A tropical salamander |
Frogs, toads, salamanders and caecilians are all amphibians, scale-less vertebrates able to live on both land and in the water. There are about 4,000 different species.
Because amphibians are able to live on land as well as in the water, evolutionists have claimed that they are a “transitional form” in the movement of vertebrate life from water to land.
According to the evolutionist scenario, fish first evolved into amphibians, which later developed into reptiles. But there is no proof for this. Not a single fossil has been found that proves that a half-fish or a half-amphibian ever lived.
In this book, Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution, the noted evolutionist writer Robert L. Carroll says that in fact, we have no fossils of any intermediate form between early amphibians and rhipidistian fish.16
Colbert and Morales, evolutionist paleontologists, make the following comment on the amphibians’ three classes—frogs, salamanders and caecilians.
There is no evidence of any Paleozoic amphibians combining the characteristics that would be expected in a single common ancestor. The oldest known frogs, salamanders, and caecilians are very similar to their living descendants.17
Up until about 60 years ago, an extinct fossilized fish called the Coelacanth, estimated to be 410 million years old, was touted in evolutionist sources as the transitional form between fish and amphibians. But the fact that this fish, still alive and anatomically unchanged was caught in the Indian Ocean invalidated these evolutionist claims. (See Coelacanth.)
In the evolutionist scenario, the second stage is the evolution of amphibians to reptiles and their movement from the water to the land. But there is no solid fossil discovery to support this claim. On the contrary, there remain very great physiological and anatomical differences between amphibians and reptiles.
For example, take the structure of the eggs of the two different species. Amphibians lay their eggs in water. Their eggs have a very permeable, transparent membrane and a gelatin-like consistency that allows them to develop in water. But because reptiles lay their eggs on the ground, they are designed for a dry climate. Reptile eggs are amniotic with a strong rubbery shell that admits air, but keeps water out. For this reason, the fluid needed by the young is stored within until they hatch.
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| The Difference Between the Eggs of an Amphibian and a Reptile One of the inconsistencies in the scenario of amphibian-reptile evolution lies in the structure of their eggs. Amphibian eggs develop in water, have a jelly-like structure and are covered in a porous membrane. Reptile eggs, on the other hand, have a hard structure that’s impermeable to water, but appropriate to conditions on land—as you can see from the dinosaur egg reconstruction to the right. For an amphibian to turn into a reptile, its eggs need to become fully reptilian. Yet the slightest error in such a transition will lead to that particular species becoming extinct. |
If amphibian eggs were laid on the ground, they would soon dry out, and the embryos inside would die. This poses a problem for any evolutionist explanation of how reptiles evolved in stages from amphibians: For the very first amphibians to begin living entirely on land, their eggs would have had to transform into amniotic eggs within a single generation. How this switch could have suddenly occurred cannot be explained by the evolutionist mechanisms of natural selection and mutation.
Again, the fossil record leaves the origins of reptiles with no evolutionist explanation. The noted evolutionist paleontologist, Robert L. Carroll, admits this in an article entitled “Problems of the Origin of Reptiles”:
Unfortunately not a single specimen of an appropriate reptilian ancestor is known prior to the appearance of true reptiles. The absence of such ancestral forms leaves many problems of the amphibian-reptilian transition unanswered.18
The same fact is admitted by the late evolutionist paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, of Harvard University: “
No fossil amphibian seems clearly ancestral to the lineage of fully terrestrial vertebrates (reptiles, birds, and mammals).”19 (See
Movement from Water to land, the.)
16 Robert L. Carroll, Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution, New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1988, p. 304.
17 Edwin H. Colbert, M. Morales, Evolution of the Vertebrates, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1991, p. 99.
18 Robert L. Carroll, “Problems of the Origin of Reptiles,” Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Vol. 44. p. 393.
19 Stephen Jay Gould, “Eight (or Fewer) Little Piggies,” Natural History, No. 1, Jan 1991, Vol. 100, p. 25.
