Creation Science Rebuttals

Institute for Creation Research

Flower Fossils

ICR News, 11 October 2013

First Published 11 Oct 2013

In a web article dated 11 October 2013, the Institute for Creation Research reported on a new discovery of flower fossils, which shows that flowers existed over 100 million years prior to what scientists had previously thought.¹

Scientists publishing in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science revealed they had discovered fossil pollen grains in a drill core in northern Switzerland. The core is from the Triassic, about 243 million years ago. Previous fossil evidence for the oldest flowers was more than 100 million years younger. This means there is a gap in the fossil record of over 100 million years, with no evidence of the existence of flowers.

The ICR author, Brian Thomas, siezes on this gap. The authors of the study make the suggestion that these pollen discoveries represent the stem relatives of the angiosperms. That's fine. But there is still a gap in the fossil record. Thomas states:

They encountered an equal challenge in trying to decipher why, after this sudden burst of supposed evolutionary creativity, angiosperms disappeared for 100 million years.

Clearly angiosperms did not disappear, for we have them here today. They merely have not been discovered in the 100 million years of rocks between these two time points. Although the authors seem genuinely concerned about the lack of angiosperm fossils, it should be no big deal. After all, fossil pollen is a lot harder to find than a fossil bone! Maybe we don't find much fossil pollen in the Triassic and Jurassic because the dinosaurs ate most of the flowers!

Later on, Thomas states:

It's one thing to assert that these fossils must represent evolutionary ancestors of modern plants because they are millions of years older than the accepted age, but it's entirely circular to then assert that the angiosperm fossils must have formed millions of years before the accepted age simply because conventional evolution tells us plants evolved over long ages.

I can see Thomas' point, but its moot. So the author's claim it was an earlier relative of angiosperms, because they "had to evolve" from an earlier species. No problem. This claim presents no problems from an old earth perspective, whether you are a progressive creationist or an evolutionary creationist. For the progressive creationist, God created distinct angiosperms as time progressed, whereas evolutionists see the angiosperms evolving. The only one with a problem with this is YECs.

Conclusion

Gaps in the fossil record prove nothing about the age of the earth, nor the theory of evolution. They merely mean the fossil record is incomplete. As time passes, and scientists make new discoveries, some gaps will be filled in, while others may not. The bottom line...a gap in the fossil record does not offer any proof that the earth is young.

¹ Brian Thomas, Flower Fossils 100,000,000 Years Out of Place?, ICR website.

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