Ediacaran: A False Intermediate-Form Fauna

The rocks that generally underlie the Cambrian rocks are simply called Precambrian rocks. Some are thousands of feet thick, and many are undisturbed-perfectly suitable for the preservation of fossils. If it is possible to find fossils of microscopic, single-celled, soft-bodied bacteria and algae, it should certainly be possible to find fossils of the transitional forms between those organisms and the complex invertebrates. Many billions times billions of the intermediates would have lived and died during the vast stretch of time required for the evolution of such a diversity of complex organisms. The world's museums should be bursting at the seams with enormous collections of the fossils of transitional forms. As a matter of fact, not a single such fossil has ever been found! Right from the start, jellyfish have been jellyfish, trilobites have been trilobites, sponges have been sponges, and snails have been snails. Furthermore, not a single fossil has been found linking, say, clams and snails, sponges and jellyfish, or trilobites and crabs… 23 (Duane T. Gish, Ph.D. in Biochemistry from University of California at Berkeley)

Ediacaran fauna represents multi-celled organisms that lived in the pre-Cambrian, between 620 and 543 million years ago. Fossils discovered on the Ediacara hills in Australia, and dating back some 600 million years to the late pre-Cambrian, were regarded as a ray of hope for evolutionists who had failed to obtain any results from previous excavations. Evolutionists sought to interpret the variety observed in multi-celled Ediacaran organisms as an evolutionary process that extended to Cambrian life forms.

Examples of Ediacaran life forms: Far left: Dickinsonia Bottom left and drawing on left: Kimberella Drawing on bottom right and the fossil beside it: Spriggnia

Modern evolutionist scientists claimed that these fossils could be used to account for the Cambrian Period, and they came up with various theories. However, none of the efforts they made along these lines could be proven with any scientific findings, and remained hollow.

The fossils discovered in 1946 by the Australian geologist Reginald Spriggs in the Ediacara Hills in Australia's Flinders Mountains dated back 580 to 560 million years. Scientists gave the name "Ediacaran" to this geological period preceding the Paleozoic. Some multi-celled Ediacaran organisms that appeared suddenly during this period were regarded with great excitement as intermediate forms by evolutionist scientists. Because of these fossils' proximity in time to the Cambrian period, evolutionists took them to be of great importance.

Following the discovery in Australia of many fossils from this period, specimens from the same age were found in Southern Namibia, Russia, Great Britain, Sweden, Canada and America as well. Thorough examination of all these fossils showed that the 16 or so different species found in the Ediacara strata had left behind no remains of their hard tissues.24 To put it another way, these creatures were entirely soft-bodied.

Darwinists maintain that supposedly, the ancestors of Cambrian life forms left no traces behind because they were soft-tissued. Yet the earliest fossils of bacteria, dating back 3.5 billion years, totally do away with these deceptive evolutionist claims.

It is true that a wide variety of multi-celled organisms emerged suddenly in Ediacaran-period strata, immediately following after the pre-Cambrian. However, their forms were completely unique and different from those of the later Cambrian life forms. Unlike Cambrian life forms, they had no hard tissues, no complex structures and organs. They were generally shaped like ferns, pouches or discs. These organisms had various sensory extensions, but no apparent head sections or respiratory, nervous or digestive systems. They had no complex physiological systems, and their features are generally unclear.

The fact that these multi-cellular organisms emerged immediately before the Cambrian led to their being the subjects of considerable speculation. Every evolutionist scientist trying to account for Cambrian life forms looked for an ancestor by formulating a theory on Ediacaran life forms.

For example, the evolutionist paleontologist Martin Glaessner and his colleagues claimed that in this fauna, they could detect certain features belonging to present-day phyla, but that these fossilized remains were not sufficiently well preserved to be able to identify their characteristics.

Another evolutionist, Adolf Seilacher, believed that jellyfish would have been preserved as depressions in the sand. The Ediacaran jellyfish, however, appeared as bumps on the undersides of sandstone beds. In his view, this implied that those animals lived on the bottom mud rather that floating in the water.25 For Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University, these fossils were unsuccessful "experiments" that had taken place during the transition to the great variety of species in the Cambrian.

For the Oregon University paleontologist Gregory Retallack, the Ediacaran fossils were not even animals. In his opinion, they were probably lichens-symbiotic species emerging from fungi and algae living together. They were able to feed by way of photosynthesis and their impressions were preserved in sandstones up to 5 kilometers deep.26

As we have seen, there was no consensus even among evolutionists regarding the Ediacaran Period. What really matters is that none o

f these claims provides any explanation for the sudden, later explosion of life that occurred during the Cambrian. None provided any clues as to where the supposed ancestors of Cambrian life forms had been. In addition, they gave no account of the origin of these new forms of Ediacaran fauna, which are described in so very different terms from Cambrian life forms. For that reason, Ediacaran species actually represent another major difficulty for evolutionists, rather than any ray of hope.

The University of California at Berkeley, Museum of Paleontology website says this about the creatures of the period:

The question of what these fossils are is still not settled to everyone's satisfaction; at various times they have been considered algae, lichens, giant protozoans, or even a separate kingdom of life unrelated to anything living today. Some of these fossils are simple blobs that are hard to interpret and could represent almost anything. Some are most like cnidarians, worms, or soft-bodied relatives of the arthropods. Others are less easy to interpret and may belong to extinct phyla. But besides the fossils of soft bodies, Vendian rocks contain trace fossils, probably made by wormlike animals slithering over mud.27

For evolutionists still speculating about a few fossils belonging to Ediacaran fauna, the situation became even more precarious when fossils from the Ediacaran began being found in other parts of the world. The newly discovered fossils exhibit more complex features than the former ones, yet it is still impossible to link these to Cambrian life forms. This only emphasizes that a great variety of new species emerged during the period in question.