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The Sands of Time?
"80-90 percent of the surface area of the Earth is mantled with sediment or sedimentary rocks."
Encyclopaedia Britannica: - 'Sedimentary rocks'
As the name suggests, sedimentary rock is made up of particles that have been compacted and cemented together to form layers. Examples of sedimentary rock would be sandstone, siltstone, limestone, claystone, mudrock and shale.
The geological theory of Uniformitarianism assumes that the sedimentary rocks have been laid down at a very slow rate: approximately 1 foot (30 cm) every 1000 years. So a layer of sandstone 80 feet thick (24 metres) would, according to this theory take approximately 80,000 years.
We are told that whilst the particles were slowly being deposited, various plants and creatures would die and fall into the sediment where they would be preserved and eventually become fossilized.
Geologists have set out the strata in a geological column (see the diagram to the right) showing the alleged chronological sequence. It is said that, the older a layer is, the lower it is found in the column. For example, the Cambrian system is said to have been formed some 570 million years ago, whereas the Jurassic is more recent, being only 208 million years old. However it must be stressed that the geological column exists only in text books. Nowhere on Earth are the rocks found in this complete series in one location!
The fossilized plants and animals trapped in the sedimentary layers are "the closest we can come to historical evidence in the matter of origins, so they are of prime importance in discussing creation and evolution." - Dr. Gary Parker
We are told that the first fish evolved in the Ordovician period. Amphibians started their evolutionary development in the Devonian period, reptiles in the Carboniferous, birds in the Jurassic, and mammals in the Triassic.
When Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859 the great museums of the world had thousands of fossil specimens. "Since Darwin's time the search for missing links in the fossil record has continued on an ever-increasing scale. So vast has been the expansion of palaeontological activity over the past one hundred years that probably 99.9% of all palaeontological work has been carried out since 1860. Only a fraction of the hundred thousand or so fossil species known today were known to Darwin."
Dr. M. Denton - Evolution: A Theory in Crisis p.160
The number of fossils we have available to test the theory is vast, almost limitless. Does the fossil record therefore, as the Encyclopaedia Britannic assures us, show 'the transition from one form to another', and thus give proof of the theory of evolution? Read on!
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