A new fossil bat, unearthed in the U.S. state of Wyoming in 2003 and estimated to be 52 million years old, is being used as a tool for evolutionist propaganda. The well-preserved fossil, known as Onychonycteris finneyi, was announced in the 14 February 2008 issue of Nature magazine by a team of researchers from the American Museum of Natural History, the Royal Museum in Ontario, Canada and the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany. It says that the interesting thing about the fossil is that, unlike present-day bats, its ear morphology suggests that it had no echolocation abilities and had claws on all digits. Present-day bats, on the other hand, have claws on only two digits of each hand. In addition, the hind legs of Onychonycteris finneyi are relatively much longer than its forearms than is the case with present-day bats. Its sternum indicates that it was able to fly under its own power. Its teeth are similar to those of bats alive today and show that it mainly fed on insects.
A new fossil bat, unearthed in the U.S. state of Wyoming in 2003 and estimated to be 52 million years old, is being used as a tool for evolutionist propaganda. The well-preserved fossil, known as Onychonycteris finneyi, was announced in the 14 February 2008 issue of Nature magazine by a team of researchers from the American Museum of Natural History, the Royal Museum in Ontario, Canada and the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany. It says that the interesting thing about the fossil is that, unlike present-day bats, its ear morphology suggests that it had no echolocation abilities and had claws on all digits. Present-day bats, on the other hand, have claws on only two digits of each hand. In addition, the hind legs of Onychonycteris finneyi are relatively much longer than its forearms than is the case with present-day bats. Its sternum indicates that it was able to fly under its own power. Its teeth are similar to those of bats alive today and show that it mainly fed on insects.
In terms of features in and around its ears, Onychonycteris finneyi lacked an echolocation, or sonar system used by bats to perceive their surroundings and for hunting, and evolutionists have used this as a starting point for speculating in favor of their theory. Evolutionists portray this fossil, in fact an indication of the great variety of bats with their perfect physical structures, as a more primitive form of present-day bats. The media organs making reports on the subject have claimed that the fossil “solves evolution poser” and “is a missing link between bats and their non-flying ancestors.”
However, concepts such as “bat evolution” and “the missing link” are nothing more than evolutionist “labeling” tactics. Bats, with their highly complex physiology and fossil specimens revealing that they have in fact remained unchanged for millions of years, totally refute evolution. The discovery in question does not change this fact by any means.
Bats refute the idea of the gradual development of echolocation
The complex echolocation system possessed by bats is their most interesting characteristic. Thanks to this system, bats are able to fly and perform the most amazing acrobatic maneuvers in the pitch dark, without being able to see anything at all. They are capable of locating and catching a caterpillar in a lightless chamber.
This system works by the animal emitting a constant stream of high-frequency sounds, analyzing the reflected echoes and thus conducting a highly detailed analysis of its surroundings. It achieves this at an extraordinary speed and in a flawless manner as it flies through the air.
Research on bats’ echolocation system has revealed even more astonishing findings. The spectrum of frequencies the animal is capable of hearing is a very narrow one, meaning it can only perceive sounds of a particular frequency. This would normally give rise to a very important problem. According to the law of physics known as the Doppler effect, the frequency of a sound striking a moving body changes. For that reason, when a bat emits sound waves in the direction of a fly moving away from it, the returning sound waves should be at an inaudible frequency to the bat itself. It should therefore have great difficulty in detecting moving objects.
But no such difficulty in fact arises. The bat continues to locate moving objects in a flawless manner. That is because the bat adjusts the frequency of sound waves it emits towards moving objects, just as if it were aware of the Doppler effect. For example, it emits sound waves of the highest pitch towards a fly moving away from it so that the echo should not be of too low a frequency for it to hear.
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The oldest known fossil bat, discovered in Wyoming, USA. There is no difference between this 50-million-year-old fossil and bats living today. |
There are two different types of neurons (nerve cells) in the bat’s brain that control the sonar system. One of these perceives the reflected ultrasound, while the other issues commands to the muscles, thus giving rise to the animal’s echolocation calls. These two neurons operate in a coordinated manner; when the frequency of the echo changes, the first neuron detects this while the second adjusts the frequency of the animal’s calls to match the echo frequency. Hence, the bat adjusts the calls it emits according to its surroundings for maximum efficiency.
It is impossible to overlook how this whole system deals a lethal blow to the theory of evolution’s idea of “gradual evolution through random mutations.” The sonar system in bats is an exceedingly complex structure and can never be explained in terms of random mutations. All its details and components have to be present and fully functioning in order for the system to function. The bat has to have the means of emitting high-frequency sounds, organs to perceive and analyze them and a system capable of adjusting sound frequencies according to variations of movement in order to possess a functional sonar system. These things cannot, of course, be explained in terms of chance, and they show that the bat was created in a perfect state.
The fossil record of bats refutes evolution
The fossil record shows that bats appeared on Earth suddenly and together with all the complex structures they possess today. In their book Bats: A Natural History, the evolutionist paleontologists John E. Hill and James D. Smith effectively admit this reality:
The fossil record of bats extends back to the early Eocene ... and has been documented ... on five continents ... [A]ll fossil bats, even the oldest, are clearly fully developed bats and so they shed little light on the transition from their terrestrial ancestor. (John E. Hill, James D Smith, Bats: A Natural History, London: British Museum of Natural History, 1984, p. 33)
The evolutionist paleontologist L. R. Godfrey writes this on the same subject:
There are some remarkably well preserved early Tertiary fossil bats, such as Icaronycteris index, but Icaronycteris tells us nothing about the evolution of flight in bats because it was a perfectly good flying bat. (L. R. Godfrey, "Creationism and Gaps in the Fossil Record," Scientists Confront Creationism, W. W. Norton and Company, 1983, p. 199)
In short, it is impossible for bats’ complex physical systems to have emerged by way of evolution, and the fossil record confirms that no such evolution ever happened. On the contrary, the first bats to appear on Earth were identical to those still living today. Bats have always existed as bats.
Darwinist claims regarding Onychonycteris finneyi are based on facile word games
Nearly all the reports about this latest fossil discovery used the term “bat evolution” in their headlines, thus giving the impression that scientific evidence verifying that concept had been discovered and revealed in the scientific literature. The fact is, however, as shown above, the scientific records in no way confirm the idea of bat evolution, but rather refute it. The deception employed by evolutionists runs along these lines:
Although the theory of evolution maintains that one life form evolved from another, evolutionists are unable to point to any transitions between different living things, and prefer to use the diversity of life in order to pull the wool over people’s eyes. For example, according to the theory of evolution, the bat should have evolved from land-dwelling quadrupedal (four-legged) mammals. In their unlikely tales evolutionists cast animals capable of leaping from branch to branch, like the flying squirrel, in that role. But this is no more than a fairy tale. Evolutionists have not the slightest piece of evidence to indicate the fossil stages in any supposed transition from a squirrel or any other terrestrial mammal to the bat, nor to suggest how living things undergoing that process could possibly have survived. (In fact, as revealed above, oldest known bat forms are fully formed and have no physical features indicating any transition from any other life form.)
Bat species are known to represent approximately one fourth of all the mammal species on Earth. They are distinguished from other mammals by their superior echolocation systems, the claws that enable them to cling to trees and cave roofs, their wings consisting of a light, thin membrane allowing them such enormous aerobatic maneuverability, and the unique features of their teeth and diets. Furthermore, mammals include a very wide range of forms, such as whales, rats, lions and bats, and there are no intermediate forms between the members of such classes completely different in morphological terms. Evolutionists, who maintain that lions, horses, bats, dogs and whales are all descended from the same common ancestor, are unable to point to a single one of the vast number of transitional forms that must, in their eyes, once have lived. All that evolutionists can do is to distort the biodiversity in bats, which indicates their flawless creation, on behalf of their theory, which is why they label that diversity as “evolution.”
Our advice to media organizations such as The Guardian newspaper and the BBC, which distort the discovery as evidence for evolution, is that they put an end to their word games intended to support the theory of evolution and admit the facts showing that bats were flawlessly created.
