Insects :: Incredible and Inspirational

In June 2002, I was hiking about 80 miles north of the AOI headquarters in Grand Junction, CO. As an entomologist, I’m almost always looking for insects and, as I passed near an exposed cliff face near a BLM trail, I saw an interesting bunch of insects all fossilized together. The first insect that caught my attention was a cricket. However, as I looked closer, I saw some beetles and a couple of flies sitting there, too.

The rock containing these insect fossils is from the Parachute Member of the Green River Formation. To evolutionists, this means it is a limestone oil shale from a freshwater lake bed which dried up 50 million years ago in the late Eocene period. It is this same formation that makes up much of Dinosaur National Monument. The area is famous for producing fish fossils, but insect fossils are also not uncommon.

Interestingly, my rock contains a specimen with very good evidence against the theory of evolution. You see, even though most of the insects were smashed terrifically, one fly is clearly identifiable from its well-preserved wing veins. It is not an extinct taxon but is a fly we could collect this summer if we wanted to. It is the fungus gnat Sciara. If the rock and the fly are truly 50 million years old, then it should seem reasonable to look at the earth’s supposed evolutionary history since that time and determine if that assertion makes sense. What changes have occurred since this fly’s death and fortuitous burial in the mud at the bottom of an ancient lake?

Well, according to the evolutionary view of earth’s history, a meteor hit Chesapeake Bay, creating a crater 85 km in diameter. This released tons of debris into the atmosphere and into the skies over the region where Sciara was living. As a result, the very last of the dinosaurs finally died off, and the whole realm of mammals arose and diverged from those few scurrying shrews which had been evading the dinosaurs.

Later, the Pacific Plate supposedly moved to the northwest, subducting and buckling the North American landscape, raising the infant Rocky Mountains from near sea level to over 14,000 high. Land bridges formed in Beringia and Panama, connecting Asia, North America, and South America. This would have allowed all kinds of exotic animals to invade the area. These would have included competitors, predators, and parasites along with potential mates possessing novel genetic material and mutations.

The Colorado Plateau is thought to have gone from a swampy-edged lake to a high, dry desert. There were lots of ice ages with alternating cold and warm climates, and Man progressed through his entire evolution from a handy little marmoset-like animal to his glorious self today. Meanwhile, the descendants of the next-of-kin to my fly lived on and prospered for more than 50 million generations. Surprisingly, over all that time, Sciara apparently hasn’t changed one bit. Now that must be a survivor story.

Many evolutionists point to the fossil record to refute Creation. Their opinion is that all those organisms were buried millions of years ago. But what if a “living fossil,” such as the Coelocanth, is discovered, showing physical traits identical to its fossilized relatives? Evolutionists argue that the traits were conserved because the animals lived in the deep oceans or some other place which was not so affected by the changing environment as was the land surface. Thus, they can look today like the fossils buried so long ago.

However, here I have a fly that has experienced all kinds of environmental changes over those 50 million years. By the evolutionist’s books, it should have formed new adaptations for the greatly altered environments and evolved into something different. But it is still the same old Sciara. Obviously, that evolutionary scenario just doesn’t make sense.