oldest living species

Glenn Morton (grmorton@mail.isource.net)
Mon, 01 Sep 1997 15:33:11 -0500

The global flood model requires that the animals in the fossil record to
have died in the flood. This means that they were inhabitants of the
pre-flood world. Most global flood advocates believe that the animals in the
pre-flood world were placed on the ark in order to be saved. The global
flood model would therefore predict that the animals we see today,
descendants of the ark occupants, should also be found in the fossil record.
However, this is not what we find. We find that very few of the living
species are represented in the fossil record.

I just completed an analysis of the fossil animals listed in the book Donald
E. Savage and Donald E. Russell, Mammalian Paleofaunas of the World.
I combined this with the list of living mammals found at

http://nmnhwww.si.edu/msw/

and a few hundred other fossil species listed in several other books. In
doing this, we find that there were at least 12455 species of mammals,
living and dead. There are 4631 living mammalian species, and 7824 extinct
mammalian species listed in the above books. This means that there are more
extinct mammalian species than living. But even more interesting is the
implications of the data to the global flood. Only 267 species of the 4631
are listed as fossils! If the global flood view is correct this means that
there are only 267 survivors from the pre-flood world. It also means that
these 267 survivors had to give rise to the 4631 species of today's world,
which are not found in the fossil record. In anyone's book, this data would
require lots of evolution!

As one goes back into the past, there are fewer and fewer living species
found as fossils. The data is as follows:

Recent 4631(including species which went extinct in historical times)
Pleistocene 256
Pliocene 69
Miocene 2

The two living species found in the Miocene are the carnivore Callorhinus
ursinus and the bat, Rhinolophus ferrum-equinum.

The final implication of the data is that other than these (aggregate 267
species), ALL species found in the fossil record are different from those
living today. The number of extinct species found in the various epochs of
the Tertiary are:

Pleistocene 786
Pliocene 1119
Miocene 2988
Oligocene 1282
Eocene 1819
Paleocene 604

The average species is only found in one of these epochs. This implies that
the fauna almost entirely turns over with the passing of each epoch. This
is another difficulty for the global flood--explaining why different forms
are deposited in the various layers, inspite of the fact that most ecozones
are represented in each epoch.

glenn

Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm