Stasis, Extinction, and Evolutionary Tempo

Stasis is real but does not decide between the models: deep time must explain why change stops, a young earth why it ran so fast. Living fossils hold at family rank and mostly fail at genus and species. Mass extinctions were real deaths, not burial order, and no young-earth model yet fits the recoveries into the Flood year.

By AI (Claude Opus 5.5, thinking level unavailable) Draft:  October 2026

"We conclude that some unspecified process of bounded evolution is responsible for the band we observe in our data (Fig. 1)." — Josef Uyeda, Thomas Hansen, Stevan Arnold and Jason Pienaar, evolutionary biologists, 2011, on why body size stops diverging over long spans.1

"Creation scientists do not consider these as true “extinction” events.  Instead, these horizons are interpreted as major shifts in the burial pattern of fossils during the Flood." — Jeffrey Tomkins and Tim Clarey, Institute for Creation Research, 20232

Summary

This section asks what the fossil record says about the pace of change in living things.  Three patterns bear on it.  Stasis:  most fossil species appear, change little, and disappear.  Living fossils:  some living organisms look like fossils found deep in the rock.  Mass extinctions:  at a few levels in the rock many groups stop at once, and a slow rebuilding follows above.  Young-earth creationists cite all three.  Mainstream paleontologists explain all three.  The articles under this heading test each pattern against the rocks and the fossil databases, and test each side's reading of it.

The section's verdict, stated first.  All three patterns are real.  None of them decides between the models by itself.  But each puts a cost on one model or the other, and the costs run in opposite directions.

  1. Deep time has too much time for too little change. Measured rates of change are fast, yet over long spans the change stops adding up. Three separate quantitative studies agree that something holds it inside bounds, and the authors of one of them call it "some unspecified process" without naming it.1 A living fossil held nearly still for a million generations needs that unexplained bound to hold the whole time.3
  2. A young earth has too little time for too much change. Its own writers need "a massive burst of speciation" within "a few hundred years" after the Flood, and call explaining it "the most challenging explanatory task" their model faces.4 Every young-earth model also puts the end-Permian extinction inside the Flood, so the ordered recovery above it, with its dwarfed shells, missing reefs and a reef 900 m thick whose builders arrive in sequence, has to fit into weeks.56

The three treatments under this heading:

  1. Stasis and punctuated equilibrium, argued in Trends in the Fossil Record, Part 1. Stasis is real and weaker than creationists usually claim. Sustained directional change is rare, about 5 % of 251 fossil trait series, but random wandering takes about half, and wandering is change. In the best-sampled series of a larger database, stasis gives way to long still periods broken by jumps. The authors of punctuated equilibrium grant the pattern and concede that their causal claim has no validation.
  2. Living Fossils. At family rank the conservatism is real, and mainstream specialists say so. At genus rank most famous cases fail, and at species rank only ginkgo leaves carry a living species into Mesozoic rock. The gaps in their records are real rarity, not missed collecting, on both timescales.
  3. Mass Extinctions. The Big Five are real losses in single rock sections, each followed by an ordered recovery. Every live young-earth model puts four of them inside the Flood. The Institute for Creation Research's reading, that they mark only the last level at which each group was buried, predicts thousands of fossils that are not there. The reading in which the Flood did the killing survives that test, but no young-earth author has explained the recoveries.

Read together, the three settle two questions none of them settles alone.  Stasis is not evidence for either model, because the young-earth literature predicts every outcome and the mainstream explains stasis after the fact.  And absence from the rock is evidence only in proportion to how many fossils were expected:  the coelacanth vanished from rock that should hold dozens of its fossils and lived, so a priced absence shows that a group left the sampled habitats, and something more is needed to show that it died.  The mass-extinction article supplies that something for the groups that end at the end-Permian;  for the smallest of them it is the weaker half of the argument.

Ages in millions of years appear here as the mainstream figures under discussion.  The arguments about order, absence and recovery work from what lies above what in the rock, which young-earth geology accepts.

Part 1: Stasis and punctuated equilibrium

Where it is argued.  Stasis and punctuated equilibrium have no article of their own under this heading.  They are argued in Part 1 of Trends in the Fossil Record, which belongs to the Reading the Record section.  This part reports that verdict and its main numbers without re-arguing them.

The question.  Do fossil species really stand still, and does that count against evolution?

The verdict.  Stasis is real, and weaker than the young-earth side usually claims.  The best single survey, Gene Hunt's 2007 analysis of 251 trait series from 53 fossil lineages, found that directional change best fits 13 of them (5 %), an undirected random walk 123 (49 %), and stasis 115 (46 %).7  A random walk is not stasis:  it is change that wanders and adds up.  Hunt warns that stretching the word stasis over every pattern that is not strongly directional "obscures real differences between the fluctuating but stationary trajectories of stasis and the unbounded meandering of random walks."7  So the claim that 95 % of lineages show no evolution misuses the paper.  What survives is that sustained directional change is rare, and Hunt adds that even 5 % "is likely to be an overestimate."7

What happened when the sample grew.  Hunt's 2007 data held a result that ran against simple stasis:  the best-sampled group, planktic microfossils, looked the most directional.  In 2015 Hunt, with Melanie Hopkins and Scott Lidgard, rebuilt the database with 709 series and withdrew it:  "Previous indications that directional trends are more likely to be observed in planktonic microfossils than in other fossil groups (14, 29, 30) are not supported by logistic regression."  Their reference 14 is Hunt's own 2007 paper.8  The trends article refitted all 709 series from the authors' deposited data and found a harder number:  none of the 62 series with more than 40 samples is best fit by stasis.  What wins instead is mostly punctuation and shifts between modes;  sustained pure directional change takes 3.2 % of those 62.9  The 2015 authors say the same in words:  "the broad version of stasis is also less likely to be best supported as the number of samples increases."8  A lineage sampled forty times instead of ten does not turn out to have been transforming all along.  It sat still, jumped, and sat still again.

What punctuated equilibrium claims, and what its authors conceded.  Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould proposed it in 1972 to explain stasis, not to escape it, and it made testable predictions.10  Two claims travel under its name.  As a description of the record it is now mainstream, and Gould and Eldredge's 1993 review counts "the recognition of stasis as a meaningful and predominant pattern within the history of species" among the theory's most important implications.11  As a cause, the claim that new species form in small isolated populations and that this is where the change happens, its authors conceded the weak link themselves:  "continuing unhappiness, justified this time, focuses upon claims that speciation causes significant morphological change, for no validation of such a position has emerged."11  In the same review they grant that "Phyletic gradualism has been well documented, again across all taxa from microfossils to mammals."11

Where the mainstream is right, and where its problem lies.  Philip Gingerich's compilations show that measured rates of change fall as the measuring interval grows.  On his figure, change in the face of selection is "fast," about "one-tenth of a standard deviation per generation."12  The trends article concedes this outright.  But the change is bounded.  In Gingerich's own model, mammals fill the body-size range in under 1 % of the Cenozoic, and "Then they were constrained to evolve within the lattice for the remaining 99 percent of their history."12  Josef Uyeda and colleagues pooled more than 8,000 body-size measurements and found no effect of elapsed time on divergence up to about a million years.1  They name no cause for the bound, only "some unspecified process of bounded evolution" at work in their data.1  Donald Prothero, an outspoken critic of creationism, found 62 of 70 species of the earliest Orellan unchanged across the Eocene–Oligocene climate crash, and wrote that "no one (including myself) has a good explanation yet for such widespread stasis despite the obvious selective pressures of changing climate."1314

What it concedes.  Gould is a witness for stasis, not for "no transitional forms":  the sentence after his famous complaint about creationists says that transitional forms are lacking at the species level but abundant between larger groups.15  Several classic gradual sequences in plankton dissolved on re-examination into size effects, temperature effects and hidden species, but two survive, and the article concedes them by name:  the central populations of Wei and Kennett's Globoconella, and Pearson and Ezard's Turborotalia.1617  Douglas Erwin and Robert Anstey's tally of 58 lineage studies concluded that "No single pattern appears dominant."18  So the article's claim is narrow.  The record gives far less direct evidence of sustained transformation than a textbook reader expects;  the mechanism offered for the shortfall is unvalidated by its own authors;  and the bound that three quantitative treatments agree on has no accepted explanation.  It does not claim that stasis disproves evolution.  → Trends in the Fossil Record, Part 1

Part 2: Living fossils

The question.  Are there organisms that have not changed for hundreds of millions of years, and what would that mean for each model?

The verdict.  The answer depends on taxonomic rank, and the article measures each famous case rank by rank.  At family rank and above, the conservatism is real and mainstream specialists say so:  a 2024 analysis of 82 coelacanth species finds that their discrete anatomical characters "virtually stopped evolving after the Cretaceous" and that in those characters the living genus has changed no more than its Cretaceous relatives.19  At genus rank most famous cases fail.  No fossil of the living coelacanth genus Latimeria, the Wollemi pine Wollemia or the monoplacophoran Neopilina is known, and the Jurassic horseshoe crab once called Limulus has been moved out of the living genus.20  At species rank only ginkgo reaches Mesozoic rock:  Royer, Hickey and Wing accept the fossil leaf species Ginkgo adiantoides as the living G. biloba.21  So "unchanged for hundreds of millions of years" almost always slides from a living species to a fossil family or order.

Stasis does not decide between the models.  Over the roughly 83 coelacanth generations since a Flood about 4,500 years ago, a lineage needs no holding force to stay put.  Over the roughly 1.2 million generations since the end of the Cretaceous on the conventional timescale, it does.3  But young-earth writers also predict fast change after the Flood:  John Whitmore writes that "organisms changed quickly after the Flood (producing many new genera within Genesis kinds), and once they became well-adapted to one of the many new niches after the Flood, change stopped."22  And a Creation Ministries International statement of what the Flood model predicts lists three outcomes:  changed within the kind, no longer living, or "exactly the same as present-day kinds".  Between them they cover every fossil.23  The one pattern that bears on the question, living forms resembling their younger fossils more than their older ones, fits descent directly and fits the Flood model only through an ecological sorting that no young-earth source has worked out.

The gaps.  If coelacanths had stayed as common, relative to other fishes, as they were in Late Cretaceous seas, about 54 of the 1,686 later marine collections holding ray-finned fishes should contain one.  None does.  Monoplacophorans are missing from about 156 collections where the same test expects them.24  Neither gap is a sampling accident, on either timescale.  Both sides have to put the survivors in habitats the rocks did not sample, and the coelacanth shows which:  its Cretaceous fossils lie in river, lake, coastal and shallow-sea rock, and the living fish lives in the deep sea.

What it concedes.  Thomas Schopf's 1980 objection, that soft parts can change while shells stay the same, is right at species rank.25  It misses the creationist claim, which is made at the rank of the created kind, placed by young-earth biologists near the family.4  The genomes split:  the coelacanth's protein-coding genes evolve slowly, while Lingula's gene families turn over faster than those of any other bilaterian sampled.2627  And the census of living genera cuts against "modern animals in dinosaur rock":  none of 1,351 living mammal genera has a Mesozoic fossil in the Paleobiology Database, while about one living bivalve genus in six does.28  → Living Fossils

Part 3: Mass extinctions

The question.  Were the mass extinctions real events, and where do young-earth models put them?

The verdict.  They are real in single rock sections, where the order of the beds is not in dispute.  In the Hell Creek badlands of Montana the youngest dinosaur bone found in place, a ceratopsian brow horn, lies "no more than 13 cm below" the boundary defined by pollen.29  A database count run for the article finds that 387 of 602 marine genera entering the last Permian stage have no record above it, by far the largest such loss in the record.30  Every live young-earth model puts four of the five inside the Flood.  The end-Cretaceous splits the camps:  one ends the Flood at or just above it, and the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) puts it at the Flood's high-water mark, Day 150.31

Two young-earth readings, two results.  ICR's Tomkins and Clarey write:  "There are no real extinction events in the rock record, only the last appearance of organisms as they were encapsulated by the tsunami-like floodwaters."32  That reading has trilobites, rugose and tabulate corals, fusulinid forams and productid brachiopods still living in the sea while the Flood buried the 404,784 marine fossil occurrences of the later Mesozoic.  At one hundredth of their share of the last Permian stage, they should have left about 9, 53, 6, 91 and 584 fossils there.  The rock holds 0, 3, 0, 1 and 8 outside the first Triassic substage.33  The reading in which the Flood itself did the killing, held by Whitmore and Garner, Snelling, Wise, and Brand and Chadwick, passes that test.34  Its problem lies above the boundary.  The Early Triassic recovery, with its dwarfed shells, missing reefs, missing coal and stepwise return of burrowers, has to fit into the days the model allows.  A reef in Guizhou grew in place to about 900 m, with sponges, then algae, then corals entering in that order.5  On ICR's timetable that is about 263,000 times the top rate of vertical growth of modern sheltered reef margins.635  No young-earth source found for the article addresses the dwarfing, the reef gap or the stepwise rebuilding.

What it concedes.  The critics of the mainstream picture have real points.  The popular 90 to 96 % figure for the end-Permian is overstated, and Steven Stanley's estimate is about 81 % of marine species.36  Two of the Big Five, the Late Devonian and the end-Triassic, are as much failures of new forms to appear as surges of loss.37  The layout of the rock shapes how sudden a loss looks.38  And the reef ratio compares a reef built largely by microbes and cement with modern coral reefs, because no growth rate for the first kind was found.  → Mass Extinctions

Part 4: The three side by side

Pattern Verdict Strongest point for the mainstream Strongest point for the young-earth side What is unfinished
Stasis and punctuated equilibrium Real, and weaker than usually claimed Measured rates of change are fast; gradual change is documented in every major group; stasis thins out where sampling is densest The authors of punctuated equilibrium call its causal claim unvalidated, and the bound on long-term change has no accepted explanation Why change stays bounded, on the mainstream side; which lineages stall, on both
Living fossils Real at family rank; fails at genus and species, except ginkgo Living genera are young or have no fossils; living forms look more like their younger fossils than their older ones Family-level conservatism is conceded in print; ginkgo carries a living species into the Cretaceous; stasis is cheap on a short clock Why constraint holds some lineages and not others; no young-earth definition of the kind for any of these groups
Mass extinctions Real losses; the burial-order reading fails; the Flood-killing reading is unfinished Each boundary is followed by an ordered recovery, including a 900 m reef whose builders arrive in sequence Sudden losses within centimetres fit a catastrophe; the causes are disputed in the mainstream; the end-Permian has been overstated No young-earth account of the Early Triassic recovery; no agreed kill mechanism in the mainstream

Two things stand out.  Each article finds the pattern real and the popular use of it overstated:  the claim that 95 % of lineages show no evolution, that horseshoe crabs are unchanged in 450 million years, and that 90 to 96 % of species died at the end of the Permian.  And in each, the young-earth side's strongest point is a cost to the other model, not a prediction of its own.

Part 5: What the three add up to

  1. Each model's problem with tempo is the other model's easy case. On the long clock the difficulty is too little change: rates measured over years are fast, rates over millions of years are near zero, and nobody has explained the bound.1 On the short clock the difficulty is too much change too fast: new genera within kinds in a few centuries,4 and a sea floor rebuilt from dwarfs and microbial mats to a 900 m reef within weeks.6 Trait change is not the hard part for the short clock. At Gingerich's upper rate, a steady push for 83 generations moves a trait about 8 standard deviations.3 What is hard is the ordered rebuilding of whole communities, which no young-earth author has attempted.
  2. Both models read the same shape in the rock. A long still period broken by a short jump is what the best-sampled fossil series show.9 It is also what Whitmore's post-Flood picture describes: quick change, after which "change stopped."22 And ICR's Clarey and Werner cite "sudden appearance, stasis, and sudden disappearance of fossils" across the whole record as a pattern of Flood burial.31 A shape that both sides predict cannot decide between them. What can decide is the order of events and the time each step needs, which is where the articles put their weight.
  3. Rank decides what stasis means, and the two kinds of evidence sit at different ranks. Hunt's trait series follow single species lineages.7 The young-earth claim is made at the rank of the created kind, near the family,4 and the living-fossil article finds real conservatism at that rank and above. Species-level stasis is a puzzle about mechanism inside evolutionary biology. Family-level conservatism is what young-earth biology claims and the mainstream concedes. No one has measured the second with the statistical tools used on the first; the 2024 coelacanth disparity study is the nearest.19
  4. Absence has to be priced, and the same rule binds both articles that use it. The living-fossil article shows that a lineage can vanish from rock that should hold dozens or hundreds of its fossils, and live: coelacanths expected in about 54 later marine fish collections, monoplacophorans in about 156, and both alive today.24 The mass-extinction holdover test asks the same kind of question of five Permian groups. At the full last-Permian share, rather than the one hundredth that article assumes, trilobites and tabulate corals would be expected about 945 and 596 times in later Mesozoic marine rock, four to seventeen times the expected counts the living lineages came through. Rugose corals, fusulinids and productids would be expected about 5,300, 9,100 and 58,000 times, which is 34 to 1,070 times larger.39 So a priced absence shows that a group left the habitats the rock samples. It does not by itself show that the group died. On the long clock, what separates the coelacanth from the trilobite is that the coelacanth comes back, in the deep sea today, while the five Permian groups never return in numbers in the 1,043,856 marine occurrences above the Permian.33 On ICR's short clock, return is not the issue, because ICR grants that these groups died out "during or shortly after the Flood."2 The dispute with ICR is over whether they lived on, unburied, through the weeks or months of Flood that followed. That needs a refuge holding all five groups while the Flood buried the same shelf and reef settings elsewhere, and ICR's own geologists report no reworked Paleozoic fossils in the younger Flood rock such a refuge would have shed.31 For productids, about one in seven marine fossils of the last Permian stage, that is a large demand. For trilobites, down to 46 records in that stage, it is a small one, and the holdover verdict should not lean on them.
  5. Errors run in both directions, and the most useful corrections came from the people who made them. Hunt withdrew his own plankton result.8 Stanley cut the end-Permian loss from the popular 90 to 96 % to about 81 %.36 Gould and Eldredge conceded that their mechanism had no validation.11 On the young-earth side, Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham and an ICR page put the 1938 coelacanth off Madagascar instead of East London, South Africa,26 and Michael Oard listed "no statistical support for a sudden extinction of dinosaurs" from a paper whose title adds "(or gradual)" after "sudden".40

Objections and responses

  1. "Stasis is what creation predicts, so stasis is evidence for creation." Only if the model forbids the alternative, and it does not. Young-earth writers also predict fast change after the Flood, producing "many new genera within Genesis kinds" according to Whitmore,22 and a Creation Ministries International statement lists changed, extinct and "exactly the same" as the three outcomes it expects.23 A prediction that every fossil fits gains nothing when a fossil fits it. What the young-earth side can fairly say is narrower: long stasis is a real cost to the long clock, whose bound on change is unexplained. That is a debit on the other side's account, not a credit on its own.
  2. "Punctuated equilibrium predicts stasis, so there is nothing left to explain." It predicts the pattern, and its authors made the prediction testable in 1972.10 But the part that would explain the pattern, change concentrated in the formation of new species, is the part they called unvalidated in 1993.11 The best current account, stabilizing selection inside bounds, fits the data without saying what sets the bounds.1 A pattern with a name is not a pattern with a cause.
  3. "Creationists use Lazarus taxa to say the record misses things, and gaps between kinds to say the record is complete. They cannot have both." They cannot have both unpriced. The living-fossil article prices its gaps and finds them real rarity on both clocks.24 The same pricing applies to a gap between kinds: it counts only where the habitat in question can be shown to be well sampled. The Order of the Fossil Record, Part 3, makes the same point from the other direction, and The Missing Transitions measures how leaky fossil ranges are. A young-earth writer who cites the coelacanth's return as a caution has to apply that caution to his own arguments from missing intermediates.
  4. "The mainstream does the same thing: trilobites are extinct because they are missing, but coelacanths hid for 66 million years." The charge is fair as far as it goes, and Part 5 above takes it seriously. The mainstream's refuges are found after the fact, case by case. But the two cases differ in what can be checked: the coelacanth comes back, and its refuge is a place the later record barely samples, while the Permian groups never return in a marine record more than fifty times the size of their last stage.33 The rule that separates them, priced absence plus a place to hide, is the same for both sides.
  5. "Many groups dying in one bed is exactly what a global Flood predicts." The reading in which the Flood did the killing does pass the holdover test. But every young-earth model puts four of the five extinctions inside the Flood with more of the Flood still to come, and each one is followed in the rock by a recovery: survivors, dwarfs, missing reefs, and a stepwise return. A Flood predicts killing. It does not by itself predict an ordered recovery between one kill and the next. The one young-earth prediction about where the extinctions fall, Snelling's, that they "would be expected to coincide with" the megasequence unconformities, fails for three of the five on ICR's own figure.412
  6. "These arguments assume the conventional timescale." The order-based ones do not. The gap pricing, the holdover test, the recovery sequence and the reef succession use only what lies above what. The generation counts in Part 2 put the two clocks side by side for scale and are labelled that way.3 The reef ratio uses ICR's own Flood timetable.6
  7. From the skeptic's side: "Calling stasis neutral is too kind. A model that predicts every outcome is not doing science." Partly right. The three-outcome prediction is unfalsifiable as written, and the one pattern that discriminates, living forms resembling their younger fossils more than their older ones, favours descent. But the mainstream's bound on change is not predicted either; it was found and then modelled. On stasis alone, neither side has a prediction that the other lacks.
  8. From the defender's side: "Rates of change measured today are fast. So a young earth has all the speed it needs after the Flood." For change in single traits, yes. At Gingerich's upper rate a steady push moves a trait about 8 standard deviations in 83 generations.3 The section concedes that trait change is not the young-earth problem. The problem is the new genera in a few centuries, which young-earth biologists themselves call their hardest task,4 and the ordered rebuilding of whole communities and reefs above the end-Permian within weeks.

Issues and unanswered questions

  1. Stasis has not been measured at the rank the young-earth claim is made. The large statistical surveys follow traits within species lineages. The young-earth claim concerns the created kind, near the family. A survey of family-level change with the same model-fitting methods would bear directly on the dispute; none was found.
  2. Neither model predicts which lineages stall. The mainstream explains the coelacanth, the ginkgo and the horseshoe crab after the fact, by selection and habitat. The young-earth literature has no rule for which kinds stayed the same and which diversified after the Flood.
  3. The young-earth side has three obvious pieces of unwritten work in this section. An account of the Early Triassic recovery that fits the Flood year; a definition of the kind for any living-fossil group; and a sampling-corrected test of ICR's deep-water explanation for Lazarus gaps, which the living-fossil article runs for the coelacanth only. No young-earth treatment of the end-Ordovician glaciation and extinction was found either.
  4. The holdover test is weaker for its smallest groups. Read beside the living-fossil gaps, the trilobite and tabulate-coral rows would not show death by themselves (Part 5). The test's weight rests on the productids, fusulinids and rugose corals. The mass-extinction article's reply to the coelacanth objection counts trilobites, with 56,535 database occurrences, among the commonest fossils of their seas. That figure has no footnote, and it is a whole-Paleozoic total; in the last Permian stage trilobites number 46 records, 0.234 % of the marine fossils.33
  5. Two descriptions in the section disagree in tone. The trends article's description says the creationist case survives most clearly on stasis and gaps. The living-fossil article says stasis does not decide between the models. Read at the level of their verdicts they agree: the trends article's own conclusion is that stasis does not disprove evolution, only that its bound is unexplained and its proposed mechanism unvalidated. This page follows the verdicts.
  6. Sources the articles could not read in full. Schopf's 1984 review of living fossils; the supplementary tables of Hunt, Hopkins and Lidgard 2015; Jin and colleagues' bed-by-bed counts at Meishan; Lyson and colleagues' metre-by-metre recovery at Corral Bluffs; Twitchett's study of Early Triassic dwarfing; and Clarey and Heim's survey of 110 end-Cretaceous papers. Each article says what turns on its gaps.
  7. Where stasis lives on this site. Stasis and punctuated equilibrium are argued inside the trends article, under Reading the Record, rather than as a child of this page. A proposal to give them their own article has not been approved. Until it is, this page summarises them and links there.

Verdict

Stasis, living fossils and mass extinctions are all real.  The record shows species that change little for long spans, families that keep their body plans through most of the column, and levels where many groups stop at once with an ordered recovery above.  Each pattern has been oversold in popular writing, on both sides:  most lineages wander rather than stand still, most "unchanged" living fossils are unchanged only at family rank, and the largest extinction killed about 81 % of marine species, not 96 %.

None of the three decides between a young earth and deep time on its own.  Their value is in the costs they set.  Deep time has to explain why change that is fast over years stays bounded over millions of years, and its own specialists say the process is unspecified.  A young earth has to explain new genera within centuries and the rebuilding of sea-floor communities and a 900 m reef within weeks of the Flood, and no young-earth author has attempted the second.  ICR's reading of extinctions as burial order fails a test it sets itself, so the young-earth position here rests on the Flood having done the killing, and that position is unfinished.  The most useful young-earth work in this section would be a model of the Early Triassic recovery, with numbers and conditions that could show it wrong.

  1. The Fossil Record, the section this page belongs to.
  2. Trends in the Fossil Record, whose Part 1 argues stasis and punctuated equilibrium in full.
  3. The Order of the Fossil Record, on Lazarus taxa and why gaps do not disturb the order of the column.
  4. Transitional Sequences, on the sequences that show change rather than stasis.
  5. The Flood/Post-Flood Boundary, on where the Flood ends in the rock and what the end-Cretaceous recovery costs each placement.

Sources

  1. 1.

    Uyeda, Josef C. et al.  “The million-year wait for macroevolutionary bursts.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(38):15908–15913.  2011.  “we find a complete absence of a time-span effect up to ∼1 Myr, but this pattern then yields to a pattern of increasing divergence on timescales above 1–10 Myr.”  The segmented regression breakpoint is at 104.82 years, about 66,000.  The best-fitting model was multiple-burst, with an expected waiting time to displacement of the adaptive optimum above 10 Myr and an ancestor-to-descendant size ratio per burst of about 1.28.  A research paper that pools more than 8,000 body-size measurements of mammals, lizards and snakes, and birds, spanning 0.2 years to 357 million years and drawn from field studies, historical records, fossil series, and family trees of living species, then fits mathematical models with random chance built in.  The trends article uses it to show where stasis (long spells with little change) ends: change does not accumulate up to about a million years, and divergence grows after that. ↩

    1. 1a.

      “We conclude that some unspecified process of bounded evolution is responsible for the band we observe in our data (Fig. 1).”  They list the models ruled out by Estes and Arnold and add:  “All of these models fail either because they require unrealistic values for microevolutionary processes or because bounded evolution is difficult to achieve under any set of parameter values.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

  2. 2.

    Tomkins, Jeffrey P., and Timothy L. Clarey.  “Developing a Comprehensive Model of Global Flood Paleontology:  Integrating the Biostratigraphic Record with Global Megasequence Deposition.”  Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9:561–587.  Cedarville University.  2023.  The Institute for Creation Research's own account of how its megasequence Flood model explains the fossil record, written by its geneticist and its director of research.  It maps Paleobiology Database occurrences onto Clarey's six megasequences and states ICR's position on every major extinction:  none is a real extinction, each is a level where one ecological zone stopped being buried.  It concedes that the marine end-Permian losses are "more difficult to explain."

    1. 2a.

      Page 563:  “Creation scientists do not consider these as true “extinction” events.  Instead, these horizons are interpreted as major shifts in the burial pattern of fossils during the Flood.  So-called extinctions are merely the level at which certain fossils were no longer being actively buried, so they disappear upward in the geological column.” ↩

    2. 2b.

      Page 564:  “However, that is not to say the Flood did not cause extinctions.  Many of the presumably unique pre-Flood environments were likely destroyed by the Flood’s tectonic activity during the destruction of “the world that then was.”  This caused a lot of marine animals to go extinct during or shortly after the Flood.  For example, animals like trilobites and many of the Paleozoic brachiopods and corals seem to be extinct today.  The exact reason for this is unclear.” ↩

    3. 2c.

      Page 563:  “Figure 2 shows that several of the major extinction events do closely coincide with the six megasequences, one coinciding with the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) and one with the Triassic-Jurassic (Tr-J) (Clarey 2020).  The other three major extinction horizons fall within the middle or toward the top of the megasequence boundaries.”  Page 586:  “Two of the megasequences line up approximately with two of the so-called major extinction events.  The other three major extinctions may be a consequence of high-water stands and/or smaller sequence boundaries within the six megasequences.” ↩

  3. 3.

    Computed for Living Fossils, for scale only;  no source makes this calculation.  Latimeria waits at least 54 years between generations.42  Since the end of the Cretaceous, about 66 million years on the conventional timescale, that is about 1,222,000 generations.  Since the Flood, about 4,500 years on a young-earth timescale, it is about 83.  A trait mean that takes an independent random step each generation drifts in proportion to the square root of the number of generations, so the long clock allows √(1,222,000 ÷ 83) ≈ 121 times as much wandering as the short one, whatever the step size.  With Gingerich's step of one-tenth of a standard deviation per generation, which he calls an upper bound,12 the expected drift is about 0.1 × √1,222,000 ≈ 110 standard deviations on the long clock and 0.1 × √83 ≈ 0.9 on the short one.  With a step a hundred times smaller, 1.1 and 0.009.  A steady directional change at the upper rate for 83 generations moves a trait about 8 standard deviations. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

  4. 4.

    Jeanson, Nathaniel T., and Jason Lisle.  “On the origin of eukaryotic species' genotypic and phenotypic diversity.”  Answers Research Journal 9:81–122.  2016.  A young-earth model of how species diversified within created kinds after Creation and after the Flood, by two young-earth creationist scientists.

    1. 4a.

      “These layers contain a tremendous amount of species' diversity, implying that a massive burst of speciation took place in just a few hundred years”.  “Explaining all of this diversity in just a few hundred years is the most challenging explanatory task that the YEC species' origins model faces.” ↩ ↩ ↩

    2. 4b.

      “young-earth creation (YEC) research within the bounds of the scriptural framework has revealed that the created 'kinds' of Genesis 1 appear to be best approximated by the taxonomic rank of family, not species (Wood 2006, 2013).  Since many families are composed of multiple species, this implies that speciation has occurred post-Creation and post-Flood.” ↩ ↩

  5. 5.

    Kelley, Brian M. et al.  “Prolonged and gradual recovery of metazoan-algal reefs following the end-Permian mass extinction.”  Geology 51(11):1011–1016.  2023.  Field mapping, satellite imagery and 164 thin sections through the oldest and thickest Lower to Middle Triassic platform-margin reef known, at the Great Bank of Guizhou in southern China.  It records the order in which the reef builders appear.

    1. 5a.

      Page 1012:  “The reef initiated in the upper Spathian (Payne et al., 2006) and persisted in situ to upper Pelsonian or lower Illyrian strata (Kelley et al., 2020), reaching a stratigraphic thickness of ∼900 m (Lehrmann et al., 1998).  The reef facies is characterized by the occurrence of Tubiphytes boundstone.”  Page 1014:  “The lowest stratigraphic occurrence of identifiable reefbuilding metazoans (calcareous sponges) coincides with the base of zone 2, 365 m above the reef base … the first framework-contributing calcareous algae (Fig. 4L;  665 m above the reef base), and the first scleractinian corals (Figs. 4M and 4N;  895 m above the reef base).” ↩ ↩

  6. 6.

    Arithmetic from Mass Extinctions.  900 m of reef in at most the 50 days ICR assigns to the whole Absaroka (Days 40 to about 90) is 18 m a day, or 6,570 m a year.  Divided by 25 mm a year, the top of the range Montaggioni gives for average vertical accretion of modern sheltered reef margins, the ratio is about 263,000.  The Guizhou reef spans only part of the Absaroka, so the true requirement on ICR's timetable is higher. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

  7. 7.

    Hunt, Gene.  “The relative importance of directional change, random walks, and stasis in the evolution of fossil lineages.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(47):18404–18408.  Edited by Michal Kucera.  2007.  “An important advantage of this model-based approach is that no evolutionary mode is granted privileged null status; all models are compared on an equal footing based on their empirical support.”  Table 1:  Table 1 supplies the counts that the trends article tabulates.  A statistical survey of more than 250 evolving traits in fossil lineages, each fitted to three models: directional change, a random walk and stasis.  Directional change was the best-supported model in only 5% of them, and the rest split nearly equally between random walks and stasis.  The trends article uses it as the best single study of how fossil lineages change. ↩ ↩

    1. 7a.

      Pages 18406–18407:  Hunt warns against stretching the word stasis to cover every pattern that is not strongly directional.  “At times, the term stasis has been applied more widely to describe any evolutionary pattern that is not strongly directional.  Such an overly broad definition is at odds with most recent accounts of stasis (9, 23) and obscures real differences between the fluctuating but stationary trajectories of stasis and the unbounded meandering of random walks.” ↩

    2. 7b.

      Page 18406:  Hunt says that even the 5% figure is probably too high.  “because researchers have preferentially studied traits and lineages with prior evidence for gradual change (9, 16), the 5% incidence of directionality is likely to be an overestimate.” ↩

  8. 8.

    Hunt, Gene et al.  “Simple versus complex models of trait evolution and stasis as a response to environmental change.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(16):4885–4890.  2015.  A database of 709 sequences from nearly 200 fossil lineages, built by merging Hunt 2007 with Hopkins & Lidgard 2012 and adding new studies, with sequences running from 7 to 114 samples (median 14), each fitted with nine models instead of the three used in 2007.  The sequences are 249 planktic microfossils (median 22 samples), 257 invertebrate macrofossils (median 14), 112 vertebrates (median 8) and 91 benthic microfossils (median 14); microfossils are 340 of the 709, or 48%, down from 55% in 2007 but still nearly half, so the canonical modern test of stasis against gradualism is run about half on plankton and shelled protists, on both databases.  The authors find stasis common and directional change in about 13% of sequences, and the trends article uses the paper because its authors reject the 2007 finding that plankton change directionally more often than other fossils.

    1. 8a.

      Pages 4886–4887:  “Previous indications that directional trends are more likely to be observed in planktonic microfossils than in other fossil groups (14, 29, 30) are not supported by logistic regression (SI Appendix, Table S3).”  Reference 14 in that sentence is Hunt 2007, the paper whose plankton result the sentence rejects.  References 29 and 30 are Jackson & Cheetham 1999 and McKinney 1985, the same two sources that Hunt 2007 cited for the "geological and biological grounds" for expecting plankton to change gradually. ↩ ↩

    2. 8b.

      Page 4886:  “Strict stasis is less probable with increasing temporal duration of sequences, and the broad version of stasis is also less likely to be best supported as the number of samples increases.”  “Complex models are substantially more likely to be favored with increasing numbers of samples, but not with increasing temporal duration (Table 2)”.  “For example, 94% of sequences (58 of 62) with >40 samples are best supported by a model that implies complex evolutionary dynamics.”  The complex models are punctuation and the four mode shifts, which take 175 of the 709 sequences: 25% overall, but 45% of the 388 sequences long enough to be fitted with one at all.  Directional models take 13% of the 709.  Page 4887:  The authors' own reading is:  “Instead, the ability of complex models to win is limited only by the information content of a sequence, and therefore its number of samples.”  The sentence cuts both ways.  Every simple model, stasis included, is partly an artefact of thin data.  The messiness that better data reveals is, for the trends article, discontinuous rather than gradual. ↩

  9. 9.

    Hunt, Gene et al.  “Data from: Simple versus complex models of trait evolution and stasis as a response to environmental change.”  Dryad Digital Repository.  2015.  The authors' deposit of 771 ancestor-descendant trait series from the fossil record, with a metadata table carrying lineage, taxon, trait type, environment, source study and sample count, and a list of source publications; the trends article analysed the 709 series with seven or more samples.  The authors printed four percentages and a set of regressions but never published the table behind them, so the trends article refitted all 709 sequences from this deposit and printed that table.

    1. 9a.

      The full model breakdown of the top row, which is the 62 sequences with more than 40 samples, is punctuation 32.3%, random-walk-to-stasis 35.5%, stasis-to-random-walk 11.3%, directional-to-stasis 9.7%, stasis-to-directional 6.5%, pure directional 3.2%, unbiased random walk 1.6%, stasis 0.0% and strict stasis 0.0%.  The structural caveat is real: the four mode-shift models and the punctuation model require at least 14 samples, so the 321 sequences in the thinnest bin were never offered a complex model, and their 45.5% stasis is a win over three rivals rather than eight.  The comparison this does not affect is between the 21–40 bin and the bin above it: both were offered all nine models, and stasis falls from 46.5% to 8.7% between them. ↩ ↩

  10. 10.

    Eldredge, Niles, and Stephen Jay Gould.  “Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism.”  Models in Paleobiology, 82–115.  Freeman, Cooper, San Francisco.  Edited by T. J. M. Schopf.  1972.  Page 95:  The four tenets are.  “(1) New species arise by the splitting of lineages.  (2) New species develop rapidly.  (3) A small sub-population of the ancestral form gives rise to the new species.  (4) The new species originates in a very small part of the ancestral species' geographic extent—in an isolated area at the periphery of the range.”  The authors also say, on the same page:  “Many breaks in the fossil record are real; they express the way in which evolution occurs, not the fragments of an imperfect record.”  The chapter that sets out punctuated equilibrium, the idea that new species arise rapidly in small populations at the edge of an ancestor's range.  The authors argue that such speciation should leave gaps in the fossil record, gaps that had often been read as evidence of the incompleteness of the record.  The trends article uses it because the theory was offered to explain stasis, and because the same chapter makes testable predictions.

    1. 10a.

      Pages 94–95:  Tracing a fossil species through a local rock column, the authors write,  “should produce no pattern of constant change, but one of oscillation in mean values”.  and, they predict,  “it is likely that the two species will display their greatest difference when the descendant first appears”.  and.  “The allopatric theory predicts that most variation will be found among samples drawn from different geographic areas rather than from different stratigraphic levels in the local rock column.”  Page 114:  Their proposed mechanism of stasis is homeostasis rather than stabilizing selection: species and individuals are systems.  “amazingly well-buffered to resist change and maintain stability in the face of disturbing influences.” ↩ ↩

  11. 11.

    Gould, Stephen Jay, and Niles Eldredge.  “Punctuated equilibrium comes of age.”  Nature 366:223–227.  1993.  “its most important implications remain the recognition of stasis as a meaningful and predominant pattern within the history of species, and in the recasting of macroevolution as the differential success of certain species (and their descendants) within clades.”  A review by the two authors who proposed punctuated equilibrium, written 21 years after the idea was first put forward.  They argue that its most lasting contribution is the recognition that stasis, a species persisting without change, is a meaningful and predominant pattern in the history of species.  The trends article uses it because the authors concede that gradual change is well documented and that their own causal claim has not been validated. ↩

    1. 11a.

      Page 227:  “But continuing unhappiness, justified this time, focuses upon claims that speciation causes significant morphological change, for no validation of such a position has emerged …” ↩ ↩ ↩

    2. 11b.

      “Like all major theories in the sciences of natural history, including natural selection itself, punctuated equilibrium is a claim about relative frequency, not exclusivity.  Phyletic gradualism has been well documented, again across all taxa from microfossils to mammals.”  The authors' own 1993 summary, two sentences later, says:  “The issue remains unsettled, but we consider (in our biased way) that four classes … establish a strong putative case for punctuated equilibrium in this general sense.” ↩

  12. 12.

    Gingerich, Philip D.  “Research on Rates of Evolution.”  Philip D. Gingerich's research pages, University of Michigan.  n.d.  A summary by the paleontologist who compiled measured rates of change in body traits, in standard deviations per generation, from laboratory selection, field studies and fossil sequences.  Mirror:  Archive.org

    1. 12a.

      “the simple answer is 'fast' and the number to go with this is about one-tenth of a standard deviation per generation.  This is more or less an upper bound of course, but it also expresses what we commonly see”. ↩ ↩

    2. 12b.

      “Mammals starting at some average size at the beginning of the Cenozoic can be expected to have diffused and filled the lattice in less than 105 generations … Then they were constrained to evolve within the lattice for the remaining 99 percent of their history.”  His arithmetic: the smallest living mammal and the largest differ by about 100 standard deviations of log body weight, or 103 units of a tenth of a standard deviation, against roughly 107 generations of Cenozoic history. ↩

  13. 13.

    Prothero, Donald R.  “Does climatic change drive mammalian evolution?”  GSA Today 9(9):1–7.  Geological Society of America.  Sep 1999.  “Of 70 species known from the earliest Orellan, 62 persisted unchanged into the late Orellan.”  The Orellan is a span of the early Oligocene.  On the exceptions, a few archaic Chadronian groups (brontotheres, oromerycid artiodactyls, cylindrodont rodents) disappeared, and the oreodont Miniochoerus dwarfed slightly.  “but most mammalian lineages showed no changes worth documenting.  Compared to the 177 species now documented for this interval, this is a remarkably mild response.”  A short article in GSA Today, the monthly news magazine of the Geological Society of America.  Donald Prothero, a geologist at Occidental College, compared fossil mammals before and during four of the largest climate changes of the Cenozoic, the geological era since the dinosaurs died out, and found little response in most species.  The trends article uses it as its most useful single-fauna case, since its author is a critic of creationism working on an unusually complete fossil record. ↩

  14. 14.

    Prothero, Donald R.  “Darwin's Legacy.”  eSkeptic.  Feb 15, 2012.  The figure he recalls is.  “over 160 well-dated, well-sampled lineages”.  “No matter how many presentations I give where I show these data, no one (including myself) has a good explanation yet for such widespread stasis despite the obvious selective pressures of changing climate.”  A column in eSkeptic in which Donald Prothero, recalling his own 1982 Columbia doctoral dissertation, gives a figure.  Prothero is a militant anti-creationist, and he spent the weekend before writing the column visiting a creation museum to mock it, which is exactly what makes him a useful witness.  The trends article uses the column for his admission that stasis, a species staying unchanged for long periods, is still unexplained under changing climate, a point the trends article says cannot be dismissed as a creationist gloss. ↩

  15. 15.

    Gould, Stephen Jay.  “Evolution as Fact and Theory.”  Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, 253–262.  New York: Norton.  1981 (edition of 1983).  An essay first published in Discover in May 1981 and reprinted in 1983.  It answers the creationist arguments of its day one at a time, and argues that evolution is both a fact and a theory, that preserved transitions are uncommon but not absent, and that creationism cannot be falsified.  The trends article uses it for Gould's complaint about being quoted by creationists and for the sentence that follows it.

    1. 15a.

      Page 260:  The sentence immediately following it says transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level but abundant between larger groups.  Gould then names Duane Gish and Luther Sunderland personally as the creationists he is answering, and quotes both.  A second, earlier witness, John R. Cole, "Misquoted Scientists Respond," Creation/Evolution VI (Fall 1981), reproduced by the National Center for Science Education at https://ncse.ngo/misquoted-scientists-respond, gives a slightly different continuation: the same two sentences followed by "The evolution from reptiles to mammals … is well documented."  The Discover original carried that sentence, and the 1983 book reprint dropped it.  Both are Gould, and neither changes the meaning. ↩

  16. 16.

    Wei, Kuo-Yen, and James P. Kennett.  “Phyletic gradualism and punctuated equilibrium in the late Neogene planktonic foraminiferal clade Globoconella.”  Paleobiology 14(4):345–363.  1988.  “During the Late Miocene (7 Ma to 5 Ma), populations of the ancestral species Globorotalia (Globoconella) conomiozea formed a geographic cline showing continuous morphological variation from the temperate sites (DSDP 284 and 207A) to the warm subtropical sites (DSDP 208 and 588).”  The central temperate populations transformed gradually over about 0.2 Myr, while the peripheral subtropical populations produced G. pliozea.  “very rapidly within an interval of less than 0.01 m.y.”  and then held.  “morphological stasis for about 0.6 m.y.”  Their conclusion:  “The evolution of the Globoconella clade shows both phyletic gradualism and punctuated equilibrium.”  A study of the Globoconella clade of planktonic foraminifera from the late Neogene.  Kennett returned to his own 1981 study of this lineage, which used a single drill site, and this time sampled four Deep Sea Drilling Project sites on a latitudinal transect.  The trends article uses it because one lineage can change gradually in one place and in sudden bursts in another, so a single site can mislead. ↩

  17. 17.

    Pearson, Paul N., and Thomas H. G. Ezard.  “Evolution and speciation in the Eocene planktonic foraminifer Turborotalia.”  Paleobiology 40(1):130–143.  2014.  “We find that for most of the record, contemporaneous specimens form one morphological cluster, which we interpret as an evolving species that shows quasi-continuous but non-directional gradual evolutionary change (anagenesis).  However, in the upper Eocene from ca. 36 to ca. 34 Ma there are two clusters that persistently occupy distinct areas of morphospace, from which we infer that speciation (cladogenesis) must have occurred.”  A study of 10,200 individual tests (the shells) of the Eocene planktonic foraminifer Turborotalia, taken from 51 stratigraphically ordered samples at one site in the tropical North Pacific gyre.  The site was chosen because its oceanography was stable, which removes the water-mass confound that wrecks single-site studies.  The shells were clustered without assigning specimens to species beforehand, which removes the circularity that Hull and Norris complain about.  The trends article concedes its finding because it is the best-controlled study in this literature, and it found a genuine species split near the end. ↩

  18. 18.

    Erwin, Douglas H., and Robert L. Anstey.  “Speciation in the fossil record.”  New Approaches to Speciation in the Fossil Record, 11–38.  Columbia University Press, New York.  1995.  The opening chapter of a book of papers on speciation in the fossil record.  The trends article uses it because its authors tallied 58 published lineage studies from the previous 22 years and concluded that no single pattern appears dominant.

    1. 18a.

      Page 38:  “The results so far ostensibly support a pluralism of tempos and modes in the historical record of speciation.  No single pattern appears dominant, and their variety suggests that new research agendas are needed to investigate the conditions under which any one of them might be predicted.”  Page 23:  The book's closing summary says the same, that speciation.  “is sometimes gradual and sometimes punctuated, and … no one mode characterizes this very complicated process.” ↩

  19. 19.

    Clement, Alice M. et al.  “A Late Devonian coelacanth reconfigures actinistian phylogeny, disparity, and evolutionary dynamics.”  Nature Communications 15:7529.  2024.  Describes a new Devonian coelacanth from Western Australia and analyses 87 species coded for 322 characters with a time-calibrated Bayesian phylogeny, estimating rates of change separately for discrete characters, counts and continuous shape measures.

    1. 19a.

      Page 5:  “Discrete characters, which often reflect evolutionary innovations, virtually stopped evolving after the Cretaceous (Fig. 4D); the substitution tree reveals Latimeria has undergone no more anagenesis than Cretaceous relatives, i.e. for discrete characters, it has indeed been frozen in evolutionary time.” ↩ ↩

  20. 20.

    Lamsdell, James C.  “The phylogeny and systematics of Xiphosura.”  PeerJ 8:e10431.  2020.  A phylogenetic analysis of 58 horseshoe crab species, fossil and living, on 259 characters, by a specialist in the group, with a revision of every genus.  Mirror:  PMC

    1. 20a.

      Section Taxonomic results:  “Limulus is shown to be polyphyletic, with several fossil species resolving outside of the clade including the living type species, Limulus polyphemus”.  “'Limulus' darwini Kin & Błażejowski, 2014 is congeneric with Crenatolimulus paluxyensis”. ↩

  21. 21.

    Royer, Dana L. et al.  “Ecological conservatism in the "living fossil" Ginkgo.”  Paleobiology 29(1):84–104.  2003.  A study of the rocks and plant fossils at 51 Ginkgo-bearing sites from the latest Cretaceous to the middle Miocene in North America and northern Europe, testing whether the tree's habitat stayed the same as its leaves did.

    1. 21a.

      Page 92:  “This marked stability in ecology supports previous work, based upon morphology alone, that G. adiantoides and G. biloba are conspecific.” ↩

  22. 22.

    Whitmore, John H.  “What about living fossils?”  The New Answers Book 4 (Answers in Genesis).  Dec 14, 2019.  A chapter by a young-earth geologist that counts living genera with fossil records in the Paleobiology Database by era and reads the Cenozoic excess as diversification after the Flood.

    1. 22a.

      “organisms changed quickly after the Flood (producing many new genera within Genesis kinds), and once they became well-adapted to one of the many new niches after the Flood, change stopped.”  A footnote number after "kinds" in the original is omitted. ↩ ↩ ↩

  23. 23.

    Creation Ministries International.  “Spot the difference!  Fascinating living fossils.”  Creation 19(3).  1997.  Page 52:  An unsigned one-page magazine feature comparing fossil and living bivalves from the collection of Joachim Scheven's creationist museum in Germany, followed by a statement of what the Flood model predicts for fossils.

    1. 23a.

      “What would we predict the fossils to show on the basis of a recent six-day creation and a worldwide Flood?”  “Some fossil creatures would be somewhat different from their living counterparts due to genetic variation within the kind since the Flood, but still basically the same kind.”  “Some fossil creatures would not be represented among living things today”.  “Some fossils would be exactly the same as present-day kinds, just as shown in this example, because in reality, only a few thousand years separates the two specimens shown, not millions of years.” ↩ ↩

  24. 24.

    Computed for Living Fossils from the Paleobiology Database43, counting collections whose whole age bracket lies inside each window.  For each lineage, the share of collections holding a neighbour group that also hold the lineage was measured just before the gap, and multiplied by the number of neighbour-group collections inside the gap.  The chance of finding none is e to the minus expected count.  Coelacanths against ray-finned fishes, marine settings:  Late Cretaceous (Cenomanian to Maastrichtian) 23 of 711;  Paleocene to Pleistocene 1,686 collections with ray-finned fishes, expected 54.5, found 0, chance about 2 × 10⁻²⁴.  All settings:  34 of 1,242, then 2,694, expected 73.7.  Last two Cretaceous stages only, marine:  2 of 278, expected 12.1, chance about 5 × 10⁻⁶.  Lakes and rivers:  6 of 159, then 315, expected 11.9.  Coastal and estuarine ("marginal marine"):  12 of 164, then 134, expected 9.8.  Slope and basin, Triassic to Cretaceous:  10 of 134, then 63, expected 4.7, chance about 0.009.  Tuatara relatives against lizards and snakes:  Cretaceous 24 of 1,152, Eocene to Pliocene 1,369, expected 28.5, found 2 (both the Miocene New Zealand jaws);  Campanian to Paleocene window 7 of 829, expected 11.6.  Monoplacophorans (Tergomya) against snails, marine:  Permian and Triassic 33 of 3,231, Jurassic to Pliocene 15,235, expected 155.6, found 0.  Limulidae against decapod crustaceans:  Cretaceous to Eocene 9 of 1,769, Oligocene to Pleistocene 1,284, expected 6.5, found 0, chance about 0.0015.  Environments of the 61 Cretaceous coelacanth collections:  14 terrestrial (unspecified), 9 marginal marine, 7 marine (unspecified), 4 estuary or bay, 4 coastal, 4 lagoonal or restricted shallow subtidal, 4 fluvial, 4 lacustrine, 2 carbonate (unspecified), and single deltaic, fluvial-lacustrine, channel, floodplain, offshore, lower shoreface, shelf-margin reef and delta-plain collections;  none from slope or basin.  The test assumes the neighbour group samples the lineage's habitat;  where a lineage moved to a habitat its neighbours do not share, the test shows that it moved, which is how the living-fossils article uses it. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

  25. 25.

    Rensberger, Boyce.  “Ideas on evolution going through a revolution among scientists.”  Houston Chronicle (New York Times News Service).  Nov 5, 1980.  A wire-service report on the October 1980 conference on macroevolution at the Field Museum in Chicago, the meeting at which Niles Eldredge's much-quoted remarks on gradualism were made.  It is the only report found of Thomas Schopf's remarks there.

    1. 25a.

      Section 4, page 15:  “He contended that species may not be as static as they seem.  Fossils, he noted, represent only the hard parts of the organism, such as bones or shells.  Schopf argued that the soft parts, which are not fossilized, may be undergoing significant gradual changes that the paleontologist can never see.” ↩

  26. 26.

    Amemiya, Chris T. et al.  “The African coelacanth genome provides insights into tetrapod evolution.”  Nature 496:311–316.  2013.  The first coelacanth genome, sequenced by a consortium of about ninety scientists, with a phylogenetic comparison of 251 genes across 22 vertebrates.  It reports that the coelacanth's protein-coding genes have changed more slowly than those of lungfish, birds and mammals.

    1. 26a.

      Page 313:  “significantly more slowly evolving (0.890 substitutions per site) than the lungfish (1.05 substitutions per site), chicken (1.09 substitutions per site) and mammalian (1.21 substitutions per site) orthologues”.  The figures are amino-acid substitutions per site measured from a common reference point, so they compare distances, not rates per year. ↩

    2. 26b.

      Page 311:  “In 1938 Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the curator of a small natural history museum in East London, South Africa, discovered a large, unusual-looking fish among the many specimens delivered to her by a local fish trawler.” ↩

  27. 27.

    Luo, Yi-Jyun et al.  “The Lingula genome provides insights into brachiopod evolution and the origin of phosphate biomineralization.”  Nature Communications 6:8301.  2015.  The first brachiopod genome, from Lingula anatina, with comparisons of gene families, duplications and gene clusters across animals.  Mirror:  PMC

    1. 27a.

      Page 3:  “The turnover rate of gene families in Lingula is the highest among bilaterians”. ↩

  28. 28.

    Computed for Living Fossils.  Numerator:  the living genera the Paleobiology Database43 lists in each group, with the oldest fossil occurrence of each.  Denominator:  accepted, non-extinct genera in the GBIF backbone taxonomy,44 which is compiled from living-species catalogues and so is not biased toward groups with fossils.  Only names present in both lists were counted.  "Older than" a boundary means the oldest occurrence's youngest possible age is older.  Living genera with a record older than the Pleistocene:  mammals 384 of 1,351;  birds 158 of 2,360;  lizards and snakes 92 of 1,106;  amphibians 51 of 552;  sharks and rays 96 of 171;  bivalves 595 of 1,261;  gastropods 1,242 of 5,310;  echinoderms 159 of 1,286;  brachiopods 60 of 130;  bryozoans 295 of 930;  corals and sea anemones 160 of 1,097;  decapod crustaceans 286 of 2,511.  Older than the Cenozoic:  0, 1, 4, 3, 40, 213, 254, 70, 19, 55, 54, 52 respectively.  The land-vertebrate exceptions are single records:  the database flags as living the Cretaceous mammal Zhelestes and the Carboniferous amphibian Apateon, neither of which is alive;  the one bird is a Campanian record under Oena, the living Namaqua dove's genus, almost certainly a misfiling;  the lizards are latest-Cretaceous records under Agama, Eumeces, Gerrhonotus, Phyllodactylus and two others, and the frogs Bufo, Calyptocephalella and Barbourula.  Ray-finned fishes could not be counted, because the GBIF backbone has no usable node for them.  Names are matched as spelled, so synonyms move a few genera either way. ↩

  29. 29.

    Lyson, Tyler R. et al.  “Dinosaur extinction:  closing the '3 m gap'.”  Biology Letters 7(6):925–928.  2011.  The report of the stratigraphically youngest non-avian dinosaur fossil found in place, a ceratopsian brow horn in Montana, with the boundary fixed by closely spaced pollen samples.  Mirror:  PMC

    1. 29a.

      Page 925:  “a ceratopsian brow horn found in a poorly rooted, silty, mudstone floodplain deposit located no more than 13 cm below the palynologically defined boundary”.  “the K–T boundary actually lies anywhere from –5 to +3 m relative to the contact”.  Page 927:  “Dinosaur extinction (K-taxa) drops significantly from 14% in sample 190-1 to 1–3% in the overlying samples.  A ‘fern spike’ is also identified starting at sample 190-2, where the assemblage consists of as much as 80% ferns”.  The PDF's text layer renders the plus sign in "+3 m" as "þ". ↩

  30. 30.

    A count made for Mass Extinctions from the Paleobiology Database, retrieved 17 October 2026.  Query:  taxa/list.csv?base_name=Animalia&rank=genus&taxon_status=valid&show=app,class,ecospace&pres=regular&limit=all, which returned 88,505 valid animal genera;  pres=regular removes trace and form taxa.  Each genus's first-appearance and last-appearance age brackets were placed in PBDB's 101 named stages, keeping only genera whose brackets each fall inside a single stage (39,363 genera;  13,233 tagged marine in PBDB's environment field).  For each stage, extinction is the share of genera entering it from below whose last record is in it;  origination is the share of genera leaving it upward whose first record is in it.  Genera known from one stage only are left out of both.  Putting a bracket that spans two stages into the stage holding its midpoint, instead of dropping it, gives the same ranking:  Changhsingian 57.5 %, Katian 48.1 %, Maastrichtian 31.8 %.  The figures are raw and are not corrected for collecting effort. ↩

  31. 31.

    Clarey, Timothy L., and Davis J. Werner.  “A Progressive Global Flood Model Confirmed by Rock Data Across Five Continents.”  Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9:412–445.  Cedarville University.  2023.  ICR's flagship statement of its Flood model, built on its own database of about 3,000 stratigraphic columns from five continents.  It assigns each of Sloss's six megasequences to a span of Flood days and explains extinctions as levels where rising water reached new "biozones."  The database behind it has not been released.

    1. 31a.

      Page 430:  “We interpret Days 40 to about 90 of the Flood as corresponding to the Absaroka megasequence.”  Page 431:  “We suspect the Zuni was deposited from about Day 90 of the Flood to Day 150 of the Flood.”  The same page assigns the Sauk, Tippecanoe and Kaskaskia, which hold the end-Ordovician and Late Devonian levels, to "the first 40 days of the Flood" (p. 430), and calls the end of the Zuni, at the end-Cretaceous, "the highest point of the Flood, which we believe was at or near Day 150" (p. 431). ↩

    2. 31b.

      Page 423:  “Secondly, we do not observe significant numbers of reworked early Paleozoic fossils and mixed fossil debris in younger, Absaroka, Zuni and Tejas strata. … The pattern of sudden appearance, stasis, and sudden disappearance of fossils is prevalent throughout the entire Phanerozoic sedimentological record, Sauk through Tejas (Wise 2017).  Reworking significant amounts of fossils would likely have blurred this pattern.” ↩ ↩

  32. 32.

    Tomkins, Jeffrey P., and Tim Clarey.  “Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary Shenanigans.”  Acts & Facts.  Institute for Creation Research.  Dec 29, 2017.  A short ICR magazine piece answering a 2017 study that found placental mammals diversifying straight through the end-Cretaceous.  It restates ICR's position in its strongest form.

    1. 32a.

      Section final paragraph:  “There are no real extinction events in the rock record, only the last appearance of organisms as they were encapsulated by the tsunami-like floodwaters.” ↩

  33. 33.

    A count made for Mass Extinctions from the Paleobiology Database, retrieved 17 October 2026, with every query occs/list.json?…&timerule=contain&pres=regular&show=coords&limit=0&rowcount, so that a collection counts only if its whole age bracket lies in the interval.  Marine occurrences (envtype=marine):  Permian 124,185;  Changhsingian 19,697;  Lower Triassic 20,730;  post-Permian Mesozoic (251.902 to 66 Ma) 404,784;  everything after the Permian 1,043,856;  Maastrichtian 40,609;  Danian 13,142;  everything after the Cretaceous 638,121.  Group counts, Changhsingian then everything after the Permian:  Trilobita 46 and 0;  Rugosa 256 and 3;  Tabulata 29 and 0;  Fusulinoidea 445 and 1;  Productida 2,842 and 115, of which 107 are labelled Griesbachian.  Maastrichtian, Danian, everything after:  Ammonoidea 2,622, 9, 11;  Mosasauridae 325, 0, 0;  Plesiosauria 170, 0, 0;  Inoceramidae 435, 0, 0;  Hippuritida 1,332, 0, 4.  "Expected" is a group's share of the last-stage marine occurrences, times one hundredth, times the later marine count;  the chances are Poisson probabilities of finding that few or fewer.  Shares of database occurrences reflect collecting and naming as well as abundance, which is why only one hundredth of the share is assumed. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

  34. 34.

    Whitmore, John H., and Paul Garner.  “Using Suites of Criteria to Recognize Pre-Flood, Flood, and Post-Flood Strata in the Rock Record with Application to Wyoming (USA).”  Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Creationism, 425–448.  2008.  Sets out 27 ranked criteria for telling Flood rock from post-Flood rock and applies them in Wyoming, where they place the end of the Flood near the end-Cretaceous.  Both authors are working creationist geologists;  the paper is the founding method of the end-Cretaceous boundary camp.

    1. 34a.

      Page 429:  “Since most marine extinctions are likely to have occurred directly as a result of the global Flood, due to the non-representation of these organisms on the Ark, the last appearances of extinct marine species would be expected to occur predominantly in Flood-deposited sediments. … However we believe most marine extinctions probably occurred during the Flood.” ↩

  35. 35.

    Montaggioni, Lucien F.  “History of Indo-Pacific coral reef systems since the last glaciation:  development patterns and controlling factors.”  Earth-Science Reviews 71:1–75.  2005.  A review of the drilled and dated Holocene reefs of the Indo-Pacific, tabulating how fast reef margins built upward and outward in different settings.

    1. 35a.

      Page 43:  “In exposed settings, the mean aggradation rates range between 1.5 and 12 mm year⁻¹, with a mode of 5 mm year⁻¹ (Table 5).  In semi-exposed to sheltered reef margins, vertical accretion rates average 1 to 25 mm year⁻¹, with a mode of 9 mm year⁻¹ (Table 6).” ↩

  36. 36.

    Stanley, Steven M.  “Estimates of the magnitudes of major marine mass extinctions in earth history.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(42):E6325–E6334.  2016.  A re-estimate of the size of the major marine extinctions by a University of Hawaii palaeontologist.  It corrects for background extinction and for the backward smearing of last appearances, and finds most events smaller than usually quoted, the end-Permian at about 81 % of species.  Mirror:  PMC

    1. 36a.

      Section Abstract:  “They indicate that only ∼81% of marine species died out in the great terminal Permian crisis, whereas levels of 90–96% have frequently been quoted in the literature.  Calculations of the latter numbers were incorrectly based on combined data for the Middle and Late Permian mass extinctions.  About 90 orders and more than 220 families of marine animals survived the terminal Permian crisis … Life did not nearly disappear at the end of the Permian, as has often been claimed.” ↩ ↩

  37. 37.

    Bambach, Richard K. et al.  “Origination, extinction, and mass depletions of marine diversity.”  Paleobiology 30(4):522–542.  2004.  A re-analysis of Sepkoski's genus compendium that measures extinction and origination for every substage and compares each event with its neighbours in time.  It finds that only three of the Big Five are true outliers of extinction, and that the Late Devonian and end-Triassic losses came largely from a failure of new genera to appear.

    1. 37a.

      Page 535:  “about two-thirds of the diversity loss in the late Frasnian and almost 60% in the end-Triassic can be ascribed to origination failure, not elevated extinction”. ↩

  38. 38.

    Holland, Steven M., and Mark E. Patzkowsky.  “The stratigraphy of mass extinction.”  Palaeontology 58(5):903–924.  2015.  Numerical simulations, by two specialists in sequence stratigraphy and the fossil record, of how last appearances are distributed in real sedimentary sequences.  They find last appearances cluster at erosion and flooding surfaces, so a protracted extinction can look like a sudden pulse.

    1. 38a.

      Section Abstract:  “last occurrences are not randomly distributed, but tend to cluster at subaerial unconformities, surfaces of forced regression, flooding surfaces and intervals of stratigraphical condensation … With the possible exception of the end‐Cretaceous, mass extinctions in the fossil record are characterized by clusters of last occurrences at these sequence stratigraphical horizons.  Although these clusters of last occurrences may represent brief pulses of elevated extinction, they are equally likely to form by stratigraphical processes during a protracted period”. ↩

  39. 39.

    Computed for this page from counts printed in Living Fossils and Mass Extinctions, for scale only.  The two tests are built differently.  The living-fossil test counts collections that hold a neighbour group and assumes the lineage kept its whole share of them:  coelacanths 23 of 711 Late Cretaceous marine fish collections, so about 54.5 expected among 1,686 later ones, and none found;  monoplacophorans 33 of 3,231 Permian and Triassic snail collections, so about 155.6 expected among 15,235 later ones, and none found.24  The holdover test counts marine occurrences and assumes one hundredth of a group's share of the last Permian stage, the Changhsingian, which holds 19,697 marine occurrences against 404,784 in the later Mesozoic.33  At the whole Changhsingian share instead of one hundredth, the expected later counts are:  trilobites 46 × 404,784 ÷ 19,697 ≈ 945;  tabulate corals 29 → ≈ 596;  rugose corals 256 → ≈ 5,261;  fusulinids 445 → ≈ 9,145;  productids 2,842 → ≈ 58,405.  Against the living lineages' expected counts of 54.5 and 155.6, the trilobite and tabulate figures are about 3.8 to 17 times larger, and the rugose, fusulinid and productid figures about 34 to 1,070 times larger. ↩

  40. 40.

    Oard, Michael J.  “The extinction of the dinosaurs.”  CEN Technical Journal 11(2):137–154.  1997.  A review of the dinosaur-extinction debate by a retired meteorologist who is the most prolific author on Flood geology at Creation Ministries International.  It sides with the volcanist critics of the impact theory and concludes that the dinosaurs died in the Flood.

    1. 40a.

      Page 141:  “(10) no statistical support for a sudden extinction of dinosaurs;113”.  Oard's footnote 113 is Hurlbert and Archibald 1995, whose title is "No statistical support for sudden (or gradual) extinction of dinosaurs."  The paper found the data too sparse to decide either way;  the list drops "(or gradual)." ↩

  41. 41.

    Snelling, Andrew A.  Earth's Catastrophic Past:  Geology, Creation & the Flood.  Institute for Creation Research.  2009.  A two-volume, 1,100-page textbook of Flood geology by Answers in Genesis's director of research, an Australian geologist with a Sydney PhD.  It treats mass extinctions as global burials inside the Flood and places the end of the Flood above the end-Cretaceous.

    1. 41a.

      Page 741:  “Of course, the so-called mass extinctions would be expected to coincide with these major unconformities, because the abrupt change in sedimentation, and/or lowered water levels, would likely have resulted in the mass burial of the creatures carried in each major wave of sedimentation, prior to different creatures being carried by the subsequent sedimentation.” ↩

  42. 42.

    Cavin, Lionel, and Nadir Alvarez.  “Why coelacanths are almost "living fossils"?”  Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 10:896111.  2022.  A perspective paper arguing that the coelacanth's slow evolution follows from its very long generation time, estimated from growth lines on the scales of the living fish.

    1. 42a.

      Page 2:  “the time before genetic transmission between generations is 54 years at minimum”. ↩

  43. 43.

    Paleobiology Database.  The Paleobiology Database data service, version 1.2.  n.d.  Retrieved Oct 17, 2026.  A public database of published fossil occurrences, each tied to a literature reference, a collection and a stratigraphic assignment, compiled by working paleontologists.  It held about two million occurrences in about 277,000 collections.  The living-fossils article uses it for stratigraphic ranges, gaps and the share of living genera with fossils. ↩ ↩

  44. 44.

    Global Biodiversity Information Facility.  GBIF Backbone Taxonomy.  n.d.  Retrieved Oct 17, 2026.  A single taxonomic list of living and extinct names assembled from published species catalogues, most of them catalogues of living organisms.  The living-fossils article uses its count of accepted living genera as the denominator for the genus census, because it was not built from the fossil record.  Mirror:  Api.gbif.org ↩