Evolution or Creation?
Living Coelacanths
Because coelacanths have lobed fins evolutionists thought them to be ancestors of the first amphibians, and hence, us. The earliest coelacanth appears in the fossil record in the Devonian period about 375 million years ago [ET*]. The last fossil was dated at about 80 million years ago [ET*] in the Cretaceous period.[11]
The discovery of living coelacanths in this century electrified the scientific world. A fish that had thought to have died out with the dinosaurs was found alive. The first was taken in 1938 about three miles from the mouth of the Chalumna River, southwest of East London, South Africa. The second was caught in 1952 off Anjouan Island in the Comores Islands, northwest of Madagascar. Another was discovered off Sulawesi, Indonesia in 1998. The Indonesian locals call the coelacanth Rajah Laut, "King of the Sea."[11]
How could the Coelacanth disappear for over 80 million years [ET*] and then turn up alive and well in the twentieth century?[48]
In 1987, a German naturalist, Hans Fricke, observed and photographed coelacanths in their habitat off Grand Comoro Island. He found that they swam forward, backward, and even tilted head down, but never once walked, crawled, or otherwise moved on the bottom with their lobed fins, as some thought. So the coelacanth would never have moved up on land as hypothesized in the evolutionary scheme. It wasn't a missing link after all; it was a fish and it always had been a fish - for 400 million years [ET*].[11]
Evolutionists try to explain "living fossils" by calling them "primitive," that is, some specie was more primitive, but now it is not.[11]
The primitive-looking coelacanth has a massive organ in its head that has scientists scratching their heads. Some speculate it might be an electro-receptor unlike any that we know about today. Also, it seems that this fish generates an electric field around its body, as an electric eel does. We can't explain its coastal navigation skills. It turns out that coelacanths are not so primitive after all.[11]
* Evolutionary time scale.