Nature magazine carried an article called "The Earliest Known Grown-Group Salamanders" in its March 27, 2003 edition. The story concerned the finding of a large number of salamander fossils in China, which were established as belonging to the Middle Jurassic Period. Researchers Ke-Qin Gao and Neil H. Shubin presented various salamanders which had been covered in lava as the result of a sudden volcanic eruption and which had thus been splendidly preserved. The salamander in the lava had been so well preserved that soft tissue such as the eye and gills and even the last things they had eaten in their stomachs could all be identified.
The researchers stated that among the thousand or so salamanders there were some new species differentiated from present-day examples by small differences, and that other specimens were no different to modern salamanders. Thus in looking for transitional species which they could put forward as proof of evolution, evolutionists encountered "living fossils" which had remained unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.
While offering a pro-evolutionary analysis of their findings, the researchers were still unable to conceal their disappointment at this "stability" displayed in the salamander fossils. The following lines appeared in Nature magazine:
Despite its Bathonian age, the new cryptobranchid shows extraordinary morphological similarity to its living relatives. This similarity underscores the stasis within salamander anatomical evolution. Indeed, extant cryptobranchid salamanders can be regarded as living fossils whose structures have remained little changed for over 160 million years. Furthermore, the new material from China reveals that the early diversification of salamanders was well underway by the Middle Jurassic; several extant taxa including hynobiids and cryptobranchids had already appeared by that time. Notably, this ancient pattern of taxonomic diversification does not correlate to any great disparity in anatomical structure.
The authors of the article refuse to abandon the theory of evolution in the face of these findings, and make this attitude clear with references to evolution in parts of the text. Yet the only analysis they offer in the name of evolution is to the effect that "these creatures changed little with evolution." That statement is actually an implicit admission by an evolutionist of the defeat of the theory in the face of the "stability" in the fossil record. An objective explanation of this is to say that salamanders emerged suddenly in the fossil record and have come down unchanged to the present day. The increasing number of "living fossils" is findings, which make it perfectly evident that no such process as evolution ever happened. As well as dealing a lethal blow to the theory of evolution they also emphasize the power of evolutionists" imaginations.
That imagination is so powerful as to imagine that a creature not unlike a wolf one day entered the sea and over the next 50 million years turned into a whale, a giant marine mammal. If evolution is able to turn a four-footed land animal resembling a wolf into a whale in such a short space of time, how is it that it brought about no changes in the salamander over the space of 160 million years? Evolutionists can give no scientific answer to this. All they can do is speculate.
Another noteworthy point when it comes to evolution is this: There is a constant "sudden emergence" and "stability" in the fossil record. "Evolution," on the other hand, is nothing but the theories and speculation of Darwinists. This is just one of the many pieces of evidence that evolution is an error, and creation the truth.
(There are many creatures on the list of living fossils which have remained unchanged for as long as 400 million years. See: Darwinism Refuted, by Harun Yahya at www.darwinismrefuted.com)