Richard William Nelson
[Originally published in 2014 as Daohugou Biota]
Over the past two decades, a treasure trove of fossils has been unearthed in China. Some of the world’s most exquisitely preserved feathered dinosaurs, birds, reptiles, and mammals have been recovered near the quiet northeastern China village of Daohugou.
Chinese farmers first discovered the trove near this Inner Mongolian village in 1998. The following summer, two distinct salamander species were recovered. Since then, the now-famous fossil site has been named the Daohugou Biota and has yielded more than 30 different vertebrate taxa (groups). The treasure trove of scientific evidence, however, further upends Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution “by means of natural selection.”
New Evidence, Old Problem
In March of 2014, a research team headed by Corwin Sullivan of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, China, published a benchmark review of two decades of research on the Daohugou Biota entitled “The vertebrates of the Jurassic Daohugou Biota of northeastern China” in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The “Daohugou Biota vertebrate specimens are typically preserved in fine-grained lacustrine beds and often retain feathers and other soft-tissue features,” according to Sullivan. Geologically just above the Daohugou Biota is a similar, yet different, layer of vertebrates known as the Jehol Biota.
In a Science Daily interview, Sullivan notes “The Daohugou Biota gives us a look at a rarely glimpsed side of the Middle to Late Jurassic — not a parade of galumphing giants, but an assemblage of quirky little creatures like feathered dinosaurs, pterosaurs with ‘advanced’ heads on ‘primitive’ bodies, and the Mesozoic equivalent of a flying squirrel.”
The article notes the impressive preservation of “complete or nearly-complete skeletons associated with preserved soft tissues such as feathers, fur, skin or even, in some of the salamanders, external gills.”
Dinosaur researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, Paul Barrett, who was not involved with the study, commented,
Daohugou is proving to be one of the key sites for understanding the evolution of feathered dinosaurs, early mammals, and flying reptiles, due largely to the fantastic levels of preservation. Many of the fossils are stunning and offer vast amounts of information. There are only a handful of similar sites elsewhere in the world and this article represents the first comprehensive attempt to draw all of the relevant information together into a single benchmark paper.
Because the Daohugou Biota lies below the much better-studied Jehol Biota, the similarity “they give paleontologists an outstanding, even unique, opportunity to study changes in the fauna of this region over a significant span of geological time,” according to ScienceDaily.
“The Cretaceous feathered dinosaurs of northeastern China have been astonishing paleontologists and the public for almost two decades now,” Sullivan further remarked, “and the Daohugou Biota preserves their Jurassic counterparts in the same region. As prequels go, it’s pretty exciting.”
“It is a time when a lot of interesting things are happening,” paleontologist David Hone of the Queen Mary University of London added in a telephone interview. “We’ve got feathered dinosaurs. We’ve got weird mammals. We’ve got fish. We’ve got lizards. We’ve got all this wonderful, wonderful stuff.”
“You’ve got a bunch of very bird-like dinosaurs. We do not yet have a definitive bird there,” Hone said. “It’s the best possible place we have got anywhere to find a true bird older than Archaeopteryx. That will be the place.”
Missing Links Still Missing
After nearly two decades of investigating the Daohugou Biota, however, an ancestral Archaeopteryx transitional form remains a mystery. According to Eugene V. Koonin, Senior Investigator National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Library of Medicine, “The general lack of transitional forms between species in the fossil record is a constant theme in evolutionary biology.”
The fossil record points to stasis — not evolution.
In his book, The Logic of Chance, the Nature, and Origin of Biological Evolution (2011), Koonin points out that even “[Stephen] J Gould and [Niles] Eldridge collected extensive evidence indicating that the history of the great majority of animal species, as reflected in the fossil record, represents mostly stasis−that is the virtual lack of change.”
The “extensive accumulation of paleontological data in the twentieth century,” Koonin concedes, “helped very little, if at all.” Koonin’s conclusion is further reinforced by Sullivan’s extensive examination of the Daohugou Biota treasure trove.
The hint of uncovering a possible transitional form appears only once in Sullivan’s report: “The scansoriopterygids Epidendrosaurus and Epidexipteryx are also the oldest known avialans, and this apparently endemic clade may represent a short-lived, localized evolutionary experiment near the base of the avialan tree.”
Discovering any transitional forms to formulate Darwin’s tree of life theory has long been a problem. As Darwin acknowledged in The Origin of Species,
The distinctiveness of specific forms and their not being blended together in innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty.
At the time, Darwin safely secured his theory arguing that “only a small portion of the surface of the earth has been geologically explored, and no part with sufficient care” — a legitimate argument in 1859. This argument, however, now certainly stands as irrelevant.
Even avant-garde atheist, Richard Dawkins, has abandoned the fossil record. “We need more fossils” Dawkins pleaded in his 2009 book entitled The Greatest Show on Earth. In turning a fossil record blind eye Dawkins turns to advance a more abstract concept − “comparative evidence” –
Comparative evidence has always, as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, told even more compelling than fossil evidence.
For Dawkins, the fossil record is now irrelevant: “We don’t need fossils in order to demonstrate that evolution is a fact.” For Dawkins, evolution is true because it is true−ideological circular reasoning at its best. At least Darwin was more realistic:
“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ exists which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, Darwin concluded, “my theory would absolutely break down.”
Genesis
The scientific evidence from the Daohugou Biota remains compatible with the Genesis account for the origin of species − rather than any theory of evolution. Over the past 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species, the scientific evidence from the fossil record has been a colossal failure in advancing the theory of evolution.
Evidence for common ancestry and transitional links from the fossil record to validate the theory of evolution scientifically still remains speculative.
