Fossilized footprints are causing evolutionists to rethink their beliefs about the fish Tiktaalik, considered the best fossil evidence of the supposed transition of creatures from water to land, as fins changed into limbs.
The newly discovered fossil prints from Poland, found in rocks dated older than Tiktaalik, clearly show that an animal was already walking on the mud with a coordinated fourlimbed gait. Based on evolutionary dating methods, this means a creature was walking nine million years before Tiktaalik.*
Tiktaalik’s status as a missing link is now in question in the secular world. Note that although this new discovery is forcing evolutionists to reevaluate their models, their faith in the evolutionary worldview remains unchanged.
Fossilized tracks recently found in Poland (a) show evidence of a creature walking (b) in rocky layers below Tiktaalik. This undermines Tiktaalik's status as a “missing link.” Photo: G. Niedzwiedzki
This new find is not a challenge to biblical creationists, who reject not only the evolutionary transitional claim but also the supposed dates of millions of years. They argue that Tiktaalik and these new fossil footprints go back only about 4,400 years to the time of Noah’s Flood. So Tiktaalik and the four-legged animal in question lived at the same time but not necessarily in the same place. One animal was buried at a different time than the other during the year-long Flood.
* http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/106/2