Another living fossil has been discovered, described and now videoed by a retired professor of biology. Can it be long now until creationists start to claim this falsifies evolution?
"Living fossils" are an artifact of the way we classify species and higher taxonomic groups. Typically it means they are a member, as this baby is, of a group or branch of the evolutionary tree that we had previously thought had no living members.
They are not the "same" organisms as lived 11 or 30 million years ago, or whatever. The species that are found in the fossil record are almost always going to be extinct. Suppose all mammals had gone extinct except one, a field mouse, perhaps. The intelligent cephalopods that rule the earth's taxonomic enterprise 20 million years from now would declare it a "living fossil", even though, as would be highly likely given the speciation rates of rodents, it was not the same species (or even the same genus or family) as any that live now.
Other living fossils such as the famous coelocanth, the Wollemi pine, or the horseshoe crab are all distinct species than the ones that were once alive to be recorded in the fossil beds.
When creationists loudly claim this falsifies the unfalsifiable theory of evolution (consistency not being a strong suit in creationist thinking), they are demonstrating that they really, really, really don't understand evolution, which comes as a surprise only to those who have never encountered them before.
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The headline reads, "Retired Professor Captures a "Living Fossil" on Video".
I can't be the only person to think, "Aha! So the `fossil' was in his office the whole time!"