Friday, April 27, 2007

More on Fossilized Rainforest

Here’s an update on the fossilized rainforest I posted about earlier this week:

One article mentioned that a member of the research team seemed puzzled at finding “mangrove-like plants”.

Also surprising is the presence of remains from mangrove-like plants. "It was always assumed that mangrove plants had evolved fairly recently," says Falcon-Lang.
This source offers the following:

Is this a “mangrove-like” plant or a true mangrove? If the latter, it sounds like a big out-of-order problem for evolution, because mangroves were not supposed to appear till the late Cretaceous (source) and these forests are Carboniferous, over 200 million years earlier. That would be a bigger problem than finding a living dinosaur. A quick check of the original paper in Geology (May 2007) does not reveal any mention of family Rhizophoraceae or any of the other mangroves, but that doesn’t mean they were not found. We’ll have to see if more of the details come to light. In any case, gymnosperms were not thought to live in “mangrove-like” habitats.

This story also illustrates, as seen so often before, that wherever evolutionists look, they find more complexity farther back in time than they expect.
Hmmm...there might be all kinds of interesting finds in that rainforest.