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Jurassic Beaver?
Feb 2
According to conventional evolutionary thinking, the earliest mammals were small, primitive, shrew-like creatures that did not begin to explore the world's varied environments until the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.
But scientists reported that they have uncovered fossils of a swimming, fish-eating mammal that lived in China the same time as the dinosaurs, well before evolutionist thought that some mammals could have spent much of their lives in water. This, of course, would not be a problem for conventional creation thinking that mammals and dinosaurs were created on day 6 of the creation week.
The species appears to have had a broad, scaly tail, flat like a beaver's. It's sharp teeth seemed ideal for eating fish, like an otter's. Its likely lifestyle--burrowing in tunnels on shore and dog-paddling in water--reminds scientists of the modern day Beaver or Otter. (If it looks like a Otter or Beaver perhaps it is an Otter or Beaver).
Its skeleton suggests that it was about 20 inches long, from snout to the tip of its tail, about the length of a small house cat.
The surprising discovery, made in the abundant fossil beds of Liaoning Province, China, was reported in the journal Science by an international team led by Ji Qiang of Nanjing University.
In the article, Ji and other researchers from the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh said the fossil skeleton showed that some mammals occupied more diverse ecological niches than had been suspected during the age of the dinosaurs.
Thomas Martin, an authority on early mammals at Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, said the find pushed back "the mammalian conquest of the waters by more than 100 million years" and "impressively contradicts" the conventional view.
"This exciting fossil," he wrote in a commentary accompanying the report, "is a further jigsaw puzzle piece in a series of recent discoveries, demonstrating that the diversity and early evolutionary history of mammals were much more complex than perceived less than a decade ago."
However if Thomas Martin based his authority on scripture, it would not come as a surprise that such an animal would not only live among dinosaurs, but would reveal complexity, since God created fully formed complex creatures such as Beavers and Otters.
Zhe-Xi Luo, one of the discoverers and the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie museum, said the specimen was well preserved, unlike the surviving fragments of bone and tooth of most mammals from the dinosaur age.
The skeleton is accompanied by fur and scale imprints and the suggestion of soft-tissue webbing in the hind limbs. Luo said the fur was to keep water from the animal's skin. The scientists said the tail and limbs of the newfound specimen were well developed for aquatic life.
"We have been seeing mammals at that time that were larger than a mouse or rat, some that climbed trees, and now we see some that could swim in water," Meng said.
Book speaker Larry Dye “the Creation Guy” for creation presentations at you Church or organization.
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