so why you cant answer my question? again: where is the limit of pushing a creaure appearance back? 30 my? 50? you must define a limit. otherwise any fossil will fit well with evolution.
Before, I answer, let's look at how the fossil record matches your claim of what happened. Well, that is going to be pretty hard, since you won't tell us what you are arguing for. Why not? How can you spend months on end telling us that you think we got it wrong without telling us what you think is right?
Do you believe all creatures were created about 600 million years ago? Do you believe that creatures were created progressively over hundreds of millions of years? Or do you believe they were all created in 4004 BC? Or do you have some other view? Let's see your view on the table, and then we will judge how well the fossil record matches your view.
Now back to our view. First, I don't think you understand how scientists see the history of life. We do not believe that it was a steady progression to modern life, with all the intermediates dying out as the new ones came on the scene. Neither do we expect that all species that ever existed will be found as fossils. Rather we see that finds will be hit or miss, with many species never documented. We expect that we will be lucky to get what we find. We expect that we will be more likely to find a cousin of an ancestor than to find the ancestors. We expect that we will see animals with an intermediate body plan long after new species have evolved from them with new features. We will suspect that evolution will branch in many directions, and it will be sometimes hard to find which paths led to later life and which went extinct. We expect that sometimes different strands will converge on similar plans.
We also expect the oldest life will be simple, and that life will branch out as time goes on. We expect that life will become closer to modern life as time progresses. We expect that no form of life will be found in the fossil record long before the rest of the record indicates that such forms would be possible.
And we find the fossil record is remarkably close to what we expect, with all of the many thousands of fossils consistent with our view. Now please state what your view is of the history of life, and what we should expect to see in the fossil record. Then we will see how close the record matches your expectations based on your view of the history of life.
Now I will make an attempt at answering the question you asked to Pitabread. It depends on the fossil, but some finds would be truly startling. A human found 5 million years earlier than expected would be earthshattering. A member of the modern Equus (horse, zebra) genus found 20 million years early would be startling. A mammal found 100 million years before the first mammal would drop jaws. A camel in the Cambrian would send scientists scrambling. But this is not what we find. After many thousands of finds we find every single fossil consistent with evolution as understood in my paragraphs above. Your early whale fossil is no where close to being a problem for evolution. It is totally consistent with the cousin-of-ancestor and surviving-intermediates points I made above.
Caveat: The above dates are my educated guesses. Others may differ on the dates I give.
Evolution makes real claims and finds the record in remarkable concordance with its predictions. You, well you have not even made a claim yet. One would think you would need to do that before you nitpick at fossils a few percent off the age range we initially expected.
