfossil publications pouring in.

It's unreasonable to speak of rock dating back 800 to 1 billion years old, because this is over 200 million years before the Cambrian explosion. It's an incredibly long amount of time. To find precursors, you would have to look, at the very least, at ages more recent than 700 mya. Because then we would at least be in the ballpark of the ediacaran. And of course it is between this 500mya to 700mya that the earliest metazoans are being continually found in recent times. To look at rocks of 800mya to 1 billion years old is like looking around in another country for your pet dog that went out the back door. It's good for scientific purposes to confirm a lack of metazoans wherever and whenever you can. But for purposes of understanding precursors of the Cambrian explosion, or even of ediacaran biota, it's almost meaningless because it's much too far back in time.

Meanwhile the 550 and 560 Mya noted in the article is precisely where fossil evidence is flooding in and virtually no paleontologist today would argue that there are no metazoan fossils in this age range. It's firmly established that there are many (not even considering the ediacaran).

Small shelly fauna - Wikipedia

 

[Astrid]

That sounds funny coming from an atheist whose only reason for being on a Christian site is to spread the godless gospel of evolution.

Thus you exit even any pretense of an actual discussion.

 

[Buzzard3]

Ive never heard of " disparity / diversity " as a thing
in evolution.

Species diversity vs. morphological disparity in the light of evolutionary developmental biology - PubMed

 

[Shemjaza]

Species diversity vs. morphological disparity in the light of evolutionary developmental biology - PubMed

Wow!

People are studying evolution! This changed everything!

Do you have a specific point, or is this a variation on:
"I you don't know everything, then you don't know anything, and you have to accept my ideas with no evidence at all."

 

[Buzzard3]

Evolution news. Seriously? Do I have tomexplain why
nothing from DI AIG, and related creationist sites can be trusted?

What about the independant scientists whose work they quote in support of their views? Are you going to dismiss them as well?

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

"[A] great variety and abundance of animal fossils appear in deposits dating from a geologically brief interval between about 530 to 520 Ma, early in the Cambrian period. During this time, nearly all the major living animal groups (phyla) that have skeletons first appeared as fossils (at least one appeared earlier). Surprisingly, a number of those localities have yielded fossils that preserve details of complex organs at the tissue level, such as eyes, guts, and appendages. In addition, several groups that were entirely soft-bodied and thus could be preserved only under unusual circumstances also first appear in those faunas. Because many of those fossils represent complex groups such as vertebrates (the subgroup of the phylum Chordata to which humans belong) and arthropods, it seems likely that all or nearly all the major phylum-level groups of living animals, including many small soft-bodied groups that we do not actually find as fossils, had appeared by the end of the early Cambrian. This geologically abrupt and spectacular record of early animal life is called the Cambrian explosion." (Douglas Erwin and James Valentine, "The Cambrian Explosion", p. 5)


“The most conspicuous event in metazoan evolution was the dramatic origin of major new structures and body plans documented by the Cambrian explosion. Until 530 million years ago, multicellular animals consisted primarily of simple, soft-bodied forms, most of which have been identified from the fossil record as cnidarians and sponges. Then, WITHIN LESS THAN 10 MILLION YEARS, almost all of the advanced phyla appeared, including echinoderms, chordates, annelids, brachiopods, molluscs and a host of arthropods. The extreme speed of anatomical change and adaptive radiation during THIS BRIEF TIME PERIOD REQUIRES EXPLANATIONS THAT GO BEYOND THOSE PROPOSED FOR THE EVOLUTION OF SPECIES WITHIN THE MODERN BIOTA.” (Robert L. Carroll, “Towards a new evolutionary synthesis,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol. 15: 27-32 (January, 2000), emphasis added.)


"An analysis by MIT geochronologist Samuel Bowring has shown that the main pulse of Cambrian morphological innovation occurred in a sedimentary sequence spanning NO MORE THAN 6 MILLION YEARS. Yet during this time representatives of AT LEAST SIXTEEN COMPLETELY NOVEL PHYLA AND ABOUT THIRTY CLASSES first appeared in the rock record. In a more recent paper using a slightly different dating scheme, Douglas Erwin and colleagues similarly show that THIRTEEN NEW PHYLA APPEAR IN A ROUGHLY appear in a roughly 6-MILLION-YEAR WINDOW."
(Stephen Meyer, "Darwin's Doubt", p. 73. emphasis added)

The Cambrian explosion was far shorter than we thought published 2019

The Cambrian explosion is one of the most important intervals in the history of life.

Now, new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) is revealing that this explosion was far shorter than many experts had thought.

What was the Cambrian explosion?
The Cambrian explosion happened more than 500 million years ago. It was when most of the major animal groups started to appear in the fossil record, a time of rapid expansion of different forms of life on Earth.

While there has been a lot of research into exactly when the Cambrian explosion kicked off, little has been done to nail down when this burst of evolution ended.

Evolution during the Cambrain
Dr Greg Edgecombe, Merit Researcher at the Museum and co-author of the study, has been using the diversification of trilobites to uncover precisely how long the Cambrian explosion went on for.

His work shows that this burst of evolution may have only occurred for around 20 million years - actually very brief in the grand scheme of Earth's history.
(Emphasis is my own)

Also, do you know how long a million years is? It's a LONG TIME. More than enough time for evolution to occur, and it there's an ecological niche that needs filling, it will be filled.

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

"According to Gaines et al. (2012),
“Burgess Shale−type biotas occur globally in the Cambrian record and offer unparalleled insight into the Cambrian explosion, the initial Phanerozoic radiation of the Metazoa. Deposits bearing exceptionally preserved soft-bodied fossils are unusually common in Cambrian strata; more than 40 are now known.”

Thus, we definitely should expect to find the postulated ancestors of the Cambrian animal phyla in Burgess Shale-type localities of the preceding Ediacaran era. The artifact hypothesis suggested that there are no such localities. However, in the past years several fossiliferous Burgess Shale-type (BST) biota from the Ediacaran have been discovered:

Pusa Shale of Spain (Brasier et al. 1979, Jensen & Palacios 2016)

Chopoghlu Shale / Soltanieh Formation of northern Iran (Ford & Breed 1972)

Khatyspyt Formation of Siberia (Grazhdankin et al. 2008)

Miaohe biota of southern China (Xiao et al. 2002, Tang et al. 2008, Ye et al. 2017)

Lantian biota of southern China (Yuan et al. 2011, 2013)

Jinxian biota of northern China (Luo et al. 2016)

Zuun-Arts biota of western Mongolia (Dornbos et al. 2016, Hassell et al. 2017)

Guess What?
None of these Ediacaran biotas yielded any uncontroversial fossil record of animals! Especially important are the vast deposits of the Miaohe and Lantian biotas in China and the Zuun-arts biota in Mongolia, which both lack any bilaterian animals and only yielded fossil algae and problematic organisms ...

Even the most recent study by Daley et al. (2018), which very unsuccessfully (Bechly 2018a) tried to downplay the abruptness of the Cambrian explosion, acknowledged that these new localities have proven that fossil animals are not just unknown from the Ediacaran because of preservation issues but because they definitely did not yet exist. Daley et al. discussed all the above-mentioned Burgess Shale-type localities from the Ediacaran and concluded that the “modes of fossil preservation are comparable in the Cambrian and Precambrian.”
In their abstract they affirmed that: “BSTs from the latest Ediacaran Period (e.g., Miaohe biota, 550 Ma) are abundantly fossiliferous with algae but completely lack animals, which are also missing from other Ediacaran windows, such as phosphate deposits (e.g., Doushantuo, 560 Ma)”" ...

continued in next post ...

... continued from previous post:

From the Royal Society

Now, a new study by Anderson et al. (2020), published in a Royal Society journal, analyzed microfossils from a 1-billion-year-old and two 800-million-year-old localities in Russia, Svalbard, and Canada, which also belong to the Burgess Shale type and thus could preserve early soft-bodied animals. The authors conclude in their abstract: “These deposits lack metazoan fossils even though they share fossilization conditions with younger BST deposits that are capable of preserving non-mineralizing metazoans. Thus metazoans, at least those typically preserved in BST deposits, were probably absent from sedimentary environments before approximately 800 Ma.”

Here is what Demming (2020) commented about this new study: “The results suggest the same processes preserved pre-Cambrian microbes as later larger animals. ‘So the fact that there are no animals in the 800-million-year-old rocks, even though they’ve got the same type of preservation — all you find there are bacteria or the algae analyzed — that would suggest that animals really haven’t evolved at that time,’ says Anderson.”

So, demonstrably no animal biota existed 1 billion, 800 million, 560 million, and even 550 million years ago (the only remotely plausible candidates are the late Ediacaran jellyfish Haootia, the mollusk-like Kimberella, the worm-like Yilingia, and the possible lophophorate Namacalathus, which I will discuss in future articles). But in the lowermost Cambrian, 537 million years ago, there were already complex arthropod body plans with exoskeleton, articulated legs, and compound eyes (Daley et al. 2018), as well as many other bilaterian animal phyla. TO DENY THAT THIS IS A MAJOR PROBLEM FOR DARWINIAN EVOLUTION IS ABSURD.

Finally Put to Rest

We can conclude that the artifact hypothesis, which was nothing but an ad hoc strategy to get rid of conflicting evidence, can finally be put to rest for good. The absence of Ediacaran fossils of putative precursors of the Cambrian animal phyla is not an artifact of undersampling or an artifact of taphonomy, but simply reflecting the fact that there were no such organisms living in this period. With increasing paleontological research and better knowledge of the Proterozoic fossil record, the Cambrian explosion has turned out to be even more abrupt than was previously thought (Bechly 2018a).
If a problem does not dissolve with increasing knowledge but only gets worse over time, it is a good indicator that this problem is very real.

Darwinists have to face the fact that a core prediction of their theory miserably failed an important empirical test."

( Günter Bechly, "The Demise of the Artifact Hypothesis", evolutionnews.org. emphasis added)

Günter Bechly is a German paleo-entomologist who specializes in the fossil history and systematics of insects (esp. dragonflies), the most diverse group of animals. He served as curator for amber and fossil insects in the department of paleontology at the State Museum of Natural History (SMNS) in Stuttgart, Germany. He is also a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Dr. Bechly earned his Ph.D. in geosciences from Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen, Germany.

He has authored or co-authored more than 160 scientific publications, including a co-edited and co-authored book published by Cambridge University Press and a German popular science book on evolution, as well as several book chapters (including three chapters in the latest and largest monograph on the Solnhofen fossil locality and the chapter on insect evolution and systematics in Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia).
He pioneered the phylogenetic re-classification of the insect order Odonata (dragonflies, damselflies, and their fossil relatives), made substantial contributions to the question of the evolutionary origin of insect wings, and rank among the world leading experts on fossil dragonflies and on fossil insects from the Solnhofen and Crato limestones.

He has discovered and described more than 180 new species (incl. three new insect orders), and 11 biological groups have been named as eponyms by other scientists in his honor.

Why do you not include the links to any of your sources so that people can check them out for ourselves?

Also, I see nothing in there that disputes what I said. Although I do see that you used evolutionnews.org as a source, which is an incredibly biased website that takes a full on anti-evolution stance, so using that is suspect to begin with.

 

[Warden_of_the_Storm]

A theory that depends on assumed evidence that doesn't exist ... that's an interesting take on the scientific method, I must say.

It's not a take, it's me stating the obvious from the record and the fact that soft tissues of a body decompose rapidly in environments not conducive to fossilization. Aquatic environments are even worse because they are more prone to rapid fluctuations due to tides, storms, etc, not to mention scavengers.

What the difference between a phylogenetic "tree" and a phylogenetic "bush"?

Technically, a bush if just a small tree with more branches than trunk, and that is what we see in biology.

Notice how there's a large split right on the trunk between bacteria, archaea and eukaryota? It's not a huge difference to a tree, but is more reflective of the genetic evidence we see in biology.

 

[Buzzard3]

Notice how there's a large split right on the trunk between bacteria, archaea and eukaryota? It's not a huge difference to a tree, but is more reflective of the genetic evidence we see in biology.

What one needs to be aware of is that phylogenetic trees presented by Darwinists may contain branches that are inferred, not the actual evidence of fossils. Sometimes the inferred branches are made obvious by the author, but quite often they're not, which results in a misleading diagram.

 

[Buzzard3]

Deleted

 

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The Cambrian explosion was far shorter than we thought published 2019

The Cambrian explosion is one of the most important intervals in the history of life.

Now, new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) is revealing that this explosion was far shorter than many experts had thought.

What was the Cambrian explosion?
The Cambrian explosion happened more than 500 million years ago. It was when most of the major animal groups started to appear in the fossil record, a time of rapid expansion of different forms of life on Earth.

While there has been a lot of research into exactly when the Cambrian explosion kicked off, little has been done to nail down when this burst of evolution ended.

Evolution during the Cambrain
Dr Greg Edgecombe, Merit Researcher at the Museum and co-author of the study, has been using the diversification of trilobites to uncover precisely how long the Cambrian explosion went on for.

His work shows that this burst of evolution may have only occurred for around 20 million years - actually very brief in the grand scheme of Earth's history.
(Emphasis is my own)

Also, do you know how long a million years is? It's a LONG TIME. More than enough time for evolution to occur, and it there's an ecological niche that needs filling, it will be filled.

The time span of is the least of the problems the Cambrian explosion poses for Darwinism.